Old English

Viking Language 1: Learn Old Norse, Runes, and Icelandic Sagas is an introduction to the language of the Vikings offering in one book graded lessons, vocabulary, grammar exercises, pronunciation, student guides, and maps. It explains Old Icelandic literature, Viking history, and mythology. Readings include runestones, legends, and sagas.  Viking Language 1 focuses on the most frequently occurring words in the sagas, an innovative method which speeds learning. Because the grammar has changed little from Old Norse, the learner is well on the way to mastering Modern Icelandic. It provides a wealth of information about Iceland, where the sagas were written and Old Scandinavian history and mythology were preserved. Viking Language 1 is accompanied by Viking Language 2: The Old Norse Reader.

Some recent studies concerning early medieval Europe have suggested that Scandinavia and Francia represented two ideological poles with which other populations within the Germanic world might have intended to align themselves. While such a view sometimes may be useful, it may also over-simplify a more complex situation. Scandinavians must have recognised cultural distinctions between themselves and Christian Europeans, but may not have viewed these distinctions necessarily as emblems of opposition unless faced by a direct political or military threat. Indeed, ideological contrasts concerning the way society was structured and power was wielded may have cut across apparent ethnic boundaries.

Roman influences on early Germanic society may have assisted in the creation of a ‘Germanic’ identity. Roman pressure also may have affected the development of Germanic governmental structures, encouraging king-centred governmental ideologies that contrasted with possibly older, assembly-centred systems. Scandinavia, never threatened by Roman domination, may have retained assembly-centred structures longer than other Germanic societies. Southern Scandinavia’s ‘central places’ of the Early Germanic Iron Age, such as Gudme, may have had functions comparable with those of the later Old Saxon Assembly and Icelandic Alþingi. Such sites may have provided a focus for an emergent Scandinavian identity. This assembly-centred system may have been disrupted as chieftains struggled to attain the kind of power enjoyed by their counterparts in king-centred societies (much as happened in medieval Iceland), perhaps explaining the poverty of archaeological finds in the region from the Late Germanic Iron Age.
The growing Frankish threat to Scandinavia in the eighth century may have both spurred further consolidation of power in the hands of the élite and, initially, provoked an ideological reaction against Christian Europe. Yet while wary of domination by Christian European kingdoms, the Viking-Age Scandinavian élite may have envied their powerful model of lordship and had an interest in accessing elements of their culture. Such a situation may be reflected in historical legends, particularly the Scylding-Skjöldung cycle, which perhaps developed during the Viking Age. These legends might represent not source material for historical glimpses of early northern Europe (as is often assumed) but rather Scandinavian attempts at self-definition in relation to the burgeoning and powerful cultures of Christian Europe. Scandinavia’s eventual adoption of Christianity and Christian lordship in the course of the Viking Age largely resolved the ideological contrasts that had existed both within Scandinavian society and between Scandinavia and Christian Europe.

This dissertation investigates the evidence for verb movement at the earliest stages of the Germanic languages. It is argued that already in the oldest documents of Germanic there are cases which must involve movement of the finite verb from the Verb Phrase to a functional head position higher up in the hierarchical structure. In a well-defined set of cases this is the Complementizer (C) position, but in other cases an IP-internal functional head position seems more likely as a landing-site for the verb. Moreover, it is argued that whereas in Gothic and Old English the verb does not move to C when complements are topicalized, in the other old Germanic languages, Old Norse, Old High German, and Old Saxon, V–to–C movement is obligatory in topicalizations. An examination of the runic inscriptions reveals that topicalized complements triggered movement of the verb to C already at the earliest stage in the northern part of the Germanic linguistic area.

This essay proposes that the Nowell codex, or most of it, was copied in Mercia for the new regime, for a Danish earl or his English ally, not long after Cnut's defeat of Edmund Ironside in 1016, and that King Cnut used a different manuscript of 'Beowulf' to win the east of Denmark in 1019-20. To come out in 'The Anglo-Danish Empire: from Æthelred II to Cnut the Great', ed. Richard North, Alison Finlay and Erin Goeres.

The paper by my friend Kevin Kiernan, “The Reformed Nowell Codex and the "Beowulf" Manuscript”, will be appearing in 'Anglo-Saxon England' 46 (2018).

