Native Content available for Old English

[Iuri]

Hello all! I came here to ask a question about the validity of learning Old English when it comes to rewards for your efforts, my question is: Is there a good chunk of material written in native Old Eglish for one to read, covering many areas of subject? I'm very interested in learning this language in the future, perhaps start at the end of the year, but is it worth it? I know that it is very much worth it to learn a language such as Latin and Greek, where there are countless of surviving and interesting texts, but does the same apply to Anglo-Saxon? I would very much appreciate the thoughts of someone already knowledged on the subject.

[Longinus]

Hello all! I came here to ask a question about the validity of learning Old English when it comes to rewards for your efforts, my question is: Is there a good chunk of material written in native Old Eglish for one to read, covering many areas of subject? I'm very interested in learning this language in the future, perhaps start at the end of the year, but is it worth it? I know that it is very much worth it to learn a language such as Latin and Greek, where there are countless of surviving and interesting texts, but does the same apply to Anglo-Saxon? I would very much appreciate the thoughts of someone already knowledged on the subject.

The surviving OE material is mostly poetry, religious material, chronicles, and some stuff about medicinal plants, magic spells, prayers, curses, etc. There is not as much as in Latin or Greek, but certainly it is the largest collection of early material in a Germanic language. There is a lot of Old Norse material, but this is of a later date. The amount of OE literature is much more than in Old High German or Old Saxon. I think it is worthwhile, but it depends on your interests. Keep in mind that there is much, much larger amount of Middle English material as well, which is substantially easier to read than OE. The entire corpus of OE material is available online if you want to have a look.

[Iuri]

Thanks for your comment, I was kinda expecting something of that sort, it is really a shame that there isn't more surviving texts of OE, in my opinion it the most beautiful of the germanic languages and its connection to English, a language that I already know, kinda fascinates me and make me wanna learn it. If I learned OE would that help me at all if I decided to learn Middle English too later on, would that give me any advantage? Also I wonder if learning OE would also help me with my modern English, since I'm not a native speaker maybe learning OE would help me internalize more some idiomatic structures that I may be not good at yet, I dunno.

Could you please share with the website that you mentioned that has all the surviving corpus of OE if that is not any trouble?

[Longinus]

Thanks for your comment, I was kinda expecting something of that sort, it is really a shame that there isn't more surviving texts of OE, in my opinion it the most beautiful of the germanic languages and its connection to English, a language that I already know, kinda fascinates me and make me wanna learn it. If I learned OE would that help me at all if I decided to learn Middle English too later on, would that give me any advantage? Also I wonder if learning OE would also help me with my modern English, since I'm not a native speaker maybe learning OE would help me internalize more some idiomatic structures that I may be not good at yet, I dunno.

Could you please share with the website that you mentioned that has all the surviving corpus of OE if that is not any trouble?

Here are a few sites of interest:

The corpus site is structured for linguistic research, and not well-suited for actually reading texts. It is set up as a database. It is here:
http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca.ezprox ... index.html
You can also download it here by filling out a form:
http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/0163

Here are some good websites with the most important texts in OE:

https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/la ... glish-old/
https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/English ... Texts.html

Here is a nice page with a lot of useful links to texts in OE and ME:
https://sites.google.com/site/helontheweb/e-texts

If you like physical books, here is a list of the publications of the Early English Text Society, which includes both Old English and Middle English. Many of these are out of print, but you can find them online in used condition.
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~eets/list-of-all ... s-2015.pdf

Old English will help of course with Middle English. OE will not be of much help with your modern English. If you are interested in internalizing idiomatic structures and expanding your vocabulary and cultural context in English, to a high literary level, probably the best thing to do is to read Shakespeare and the so-called King James or Authorized Version of the Bible in (early) Modern English, from the early 1600s. These two sources have a huge linguistic and cultural impact in English.

