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Summary

How to Use ‘Beginning Old English’

The following pages provide a graded introduction to reading Old English. The sections should be tackled systematically, with plenty of repetition. Reading aloud is highly recommended. This part of the book is self-contained, with word-for-word translations (in section 2), vocabulary lists, notes and modern versions provided.

Grammar. A profound knowledge of grammar is not required to read Old English. Each group of practice sentences focuses on a specific aspect of the language and necessary information is given with the translations and in the supplementary essential grammar notes, and for those wanting more detail, reference is made also (by means of the paragraph mark §) to the Reference Grammar on pp. 409–50, where comprehensive tables of articles, nouns, verbs, etc, will be found.

Vocabulary. As well as being translated on the page, the words used in the practice sentences and practice texts are also integrated in the main Glossary at the back of the book (where they are identified by B followed by section and sentence (or line) number: e.g. B2a/7). Further examples of usage can be traced there.

Pronunciation. Help is given with the sounds of the Old English, especially in the early pages, by means of imitative pronunciation, using the modern language. This can only be approximate. It will be enough at first to learn the sounds of three unfamiliar letters, þ, ð and æ; to recognise that c and g marked with dots are ‘soft’ (ċ = ‘ch’ and ġ = ‘y’), not ‘hard’ (as in ‘cat’ and ‘god’); and to be careful with the ‘long’ vowels (marked with a small bar, the ‘macron’), which are the only sounds that have changed their values radically since Anglo-Saxon times. Otherwise, words may be treated as in modern English. More specific information about the sounds of the language can be found in the section on ‘The writing and pronunciation of Old English’ on pp. 403–8.

Summary

In a treatise on the books of the Old and New Testaments, written probably in the late 990s, at a time when Viking attacks on eastern and southern England were intensifying, abbot Ælfric exploited a reference to the Book of Judith to make a rare comment on events outside the monastery. He explained that he had put Judith's story into English (in a homiletic paraphrase) ‘as an example to you people, so that you may defend your country with weapons against the threatening host’. Judith was a pious widow who saved her people, the Israelites (called Hebrews in our poem) from destruction at the hands of the Assyrians by allowing herself to be taken into the bedroom of Holofernes, the enemy general laying siege to their city of Bethulia, and then chopping off his head.

The courage and fortitude which Ælfric so admired caught the imagination of many later medieval writers and painters also. However, the Book of Judith is one of several books which, though immensely popular and influential, and still part of the Roman Catholic Bible, were excluded after the Reformation from the official ‘canonical’ books of the Protestant Bible, though they will often be found there in a separate section of ‘apocryphal’ scripture.

There is no evidence that the version of Judith's story created by an anonymous OE poet was written with the specific purpose of encouraging the English in their own conflicts with invaders. It has come down to us in the early eleventh-century Beowulf-manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv, fols. 202r–209v), copied out by one of that poem's two scribes and bound into the volume immediately after it. Skilfully paring down the biblical narrative to its essentials (by ignoring the events of the first half of the book and omitting all the characters but Judith, Holofernes and Judith's maid), the poet has produced a moral tale for all times, but it is distinctly coloured by the conventional diction and imagery of Germanic heroism and structured by the sort of polarisation of good and evil well known in saints’ lives.

Summary

The literature of Anglo-Saxon Christianity dominates the surviving Old English corpus in the sheer volume of texts – and all of them, whether targeted at monks and clergy or at the laity, have ultimately a single aim: to encourage the faithful. They do this through example and exhortation, and through the clear exposition of Christian doctrine and practice in relation to life here on earth. Implicitly, and often explicitly, the theme of ‘end things’ (a subject known as eschatology) is at the heart of such writings. At the end of human time, according to St Paul in his Epistle to the Romans (14.10), ‘we shall all stand before the judgement seat of Christ’, and there all shall be judged according to how they lived their earthly life. Christian writers thus urge the faithful to conduct that life in the clear knowledge of its transitoriness and in the expectation of better things to come. It is Paul also, in his Epistle to the Ephesians (6.10–17), who defines for us the ideal Christian hero – the miles Christi (‘soldier of Christ’), whose weapons are spiritual and include the ‘sword of truth’ and the ‘breastplate of righteousness’.