The study of runes always attracted the attention of the academy and a great interest by the general public. Nowadays we can see them represented in different ways of media and serving for many different purposes. In this article we intend to deal with some of the main points on this subject, as a short introduction on this matter and, the most important, present the texts known as The Rune Poems (the Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic and Norwegian) and the Abecedarium Nordmannicum. All of them full translated for the first time together in Portuguese.

This paper investigates Old English spells in BBC's Merlin. The aim is to show whether the language is simply reconstructed or inevitably reinvented for entertainment purposes such as this TV show. The spells are analysed and discussed in terms of Old English grammar and vocabulary.

The aims of this study are to provide a comprehensive analysis on Anglo-Saxon runic inscribed rings, studying their materials, purposes and inscriptions.  This is a small group made up of nine confirmed rings, all of which are from the later period. Literature concerning the runic rings is fragmentary and often sparse. Whilst many reputable sources are available, much previous literature comes from dated knowledge and assumptions of runology, some veering into the fantastical where more mundane rings are concerned. This study will attempt to strike a balance between imagination and skepticism, avoiding the pit falls of some runologists who perhaps are a little too imaginative. Therefore, the aims of this study are to gather these sources into a corpus and provide a unified and detailed study of Anglo-Saxon runic rings, and provide new opinion and insight into the runic rings.

The study will open with an analysis of the role of finger-rings in Anglo-Saxon society in general. Following this, a large bulk of this study will focus on what will be referred to as the ‘amulet rings’; a trio of rings with similar runic inscriptions of a presumed magical quality. The mysterious nature of these rings has caused them to be the most widely studied, and they have been connected to a number of manuscript charms. This study aims to examine these rings on a number of levels. Firstly, the materials of these rings will be discussed. Next, the inscription and form of the runes will be studied, along with possible dates for the rings. Lastly, the intended purposes of the rings will be discussed, linking the rings to similar objects and manuscript charms. This study argues that the writers of these related charms attributed power to the runic characters themselves, above their simple literary value.

The other rings this study will cover are of a more mundane quality. Their inscriptions are comparable with non-runic inscribed AS rings, consisting mainly of personal names and records of ownership. For each ring, the materials and dating evidence will be examined, the history of their study, their inscriptions, their purposes and their significance in the context of other runic rings.

Timofeeva, Olga (2010) “Anglo-Latin Bilingualism before 1066: Prospects and Limitations,” in Interfaces between Language and Culture in Medieval England: A Festschrift for Matti Kilpiö, ed. by Alaric Hall, Olga Timofeeva, Ágnes Kiricsi, and Bethany Fox, pp. 1–36. Leiden: Brill.

The history of the English language is still fascinating scholars because of its absolute uniqueness: even though it belongs to the Germanic languages, its distinguishing feature is the important influence of several languages including also non-Germanic languages such as Latin or French. However a fundamental role was played by Old Norse, the language of the Scandinavian tribes which settled in England between the eighth and the eleventh century.

The Nine Herbs Charm is a tenth-century charm that carries instructions to the reader about the herbs to use various afflictions, ending with saying the Lord’s Prayer. In the tenth-century The First Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn, Solomon instructs Saturn on the use and power of the Lord’s Prayer. Regardless of runic and Roman letters, these words become carriers of magic.
However, neither runic nor Roman letter are magical. Rather, the words created by the script function as the carrier of magic which then produces a result. That letters in themselves are not magic can be seen in the mnemonic devices of rune poems, the usage of runes in The First Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn, and the pagan remains in the Nine Herbs Charm. That written words can be used to carry a king’s authority, to educate an audience, to reveal a maker, to transfer knowledge, or that written words can be used to invoke the presence or power of God, direct a healer through a recipe to heal a patient, or shed light on a society of centuries ago is their magic. The ability of written words to immortalize people and  their deeds, to be used for educational means, and invoke power is the magic of words.
Beginning with the inception of writing, then discussing the development of writing within the Anglo-Saxon kingdom to then unveil the usage of Runic and Roman letters and the power of their usage, the written words of this thesis will prove the magic of written words.

