Old English is the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons, written and spoken in Britain from the fifth century until the Norman conquest reshaped it into Middle English. Its surviving religious literature includes gospel and psalter translations, the homilies of Aelfric and Wulfstan, and the poems Caedmon's Hymn and The Dream of the Rood, in which the cross itself speaks and describes the crucifixion from its own point of view. It is written in the Latin alphabet with the added letters thorn, eth, wynn and ash, and it also appears in the runic Futhorc on stone and metal.
Facts
Origins
Language FamilyWest Germanic, within Indo-European; closest to Old Frisian and Old Saxon, and the ancestor of English. 2 Place of OriginOld English originated among the Germanic Anglo-Saxon settlers of Britain, spoken and written there from roughly the fifth to the mid-twelfth century CE, the language of Beowulf and of the earliest English biblical translations. 3 Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RoleThe language of the earliest Christian literature of England, the biblical poems, homilies and saints' lives, and of the charms and heroic verse in which pre-Christian material survives, reaching the reader only through the hands of Christian scribes. 1 Identity
Native ScriptWritten first in runes, the futhorc, and after the conversion in a Latin alphabet that kept the runic letters thorn and wynn alongside the modified eth and ash. 1 Attestation
Era of AttestationOld English is attested from around the seventh century CE in early glosses and inscriptions, with substantial surviving texts, including Beowulf, from the ninth century onward. 2 Learn More
The Dream of the Rood, and a Gospel in Heroic Verse
Old English produced the earliest substantial Christian literature in a Germanic language, and its distinctive achievement was to carry Christian material in the metre and vocabulary of heroic poetry. The Dream of the Rood, part of it carved in runes on the Ruthwell Cross and the whole of it preserved in the Vercelli Book, gives the crucifixion from the point of view of the cross, which speaks as a retainer obliged to stand fast while its lord is killed upon it. Nothing else in early medieval Europe does quite that.
The corpus includes biblical paraphrase, saints' lives in verse and in prose, homilies, charms, riddles and the poems gathered in modern editions of the Anglo-Saxon minor works. Beowulf, preserved in a single manuscript, is a poem about pagan Scandinavians composed by a Christian who declines to say that his heroes are damned, and the tension in it is the tension of the whole literature.
Prose came later and went further. The translation programme associated with Alfred in the ninth century, and Aelfric's homilies and biblical translations around the year 1000, made English a language of religious instruction at a time when almost every other vernacular in Europe had none.
Charms, Runes and What the Church Kept
Old English also preserves material the church did not compose. The metrical charms, copied into medical manuscripts, address swarms of bees, sudden pain attributed to elf shot, the loss of cattle and the blessing of fields, and they mix Christian invocation with formulas that are plainly older. The field remedy known as the Aecerbot begins by cutting turf and ends with prayer addressed both to the mother of earth and to Christ within one rite, and it survives because a monastic scribe wrote it down.
The runic alphabet was expanded in England to about thirty letters, and the Old English Rune Poem, edited by Maureen Halsall, names each with a short verse. Some of those verses read as ordinary description and others appear to hold something older, and the poem survives only because it had been copied and printed before the manuscript containing it was lost to fire in 1731.
The language ceased to be a written standard after the Norman conquest, when French and Latin took the official registers and English re-emerged changed. What Old English leaves the atlas is a rare thing: a converted people's religious literature written in its own tongue, close enough to the conversion that both layers are visible in the same manuscripts.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The Futhorc was used to write Old English on stone and metal alongside the Latin alphabet.
Old English is their language.
Named or Composed in This Language
Read in Region
Old English was the language of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England.
Related To
Modern English descends from it through Middle English.
Old Norse is its close North Germanic relative, and contact between the two left lasting marks.
Old English is a West Germanic language.
Sources
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