Prose is the medium most favoured by militant Anglo-Saxon Christian writers, and three modes of discourse feature prominently: homily, sermon and hagiography. ‘Homily’ and ‘sermon’ are useful ways to describe two different sorts of address, both designed to be read out at church services, though in practice the terms have always been used loosely and indiscriminately. A homily, properly speaking, is Bible-based; it takes a passage of scripture – usually one set to be read at mass on a particular day in the church year – and analyses it in detail, explaining both its literal significance and what it stands for figuratively as a lesson on right Christian behaviour. Ælfric's ‘Homily for Easter Sunday’ (Text 22) is a classic example, which uses a passage from the gospel of Matthew to explore the meaning of Christ's crucifixion and subsequent events. A sermon, on the other hand, is not tied to a Bible reading but addresses a specific topic related to church practice or doctrine and examines it in detail.

Summary

Familiarity

When the hero of the poem Beowulf arrives in Denmark to tackle the man-monster Grendel, he introduces himself thus in Old English:

Beowulf is min nama!

It is not hard to guess the meaning. We know the verb is, and the noun nama is almost the same as modern ‘name’. As for min, we are very familiar with this possessive pronoun in the form ‘mine’, as in ‘that book is mine’, even if today we always use the shorter form ‘my’ before a noun, as in ‘it's my book’. Evidently what Beowulf says is: ‘Beowulf is my name!’

But what about the pronunciation in Anglo-Saxon times? We shall now repeat the line, using the helpful editorial conventions of today, which include putting a ‘macron’ (a short bar) over those vowels which we are confident will have been pronounced ‘long’:

Bēowulf is mīn nama!

In Bēowulf, the long ē sounds much like modern English ‘ay’ in ‘bay’ and ēo is a double sound, something like ‘bay-oh’ said quickly; wulf sounds like modern ‘wolf’ – i.e. the ‘short’ u is the u of ‘put’, not ‘pun’. Is is exactly as it is today. Mīn, however, needs careful attention, because it does not sound anything like modern ‘mine’ but like ‘mean’ (i.e. the vowel ī is ‘ee’). That leaves nama, which is pronounced more or less as you might expect from the spelling, with the short vowels resembling those of ‘mamma’.

Changes

The recognisable form of Beowulf's declaration of his name is evidence enough that modern English (ModE) has evolved directly from Old English (OE). But the 900-year period of development since Anglo-Saxon times has been long enough for changes to have occurred which may all too often disguise the connection.

Here is another half-line from Beowulf. It is used three times in the poem, first to describe the mythical founder of Denmark, then the Danish king Hrothgar, and then Beowulf himself:

Þæt wæs gōd cyning.

This is again quite easy, though there are obvious snags for the modern reader. The first is orthographical. When writing OE, the Anglo-Saxons used several letters which we rarely see today, though they are not hard to master.

Summary

Uniquely in western Europe before 1100, Anglo-Saxon England had its own medical literature in the vernacular, and four major medical treatises in OE have survived. Much of the material in them was translated directly from Latin works and thus continued the Graeco-Roman tradition associated especially with Hippocrates and Galen (who themselves drew on traditions going back four thousand years in the Near East). It is probable that the Anglo-Saxon compilers were influenced by a ‘native’ northern European tradition as well. This may originally have been transmitted orally.

Bald's Leechbook (now London, British Library, Royal 12 D. xvii) is one of the four treatises. It is so called because a Latin colophon (concluding statement) written by the scribe declares: ‘Bald is owner of this book, which he ordered Cild to write’. Nothing is known about Bald (or indeed about Cild himself), but this ‘leechbook’ – lǣcebōc was the Anglo-Saxons’ own term for such a book – was clearly intended for use by a professional ‘leech’ (lǣce, ‘physician’).

It is a compendium of medical knowledge in two parts. The first has eighty-eight numbered chapters giving remedies for specific disorders, starting with those affecting the head and working systematically down the body (the method of the Greek physicians); the second is a more discursive and learned account of mainly internal disorders, with sixty-seven chapters. Extract (a) below is from item 2 in part one; extracts (b) and (c) are from items 12 and 65, respectively, in part two. A third part (known as Leechbook III), with seventy-six chapters, was added to the British Library manuscript but is from a separate source. All the material was probably put together in King Alfred's time (the end of the ninth century), though our copy of it was made around the middle of the tenth century, probably at Winchester.