The Anglo-Saxon charters, official documents dating from the 7 th to 11 th centuries, were used to record land-grants. The surviving documents – whether in original form or as later copies – are largely from the southwest of England and largely date from the 10 th century. They are useful not only for their explicit records of falconers and bequeathed birds, but for place-names preserved within them which may demarcate places in the landscape where hawks could be captured or where they could be flown for food and/or sport. That the place-names indicated this may be supported not only by consideration of the topographies of these areas, but also by consultation of later falconry treatises (especially that written by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen in the 13 th century) and present-day ornitho-logical research. Moreover, this charter evidence provides new insight into the transmission of falconry from England to Wales in the early medieval period. This chapter also surveys the textual evidence for falconry in Anglo-Saxon England and points out the inadequate grounds for stating that the practice was solely the prerogative of the upper classes, as well as the problems of trying to meticulously separate 'hawking' and ' falconry' and 'hawks' and ' falcons' in England at this time.

While many agree that Scyld in Beowulf was back-formed from Scyldingas, the context in which this occurred is rarely discussed. It seems frequently assumed that Scyld was created in Denmark and exported to England along with the name Scyldingas. However, the way that names and terms corresponding to Scyld and Scyldingas are used in medieval Scandinavian texts suggests that neither the figure nor an associated dynasty may have been very familiar to Scandinavians. Moreover, a consideration of Scandinavian place-name evidence shows that pre-medieval Scandinavian group-names in -ing-/-ung- were not formed on anthroponymic bases, though this practice was frequent in West Germanic contexts. Thus, though it is unlikely that Scandinavians in Scandinavia back-formed a figure named Scyld from a Scandinavian group-name antecedent to Scyldingas, such an interpretation would have been familiar and logical in West Germanic contexts. Accordingly, the figure of Scyld was likely back-formed by persons familiar with West Germanic naming practices and a Scandinavian form of Scyldingas, perhaps in an Anglo-Scandinavian context in Britain. Subsequently, the figure of Scyld was exported to Scandinavia and, though perhaps absent from autochthonous traditions, incorporated as accepted wisdom into written history and legend.

This thesis will examine the vernacular works by King Alfred and Ælfric in a wider historical context to reveal how the Old English vernacular and the connection to the Old Testament Israelites aided in the creation of an identity for the English people and the legitimising of England.
Isolated from the cultural and religious centre at the Continent, Britannia was left by the Romans as a scattered multicultural island. Gildas and Bede related the Anglo-Saxons’ hardships and journeys to those of the Old Testament Israelites. Formulating this relationship, the idea of the Anglo-Saxons as the new Chosen People was constructed and would present a new way of legitimising their new nation, England, as it arose. Through the Gregorian Mission, the Anglo-Saxons were introduced to the Roman Christian faith. This re-established link to the old Roman Empire created the possibility of new relationships with the Continent for the Anglo-Saxons. In the tenth century, the Heptarchy became one unified English kingdom. Basing themselves upon older writings and the authority of being the new Chosen People, the vernacular was used by King Alfred to educate the laity and by Ælfric to craft elaborate manuscripts.

The presence of runic writing before the influx of Latinate literacy in Anglo-Saxon England is often neglected when investigating the transitional nature of orality and literacy in vernacular Anglo-Saxon writing. The presence of runes in Anglo-Saxon society and Old English manuscripts supports the theory that Old English poetry operated within a transitional period between orality and literacy (as argued by O'Keeffe (1990), Pasternack (1995), Amodio (2005)). However runic symbols prob-lematize the definition of orality within Old English oral-formulaic studies because runic writing practices predate Latinate literacy in England. This article explores the possibility that the orality contained within Old English poetry is a form of secondary orality due to the pre-existence of runic writing in Anglo-Saxon England. This form of secondary orality occurs within the wider social cultural shift between primary orality and modern hyper-literate states as runes act as a literary representation of change within the construction of thought and literature in the English language. This article suggests that runes can be understood as a type of 'transitional literacy' between primary orality and Latinate derived literary practices. They act as a way of composing and recording thought as text while still maintaining elements strongly associated with the construction of a primary oral culture in how the texts are interpreted by a culture familiar with writing. Therefore clarification must be made when understanding Old English as a transitional poetic form, namely that the nature and degree of transition contained within Old English poetry builds upon runic inscriptions as it represents a transition between a Germanic and Latinate forms of textuality and literacy.

