In my academic career, whenever I taught the poetry survey and medieval literature, my approach was chronological. In addition to familiarising my students with the material, I wanted to help my students to understand texts as responding to and developing existing literary traditions: for example, Milton’s Paradise Lost is indeed a work of genius, but it is quite deliberately part of a literary tradition in content and in form. It is influenced by other works which came before, and it influences those which came after, as part of a grand conversation. In English literature, that tradition stretches back beyond the Modern English of today, beyond the Early Modern English of the Tudors and the Stuarts, and beyond even the Middle English of the middle ages, into the Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) of pre-conquest Britain.
The earliest datable poem in English is “Cædmon’s Hymn,” attributed by the Venerable Bede to an illiterate cowherd sometime between 658–680. It is a short poem of only nine lines, praising God as the maker of the world. Written in Old English, it might seem impenetrable for those unlettered in that language more than a millennium old:
Nū scylun hergan hefaenrīcaes Uard,
metudæs maecti end his mōdgidanc,
uerc Uuldurfadur, suē hē uundra gihuaes,
ēci dryctin ōr āstelidæ
hē ǣrist scōp aelda barnum
heben til hrōfe, hāleg scepen.
Thā middungeard moncynnæs Uard,
eci Dryctin, æfter tīadæ
fīrum foldu, Frēa allmectig.
I always provided my students with a translation of “Cædmon’s Hymn” and other works in Old English, such as “The Dream of the Rood,” But I also made certain that they had the originals in a side-by-side presentation. For, although I desperately wanted my students to have the ability to read the originals, there were no programs in Old English at any of the universities at which I have taught—not even at a large public research university like Wayne State in Detroit. Understandably, with the course goal of surveying all English poesy, or all medieval literature, it was simply beyond the scope of the course to devote the term to learning Old English. And, when my students asked for resources to learn on their own, I could only point them to the quite old texts that I had used to gain a mere competency in Old English that was sufficient to supplement my actual expertise in Middle English: Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer, Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse, and John R. Clark Hall’s Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary.
Learning a language—especially one that has fallen into disuse—through the use of grammars, primers, and a dictionary is hardly the best way to go about it. Unless one is very strongly motivated and especially diligent, there’s a good chance of going nowhere. And, for whatever reason, it seems that languages acquired in such a fashion are hard to keep up; they have a tendency to slip from the mind without continual use. In short, the would-be student of Old English had much to dissuade him, and little to encourage him, in his noble desire to learn the tradition of his own language.
So things might have carried on, especially with the continual closure of the few remaining departments where ancient languages are still taught. But this year, quite unexpectedly, something happened to reverse the trend of historical ignorance that threatened an Idiocracy-like future in which no one can read anything not written in the most contemporary idiom. For this year, Vergil Press has undertaken to publish Colin Gorrie’s Ōsweald Bera: An Introduction to Old English, and it is my pleasure to be able to say, both as an educator and a devotee of medieval literature, that it is an exceptional work deserving of swift adoption by universities and independent scholars alike.
Gorrie ditches the dry and difficult approach of learning a language’s rules almost independently of its vocabulary. Instead, as his concise introduction explains, the goal is one of immersion: the text has been designed such that recognisable words help to introduce slightly more difficult vocabulary, with the result that even a beginner can get something out of the first reading of a chapter. For example, the first few lines of the story read as follows:
On Englalande is lȳtel tūn. And on þām tūne is lȳtel hūs. And on þām hūse is lȳtel mægden. Hēo is Mildþryþ. Mildþryþ wunaþ on þām hūse. Hire fæder wunaþ ēac þǣr.
Words like ‘and,’ ‘is,’ and ‘on’ are immediately familiar, even if their meanings are slightly different (‘on’ can also mean ‘in’). Other words are nearly as obvious, capable of being understood either by thinking for a moment or sounding them aloud: ‘Englaland,’ ‘lȳtel,’ ‘tūn,’ ‘hūs,’ ‘fæder,’ ‘hire,’ and ‘þǣr.’ Minor differences in spelling and pronunciation are likewise swiftly overcome with a little thought: ‘þām’ clearly means ‘that’, just as ‘mægden’ means ‘maiden.’ And context does the rest, with ‘hēo’ meaning ‘she’ and ‘wunaþ’ meaning ‘dwells.’ At the end of each chapter, a ‘wordhoard’ (Old English for ‘vocabulary’) provides definitions for all of the words introduced in the chapter, assisting with anything that proves a little too unclear for the reader. In the brief opening paragraph quoted above, the trickiest word is ‘ēac,’ for which the wordhoard gives the meaning of ‘also.’