Much can be deduced about the health and habits of the Anglo-Saxons from their medical literature. The number of entries concerned with what is termed ‘dimness (or mistiness) of the eyes’, for example, as in (a), suggests that eye ailments were especially common. Although a condition such as astigmatism may have been involved in some cases, the problem was no doubt more usually the result of infection or injury. Inflammation and irritation would be exacerbated by the smoky atmosphere inside buildings without chimneys, and unsanitary conditions would encourage the spread of a wide range of diseases.

Summary

In the early 440s, Salvian of Marseilles (c. 400–c. 480), known as a “teacher of bishops,” surveyed with great distress the changing world of the Roman Empire in the West. His On the Government of God was a sad record of failures, past and present: the Israelites of the Old Testament; his contemporary Latin Christians. To Salvian's eye, the religious landscape of the late Roman Empire was dark. Roman orthodox Christians were sinners, spurning God. And when Salvian wrote, the Germanic peoples then well advanced in transforming the empire, through settlement and conquest, were either pagans or heretical Arian Christians. Uneducated and unromanized barbarians, sighed Salvian, “follow blindly” whatever someone tells them is the truth, and in this way they had fallen into the heresy of Arianism:

So they are heretics, but unwittingly. Indeed, it is only among us that they are heretics, and not among themselves, for they are so sure of their own orthodoxy that they libel us in turn by the accusation of heresy. As they are to us, so are we to them … God bears with them patiently, I think, for he sees that though they have not the true faith, yet their error is due to the love of what appears to be the truth, especially since he knows that their wrongdoing is due to ignorance.

What made this worse was that their heresies “spring originally from the false teaching they received from the Romans, and the inception of heresy among them becomes another heavy charge against us.” If orthodox Romans were sinners, and Germanic Christians accidental heretics, then Roman heretics were the worst of all: “their lack of faith makes them worse than the Romans, and their disgraceful lives than the barbarians.” Given all these failures, it was “easy” for Salvian “to estimate what the whole Roman state deserves”: a just punishment from God, like that Salvian was witnessing in that state's slow collapse.

Summary

‘What page, what word in that divine authority, the Old and the New Testament, is not a most proper standard of human life?’ So runs the rhetorical question asked in ch. 73 of the Rule of St Benedict, the guide to daily life drawn up (c. 540) by Benedict of Nursia for the monks of Monte Cassino in Italy and followed, with regional variations, in most of the monasteries of late Anglo-Saxon England. But it was not just monks and nuns for whom the Bible provided a framework for everyday existence. It had a pervasive influence on all medieval life and thought, informing not only the spiritual dimension but the political and historical too.

For the Christian, history was not the cyclical process conceived of in the classical and heroic worlds – involving the perpetual rise and fall of people and nations under the influence of blind fate or fickle gods – but a linear progression from a known beginning to a clearly anticipated end, the whole process operating within the all-embracing knowledge and will of a single, eternal God. The prelude to human history was Creation, whose paradisal promise was wrecked by Adam's and Eve's disobedience at the prompting of Satan (whose pride, in some accounts, had earlier lost him his position as God's brightest angel). It was their fall which brought pain and struggle into the world, and human history evolved under the burden of their ‘original sin’ until the moment when a merciful God presented humankind with the gift of his son, Christ. His sacrifice on the cross would offer the possibility of redemption and salvation. The end of history, in the Christian scheme of things, will be Doomsday (OE dōmes dæg, ‘day of judgement’), when everyone will be assessed in relation to their conduct on earth, and only those found deserving will enjoy an eternity of bliss in heaven.

Summary

PROGRESS TEST (p. 22)

Summary

Purpose of this book

Overall, Fundamentals of Translation serves the purpose of disseminating up-to-date, fundamental knowledge about translation in an appropriate format for a non-specialist, broad readership.

More specifically, the purpose of this book is threefold. It intends …

1. … to offer a basic, easy-to-read introduction to concepts essential to translation practice.

Practitioners, language and translation students, and professionals in related fields (managers of translators, communication specialists, etc.) need to acquire a general understanding of basic translation concepts without having to read through pages of translation theory and scholarship or publications geared toward specialists or graduate students. This need for knowledge remains mostly unmet, as evidenced by the disconnect between the current understanding of basic translation concepts among translation scholars and that possessed by translation practitioners, students and language professionals. Many language professionals and students still refer to deeply entrenched and outdated views of language and of translation, at a time when research in translation has seen unprecedented growth and advances. It is our opinion that this situation is due not to a lack of interest but to the dearth of publications that make this information accessible to wide audiences, who often feel overwhelmed and discouraged when confronted with books that are too long, too theoretical and too complex for their purposes. Along similar lines, many believe that theory and other conceptual elements are irrelevant to practice, mostly because they have been presented in a manner that is too complex and too far removed from their reality.