DURING the Anglo-Saxon period, English schools were among the finest in Europe.  From English schools came the great masters whose writings instructed generations, centuries even, of Insular and continental students alike: one has only to think of the works of Aldhelm, Bede and Alcuin, which were copied and studied intensively up to the twelfth century and beyond. This achievement is all the more remarkable when one considers that the Anglo-Saxons were among the first peoples in Europe who were obliged to learn Latin as a foreign language if Christianity – a religion of the book par excellence – was to flourish. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, English schools benefited from the instruction of foreign masters domiciled there: the Roman monks who came with the Gregorian mission; Aidan and his fellow Irishmen who established a school at Lindisfarne in the mid-seventh century; Archbishop Theodore (d. 690) and Abbot Hadrian who taught at Canterbury in the late seventh century; John the Archchanter from St Peter’s in Rome who taught at Wearmouth-Jarrow at roughly the same time; Grimbald of Saint-Bertin, John the Old Saxon and Asser of St David’s in Wales, all of whom were invited by King Alfred in the late ninth century to assist him in the establishment of English schools; then men such as Lantfred and Abbo, both from Fleury, who in the later tenth century spent brief periods at the schools of Winchester and Ramsey respectively; and finally scholars such as Goscelin and Folcard, both from Saint-Bertin, who resided in England in the later eleventh century. The list could be extended considerably. But although Anglo-Saxon schools were indebted to foreign masters throughout the period of their existence, the native Anglo-Saxon aptitude for learning also asserted itself - as, pre-eminently, in the cases of Aldhelm, Bede and Alcuin; but there were many more. It is not possible in the compass of a short essay to survey all the achievements of Anglo-Saxon schools; rather, I shall try to convey some notion of how these schools functioned and, where possible, to identify what characterizes the Anglo-Saxon achievement in the domain of learning.

The often-anthologized story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard is typically regarded as the earliest example of heroic English prose, perhaps a summary of an earlier oral tale. Until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to its context within the A MS of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Given this text’s association with King Alfred, this article
locates the tale within the broader context of Alfredian writing on the morality of rule and, in particular, royal wisdom. Rather than simply endorsing the loyalty of fighting men to their lord, the tale also warns of the dangers of royal folly and the consequences of unrighteous rule.

As medievalists, we often say (and sometimes even boast) to our students--not just to those in the History of the English Language (HEL) classroom, but also to freshmen who might be lured into our Old English classes, or even to accountants at dinner parties--that Old English looks scarcely like the Modern English we know today, that there is an intriguing foreignness to the earliest stage of our language, indeed that it must even be taught as a kind of foreign language. These are claims for how far the language has come, how much it has changed over the past thousand-odd years, and implicitly therefore one of the reasons why it is worth studying in the first place, both as an integral part of an HEL curriculum and as a language in itself. As Haruko Momma has pointed out, this view of Old English is hardly new: not only does Old English look "foreign" today, but until the 1870s, when scholars referred to the language as Saxon or Anglo-Saxon, they were emphasizing its Germanic origins over its affiliation to the English of the day. In part, it is this remarkable difference between Old and Modern English that justifies teaching the linguistic history of English as a standalone undergraduate course, inspiring student curiosity and interest along the way. And the same is true at the other end of the historical spectrum: as the varieties of English unfold around the world today, it is precisely their diversity and their difference--often problematically stated in terms of nativeness and foreignness--from some semblance of a "standard English" that makes the study and thus the teaching of those Englishes so compelling and rewarding. Yet even positing "the Modern English we know today," as I have just done and against which a linguistic history of the language is often drawn, assumes a relatively stable entity knowable to a certain "we" that is nevertheless class-marked by virtue of regularly being in a position to enjoy such offhand conversations about linguistic change--academics, in other words, who attend dinner parties with accountants.

