This module will give you a quick introduction to Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons. Old English is many hundreds of years older than Shakespeare’s English and even Chaucer’s, but it can still be recognised in our daily speech and in the place-names around us.
To see which words in this sentence come from Old English Click here.
The LangScape website provides a word by word analysis of Anglo-Saxon boundary clauses, providing lemmas (headwords) and 'spring-board translations' in the Glossed Displays Example. These are intended to encourage you to engage with the Old English texts. They lay bare their structures and identify the precise headwords to look up in dictionaries. There you will find a range of different meanings which cannot be captured in any one translation. Our 'spring-board translation' invites you to explore this rich pool of meaning and to work with your own translations and interpretations.
This brief Tutorial is therefore designed to help you to move from the level of translation to the charter bounds in the original langage and to work with the lemmas. It is very specific in the material that it provides: it should allow you to figure out a lot of the meaning in the boundary clauses, but it is by no means a complete course in Old English.
If you are interested in such courses then see the section Taking it Further.
The LangScape Tutorial is divided into seven sections which you can read through at your own pace.
The sections are:
- Introduction:The page you’re reading now.
- Getting Started: Recognising Old English words.
- The Alphabet: A brief introduction to the alphabet used by the Anglo-Saxons.
- Pronunciation: Twelve ‘rules’ to help make sense of the texts.
- Beorhus Gangas: Old English Pub Walks - getting to know the letters.
- Putting it Into Practice: Working through some Old English boundary clauses.
- Taking it Further: Websites providing or citing Old English courses and online dictionaries.