Middle English is actually pretty easy to learn. If you have a good command of modern English, you can just pick up a book in Middle English and start reading. You will be able to figure out most of the words, maybe occasionally looking something up in a Middle English dictionary or online. After reading through a few books this way, you will not have any trouble.

Learning Old English is like learning German. Morphologically it is essentially the same as German, although the sounds and spelling and vocabulary are of course closer to Modern English than German would be. A Modern English speaker would be able to recognize many of the words in an Old English text, but would not be able to understand the meaning of a passage without specifically studying OE like you would study a foreign language.

[mcthulhu]

I had an Old English class in college a long time ago and enjoyed it, but I think it is something you would do for enjoyment (still a very valid reason) rather than the prospect of applying it.

[Iuri]

@Longinus, thank you very much for such an excelent list of resources, I really appreciate it! It seems there are a lot of published works about Old English, they will come in handy if I decide to study. A question, do you know OE/ME by any chance?

I was meaning to start reading Shakespeare some day, thanks for the advice, reading the King James bible should be a good idea too, but I don't know if it will work for me, as christian, I find it hard to pick up the bible and read casually with the intent of learning a language, but maybe.

[Elexi]

Just in case there is any confusion, Shakespeare and the King James Bible are considered to be early Modern English - you should have no problem with those if you have a good edition that pays attention to language (such as the Arden Shakespeare editions). With the KJV the translation committee did some interesting things - like retaining Hebrew and Greek syntax - in the translation (see http://www.kjvtoday.com/home/language-of-the-kjv). So it is not entirely written in the 'standard' English of the time.

[MorkTheFiddle]

You could go back to Old English and work your way forward through Middle English to Shakespeare, or, from a suggestion by Deka Glossai in a Youtube post, you can do the reverse: Shakespeare -> Middle English -> Old English, depending on your level of Modern English.

This is Deka Glossai's post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AelM2zyv5Us. His remarks about English are from about 2:46 to about 3:35.

I tried his suggestion to go from Modern English to Middle English, and it worked rather well, but I am a false beginner in Middle English, so the result may not be a reliable indicator. I am also a false beginner in Old English, but I did not try the second step.

There is audio available for both Old English and Middle English.

For Old English, there is a 2-cd reading of the unabridged Old English of Beowulf by Trevor Eaton. It was published by Pavilion Records Ltd of the UK in 1997, and its publisher designation is SHE CDS 9642. There is a reading by J. B. Bessinger, Jr., of an abridged version of the Old English here http://www.learnoutloud.com/Audio-Books ... wulf/24873.

Earlier Bessinger had done the reading of an abridged Beowulf on cassette, and the cassette included readings of "Caedmon's Hymn," "The Dream of the Rood," "The Wanderer," "The Battle of Brunan Burg" and "A Wife's Lament." I don't know whether there's a CD version.

Trevor Eaton also narrated the Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and the Chaucer Society has published them in parts. Neither Eaton's nor the Society's complete works are cheap.

[Longinus]

@Longinus, thank you very much for such an excelent list of resources, I really appreciate it! It seems there are a lot of published works about Old English, they will come in handy if I decide to study. A question, do you know OE/ME by any chance?

I was meaning to start reading Shakespeare some day, thanks for the advice, reading the King James bible should be a good idea too, but I don't know if it will work for me, as christian, I find it hard to pick up the bible and read casually with the intent of learning a language, but maybe.

I studied Old English a long time ago, so it would take me a while to get back into practice reading it. I still read some Middle English from time to time, mostly poetry and the Arthurian stuff. Right now I'm reading Spenser's The Faerie Queene, which technically is early modern English, but Spenser employed a lot of vocabulary and even grammatical constructions which were already archaic at the time he wrote, so it's definitely more difficult to read than Shakespeare.

[IronMike]

These are the books I've used for Old and Middle English (in that order, due to many many Anglo-Saxon words in early Middle English).

Introduction to Old English by Baker

Old English Aerobics to go along with the above book

A Book of Middle English by Burrow

My favorite version of Beowulf is Heaney's bilingual version