I think for many of us who teach the history of the language from a scholarly background in Old or Middle English literature, these World Englishes pose a daunting pedagogical challenge. And as Seth Lerer reminds us Anglo-Saxonists and Chaucerians at American universities are typically an English department's first defense against this piece of the curriculum. In Chapter 7, Lerer argues this precisely because HEL remains a narrative of origin and change, it has been left to those who specialize in origins to be its overseers." Regardless of medievalists' own increasingly diverse cultural experiences of English, a hard-won diversity that has already benefited the field of Medieval Studies, medievalists' exposure to World Englishes as a field of study is necessarily more limited than those scholars of later periods, during which English first began to spread across the world. How then are such medievalists to grapple with the task of teaching precisely that which is most distant and most different from the origins of the language that we study, especially given that the scholarship on World Englishes now comprises an established and thriving field far outside the scholarly comfort zone of most medievalists? How, in
other words, can we do justice to the global phenomenon and the particularities of English in today's world?

The aim of this study is to determine whether and to what extent the English poet John Milton may have been influenced in the composition of Paradise Lost by the Old English poem known as Genesis B. The paper will examine similarities and differences in the characterisation of Satan and of the temptation of Adam and Eve in both poems. The comparison between two of the illuminations of the Junius 11 ms. and the corresponding passages in Paradise Lost will be part of the analysis.

This study analyses two Old English formulae _gret freodlice_ 'greets in a friendly manner' and _ic cyðe eow þaet_ 'I make it known to you that', which form a salutation-notification template in a document type called writs. It connects the emergence of this formulaic set to previous oral traditions of delivering news and messages and to their reflection in dictation practices from at least the time of King Alfred. Their later routinisation and standardisation is seen as a factor brought about by the centralised production of royal writs and their subsequent adoption as templates in monastic scriptoria across the country. These templates continue to be recycled in the early Middle English period both in English and in Latin writs, ultimately shifting to Latin-only documents during the reign of William the Conqueror. Although this shift does not hinder the continuity of the selected bureaucratic template into the later Middle Ages, it affects the structure of the discourse community associated with the chancery norms, consolidating its core (those literate in Latin who are involved in production and preservation of writs) and marginalising its periphery (English-speakers who used to make up the informed audience for writs in local courts).

Today, English has truly become a global language. English is used in international travel, trade, science, medicine and on the Internet.  The accent and the structural features of English have substantially changed in the past 1,500 years.  Speakers of English as a foreign language continue to exert pressure on it to conform and therefore, English as a means of international communication has become and will be easier for speakers of other languages to learn and to use.  Without a serious linguistic competitor, English will continue to be a means of world communication, due to its' adaptability, minimal inflectional morphology, non-tonal phonology, non-logographic script and a complex interplay of social, economic, technological and historical factors.

Proverbs are very much a component of traditional culture; often used and patterned for “retention and ready recall” by balance, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, or rhyme, they have become a constituent part of common memory (Ong 2012, 34). They are “storehouses of wisdom” and in them- selves often resemble legal rules (Brink 2005, 96-97); note, for example, the use of the compelling auxiliary verb mot (‘must’) in morth mot ma mith morthe kela (“murder must be cooled [i.e., placated] with murder”). Proverbs also transmit communal norms and values to posterity, they give advice or warn, articulate desired behaviour or unwanted conduct (Brink 2005, 91; Sumner 1999, 22). Their presence in medieval Frisian laws has long been recognized, and they were gratefully collected and included in the  rst col- lection of German/Germanic legal proverbs. Conrad Borchling (1908, 32) praised the “beautiful, old, alliterative formulas” in which proverbs had fre- quently been cast. Sympathetic, yet romantic, is a brief discussion by Man- fred Szadrowsky (1959-61, 155-56), who quali ed the Frisian proverbs as“urgermanisch” in nature. Wybren Jan Buma (1961, 74-83) also devoted due attention to their occurrence in the First Rüstring Manuscript (Oldenburg, Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv, Bestand 24-1, Ab. Nr. 1), but his treatment is little more than an enumeration and lacks any contextualization. More recently, critics have been less generous with praise. Klaus von See (1967, 1), for example, opined that alliterative legal verse, especially in the Frisian legal texts, and alliterative proverbs should not be completely neglected in a study of Germanic poetics, but in view of the continuing presence of al- literation in proverbs and formulas one should be careful not to assume Germanic, pre-Christian traditional matter whenever alliteration emerges in a text. With the above in mind, this paper begins with a brief survey of proverbial literature in the various Germanic languages so as to provide a proper backdrop against which to view the medieval Frisian tradition. Next, the nature of proverbs and their function in Old Frisian legal texts will be subjected to a close consideration in the light of recent scholarship.