So the book begins, with little Mildthryth asking her father to tell her a story. Naturally, he obliges: he tells her of Osweald, the talking bear, which character gives Gorrie’s text its name. Along the way, as the back cover promises, “He makes friends (and enemies), gets involved in royal intrigue, and learns all about the world.” The reader also learns all about the world, along with the language: historical details are worked into the story, so that one becomes immersed with Mildthryth in the tale she is hearing and the time in which she is living. In short, Gorrie has managed to make Old English come to life in a way that even the most stirring tales do not always achieve.
Here, I speak from experience. It is sometimes a difficult thing to make students care about Old English unless they are taking the class with that intention in mind, and few students in survey courses are there for such a purpose—indeed, few are even English majors, let alone interested in the literature of the remote past. But in reading this story with my sons, aged 5 and 8, I was surprised to see that they were instantly drawn into the tale. Moreover, their grasp of the vocabulary was far swifter than I had expected. By the second read-through of Chapter 1, they already had a complete understanding of its contents, and this without making only the slightest recourse to the wordhoard. We simply opened it and read it aloud and then did so again on successive nights.
This usage of the book is consistent with Gorrie’s introduction. In a section titled “How to use this book,” he writes:
To get the most out of this book, I recommend the following approach: read each chapter a few times. First, read it casually, trying to get the gist of what is going on. Then, go through it more deliberately, trying to understand the meaning of every word … Finally, read it through quickly once again, integrating your knowledge of the words you just learned on the previous reading.
Although it is not explicitly stated in the introduction, the text is intended for university students or perhaps upperclassmen at the secondary level. The instructions quoted above suggest some level of self-directed usage; the acknowledgements mention an “accompanying sequence of courses”; there are references throughout to the book as a “textbook”; and, all four of the blurbs on the back cover come from academics at the university level. Nevertheless, with a little effort on the part of the teacher or parent, the book seems to be perfectly suitable for teaching children even at the level of grammar school. More complex are a few of the grammatical rules which come into play in the later chapters of the text, but these are relatively few in number and, by the time they are brought up, they seem quite natural as a result of familiarity with the different forms of some words that have already been encountered in the text.
Although the text is laudable and pedagogically desirable, there are some minor and necessary limitations of approach. The text frankly acknowledges that it presents a single dialect of Old English—Late West Saxon—although the differences between Old English dialects are comparatively minor. Moreover, the book is not a grammar, and it is of little use as a reference of that sort. For such purposes, a dedicated grammar can be easily and inexpensively acquired on the second-hand market. Its combined wordhoard at the end of the book includes all of the words found in the preceding chapters, but no others, and hence it is not really suitable as a dedicated dictionary. But Gorrie’s text makes no pretensions to any of these purposes, in any case.
One possible consideration that seems to have been overlooked, probably due to the intention that the book will be used in a university classroom setting, is that the text does not come with a pronunciation guide. In a classroom with an experienced instructor, pronunciation could be thoroughly and quickly addressed. However, if the text is to be taken up by comparatively inexperienced teachers, parents, or self-directed students (of whatever age), a pronunciation guide would be a helpful addition, and one that would take up no more than one or two pages in total. To be sure, encounters with Old English are today written, rather than spoken; but many forms of learning (such as that which I have used with my own sons) involve recitation, and hence a pronunciation guide would be a pedagogically useful inclusion.
Gorrie’s Ōsweald Bera is, in my estimation, the best introduction to Old English currently on the market, and by a comfortable margin. It represents the easiest route to reacquiring familiarity with the roots of our language, an effort which is culturally conservationist—indeed, not merely respectful of tradition, but necessary in order to preserve it. Moreover, and not unimportantly, it is an engaging read capable of maintaining the interest of children and adults alike—a work that both edifies and delights. Those who follow its instructions and immerse themselves in the text will soon emerge with a solid grasp of Old English. Now, Gorrie needs only to work on an intermediate-level follow up. In the meantime, there is every reason to celebrate his gōd bōc.