In recent years, Anglo-Saxonists have widened the scope of their studies to include not only various aspects of Anglo-Saxon society and literature, but also their own discipline. Studying the scholarship on The Wife's Lament and Wuld and Eadwacer, Berit Åström examines the roles of these scholars in the critial history of the two poems. The poems are two of the most haunting, and at the same time cryptic, texts of the entire Old English corpus. Because of these characteristics, the reserach they inspires is wide-ranging, imaginative and provocative. The study focuses mainly on two aspects of scholarly reserach: the emergence of a professional identity among Anglo-Saxonist scholars and their choice of either a metaphoric or metonymic approach to the material. A final chapter charts the concomitant changes within Old English feminist studies. The study summarises the approaches to points of ambiguity in the poems and provides a comprehensive bibliography of twentieth century scholarship to the field of Old English studies, which should make it not only a concise introduction to the field of Old English studies, but also a useful work of reference for anyone wishing to pursue further research on the poems.

This article reads the celebrated Old English lament The Wanderer
within the context of the early monastic tradition of hesychasm, the harnessing of
meandering thoughts prior to approaching the stillness of prayer, and the doctrine of
theosis, the belief that humankind can share in the divine nature of God through
grace. In identifying new analogues and possible sources in scriptural and patristic
writings, it suggests how the poem might have been understood within an Anglo-
Saxon monastic milieu.

Christianity substantially altered Germanic life during the early Middle Ages. However, no large-scale studies have attempted to visualize Christianization through macroscopic semantic trends, nor have any studies used Old Saxon as a control group to help illustrate the role of Christianity in less obvious semantic contexts. The core question of this project, then, revolves around semantic corpora and their role in clarifying sociocultural phenomena: how can a cross-section of Old Saxon and Old English semantics help clarify Christianity's role in re-shaping early medieval Germanic identity? This study uses corpus linguistics, post-colonial/historical theory, and Digital Humanities approaches to schematize the processes underlying the semantic shift of eight Old English/Old Saxon lexeme pairs—ambiht/ambaht, facen/fekan, gædeling/gaduling, hosp–hosc/hosk, geneat/ginot, scyldig/skuldig, þegn/thegan, and wlanc/wlank—that illustrate how the Anglo-Saxons and Continental Saxons re-interpreted their social and moral “Self” between ca.600 CE and ca.1100 CE.

This study obtained quantitative and qualitative sample data primarily from the Dictionary of Old English Electronic Corpus (DOEEC) and TITUS Texts. To establish a semantic baseline, data collection began with Latin/vernacular glosses and ended with larger works of early Germanic literature, including the Old English Beowulf and Old Saxon Heliand. To better systematize semantic observations, the sample lexemes were organized into two groups: “Social Roles” and “Personal Qualities.” The Old English and Old Saxon conclusions yielded three key observations: First, in the “Social Roles,” the transition from reciprocal exchange to autocratic kingship correlated to the naturalization of Christian hierarchy; second, in the “Personal Qualities,” new Christian moral concepts like the sin of superbia introduced semantic gaps that necessitated the reassignment of preexisting lexemes, resulting in semantic hybridization, specialization, and the subversion of Germanic pride; third, Christianity's preference for the unseen occasioned a shift from material to spiritual representations of salvation. These findings have significance for future research on Old English/Old Saxon semantic shift, the relative and absolute dating of Old English/Old Saxon literature, and hybrid digital/analog approaches to philology.

This study reconstructs the Alfredian network as consisting of twelve actors. This network is termed a coalition, within which a cluster of Mercian actors is further hypothesised. Historical sources and charter evidence suggest that Mercian scribes worked for West Saxon kings and may even have taken part in the establishment of a proto-chancery at the royal court. This writing office can be conjectured to have ties with the Alfredian coalition and described as a community of practice. The whole sociolinguistic reconstruction is supported by three case studies: Angelcynn ‘the English people’ and here ‘band, troop’ in historical-political genres, and gretan freondlice in epistolary genres. The diffusion of these Alfredian norms across time, place and genres is linked to the royal chancery and its distribution channels, as well as to the diachronic sustainability of linguistic practices within professional discourse communities and their archives.

In this article I propose that the rationale of the compilation of the Vercelli Book is best appreciated if we group texts according to theme and content rather than form. The distinction between prose and verse appears to have been of little concern to the compiler, who combines homiletic texts with exemplary narratives concerning the education of teachers and, finally, a life of a hermit. This points to an interest in the tension between
the pastoral duties of the preacher and the contemplative virtues of the ascetic life. Drawing on Gregory the Great’s influential formulation of the “mixed life” of the ideal pastor in his “Cura Pastoralis”, I argue that the Vercelli Book invites the implied preacher-reader to balance the duty of preaching with the need for prayer, thereby harmonizing the active and contemplative lives.

The aim of this journal article is to provide an exhaustive description of word negation by means of affixation in Old English, as well as a principled explanation of the pejorative and reversative uses of the relevant affixes. More specifically, this aim involves: the definition of the inventory of affixes that convey a negative meaning, a description of the affixes that satisfies the explanatory requisites of a derivational morphology based on functional principles, and the explanation of the pejorative and reversative functions performed by the affixes under scrutiny. On the descriptive side, special attention is paid to the two defining properties of derivational morphology, namely recategorization and recursivity. On the explanatory side, an explanation of lexical negation in Old English is proposed on the grounds of the Layered Structure of the Word (Martín Arista 2006, fc. a, b, c), which specifies word constituents, functions and positions, as well as the percolation of morphological features. The data have been retrieved from Nerthus (Martín Arista et al. fc.), which is, in turn, based on Clark Hall´s A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. On specific queries, Bosworth and Toller´s An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and The Dictionary of Old English in Electronic Form (di Paolo Healey 2003) have been used.

This article focuses on the images and texts on page 3 of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, in which Lucifer foments rebellion, falls, and, as Satan, is bound to the mouth of hell. The bottom third of the page contains an image of falling angels, Satan, and the hellmouth. Above that image and to the left is written “hER SE,” Old English for “here that” or “here the.” We contend that this fragmentary textual note exaggerates both the linguistic function of other here x did y formulae in the manuscript and the interaction between these formulae and the visual images. Such exaggeration in the textual note at the very space and moment between the representation of rebellion and that of the completed transformation of Lucifer into Satan locates that metamorphosis in the act of reading-viewing itself. We consider the composition of the image and its inscriptions and set them into the context of Richard Drew’s Falling Man. Viewing the fall of Satan as part of a sequence of images and texts, we argue for the collaborative role of the viewer in sequential art and contend that Satan, as he appears in this depiction, is not safely distant from the reader-viewer but rather becoming through the active engagement of the viewer and reader in the creation of the world of image and language.

This essay, in which the poet of 'Andreas' is held to make a provocatively Quixotic reading of 'Beowulf' for entirely Christian ends,was published in 2019 in 'Essays on the Transmission and Transformation of Medieval Knowledge', ed. Marilina Cesario and Hugh Magennis (Manchester University Press), and also represents parts of the introduction to 'Andreas: An Edition', ed. Richard North and Michael D.J. Bintley (Liverpool, 2016).

A comparsion between two literary sources on the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion. Richard Belling's The Confederation and war in Ireland (c. 1670) and the Aphorismical discovery of Treasonable Faction' (c. 1655). The accounts are both from Catholic authors who participated in the rebellion and the subsequent Confederate Catholic movement in Ireland.

However they also represent antagonistic Catholic factions who ended up fighting each other in 1648 over whether to enter an alliance with King Charles I without the establishment of the Catholic religion in Ireland and the reversal of previous siezures of Catholic owned land.

As well as being first hand sources on the rebellion itself, comparison of the accounts demonstrates the constrcutions of diverging and in the end bitterly opposed narratives among Irish Catholics - exposing divsions based on class, ethnicity and geography as well as religious committment.

The aim of this paper is to investigate discourse strategies of outgroup construction in the Alfredian period (late ninth century), by using critical discourse analysis and testing its relevance for the Anglo-Saxon data. The study focuses on the Viking outgroup and its presentation in the texts of the period. The analysis also tackles earlier and later sources containing the episodes of the first encounter with the unwelcome “Other” to trace typological features of outgroup construction in medieval political discourse. The genres that are taken into account are historical writings and legislation in Anglo-Latin and Old English. It is postulated that the Alfredian texts are commissioned by the political elite—the West Saxon kingship—and produced by the symbolic elite—writers, chroniclers, copyists, the clergy more generally, with the Alfredian circle being reconstructed as a “Community of Practice” with a distinct political, cultural, and discourse agenda. The Viking raids of the period provide a “bid for counter-power,” to which the elites have to react both militarily and ideologically. The ideologies of the Anglo-Saxon elites are analyzed at the discourse level, concentrating on the strategies of outgroup derogation, e.g., criminalization of the Vikings in the chronicles. It is concluded that the chronicles can be analyzed as analogous to modern press, that they were produced and circulated to shape “public opinion” of politically and economically prominent social groups.

This chapter argues for the benefits of comparative linguistic analysis between Old English and Old Saxon, on the basis that the two languages derive from Proto-Germanic, and considering the influence of Anglo-Saxon missionaries in the conversion of early medieval Saxony to Frankish Christianity. I will argue against conventional translations of the Old Saxon geruni as a synonym for the related Old Saxon runa meaning "mystery" or "secret." Rather, I will suggest geruni in the Heliand constitutes something more explicitly spiritual. Based on the lexicographical evidence offered by Latin glosses of the Old English geryne, this chapter will reinterpret the semantics of the Old Saxon geruni, and consider how the narrative contexts, in which the word appears in the Heliand, suggests an affinity between these cognates.

This paper focuses on a hitherto neglected aspect of the Old English Orosius, namely the omissions of given passages of the Latin source-text by the Anglo-Saxon translator. The essay proposes to record/chart such omissions systematically and to present a general/comprehensive interpretation of the modes of adaptation of the Latin source on the part of the Old English translator, focusing in particular on a number of case-studies which are especially significant of his/her selection process.

Just as the antagonists of Beowulf may be read as symbolic of those problems which pervaded the heroic society in which the poem is set, so too can they be viewed as having deeper allegorical meaning in the modern adaptations of the Anglo-Saxon poem. These adaptations may be seen both to react to and engage with the poem as a means to express contemporary concerns about modern society. One such concern on which Beowulf adaptations have especially focused is that of the gendered power structures that appear in the poem, in particular the tension between the patriarchal world of Heorot and the martriarchal mere and its female occupant, Grendel’ s mother.
Through the employment of the theoretical frameworks put forward by Julia Kristeva and Sherry B. Ortner, this article will examine how patriarchal societies are depicted in three Beowulf adaptations: Gareth Hind’ s graphic novel The Collected Beowulf, John Gardner’ s novel Grendel, and Robert Zemeckis’ s film Beowulf

This article describes Anglo-Latin and Old English as two codes correlated in Anglo-Saxon England with the same community of practice. Examining the relationship between Anglo-Latin vocabulary connected with the notions of ‘Latin−Latinity’ and ‘Roman−Romanity’ and the way this vocabulary was infiltrated into the evolving written Old English, it claims that the developments in this domain of Anglo-Latin and Old English lexis can be seen as a continuum of practice. Thus the study aims to contribute methodologically in the specific context of Old English lexicon and theoretically to the understanding of bilingual modes in communities of practice.

Timofeeva, Olga (2013) “Of ledenum bocum to engliscum gereorde: Bilingual Communities of Practice in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Communities of Practice in the History of English, ed. by Joanna Kopaczyk and Andreas H. Jucker, 201–224. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 235. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

This journal article identifies two kinds of mismatch form-function in the formation of Old English adjectives. Convergent derivation is found when the meanings of derivatives converge in spite of the motivated morphological alternation that holds between their respective bases of derivation. Redundant derivation applies when an affix is attached that contributes the same meaning as another affix which has already been added to the base of derivation. The instances of convergent and redundant derivation analyzed in this work represent evidence in favour of the existence of two lexical layers in the Old English lexicon, namely the layer of affixless derivation and the layer of affixal derivation. The layer of affixless derivation, in turn, can be subdivided into the component of zero derivation proper and the component of derivation by inflectional means. Other conclusions of this research have to do with the patterns of recursive derivation in adjective formation, the insertion, combination and suppression of strong verb prefixes and the grammaticalization of -bǣre, -cund, -feald, -lēas, -lic,sum, -weard, -welle, -wende and -wīs.