2. … to reach out and introduce translation, in an accessible manner, to readers who may not intend to become translators but who work in fields that can benefit from informed knowledge about translation.

3. … to lay the ground for a better understanding of translation among language students and other language specialists, disseminating basic concepts and dispelling myths about translation.

Summary

The period of English history which we now call ‘Anglo-Saxon’ lasted from the mid-fifth century until until the end of the eleventh, when the Normans arrived. Most surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts date from the latter part of this period and many of them are in Latin, but England was unique in early medieval Europe in having a thriving vernacular literature also. This was written in what we now call ‘Old English’ (OE), to distinguish it from the ‘Middle English’ stage of the evolving language, which culminated in the works of Chaucer and Malory. The fifty-seven reading texts which make up the major part of this book have been chosen to illustrate the range and variety of OE literature.

Beginning Old English

The first section of the book, ‘Beginning Old English’, is designed for those with little or no prior knowledge of OE. It is a graded introduction to the reading of the language, based on the belief that, with suitable guidance, this skill can be learned ‘on the job’. It is self-contained, with all vocabulary and translations provided, though the vocabulary from the practice sentences and practice texts is also integrated in the main Glossary. Help with pronunciation is given by means of an imitative system, despite its inevitable flaws (it cannot of course completely accommodate all the huge variety of ‘Englishes’ spoken by users of the book). Learners cannot be expected to master the international phonetic alphabet before they even begin.

After a ‘Getting started’ section featuring short extracts from Beowulf, five groups of practice sentences follow, along with essential grammatical notes. All the sentences are taken from original OE texts, chosen for their relative simplicity and their usefulness in illustrating specific aspects of the language. Several have been edited or emended and some spellings have been adjusted. Each sentence is provided with a word-for-word literal translation, as well as an idiomatic translation and notes. A progress test follows the section of practice sentences, and then two practice texts. Keys to all the OE material are given. Finally, a ‘Beginning poetry’ section gives an introduction to the reading and understanding of OE verse.

Summary

READING THE TEXTS

All the Old Englsh texts are provided with line-numbering, to facilitate reference to specific words or phrases.

Each of the texts is provided liberally with glosses (i.e. translations of individual words) and notes. These are signalled within the texts themselves as follows:

Summary

The making of wise observations on life, derived from experience and modified by reflection on that experience, and the formal (often formulaic) expression of these in song or poem, were part of the oral inheritance of the Anglo-Saxons and continued to have an essential place in their literature. Even the eponymous hero of Beowulf must find time for reflection before he performs his great deeds: ‘fate proceeds always as it must’, he announces before fighting Grendel, and ‘it's better that a man avenge his friend than mourn much’, before taking on Grendel's mother. Such sayings, whether we call them ‘maxims’ (the term usually applied to sayings with an ethical dimension) or ‘gnomes’ (more descriptive sayings) or ‘aphorisms’ (any wise or sententious sayings), pervade much of OE literature.

There are two poems – known rather drearily as Maxims I and Maxims II – which are built entirely of such material; the second of the two begins this section (Text 33). Social regulation seems to be at least part of the purpose of such poems. They make sage and incisive comments on the world and its people, using the ordinary and the obvious to impart to their audience a sense of the necessary order of things. Closely related to maxims in their form are so-called ‘proverbs’, but they take a more robustly independent view of the world and express their truths through metaphor. As the OE collection known as the Durham Proverbs shows (Text 34), this is a more cunning and more subversive, and often humorous, method.

Humour is a natural ingredient also, though not the only one, in many of the OE Riddles. Riddling is an active process of reflection, in which the mind is forced to participate in liberating dislocations of imagined experience; like maxims and proverbs, riddles direct us towards social and existential truths, but they do so with forensic intensity, erecting elaborate structures of double meaning and exploiting paradox as they scrutinise the things of the world and the creatures (including us) which inhabit it. A selection of five riddles is given below (Text 35).

Summary

The telling of tales is one of the world's oldest professions. In pre-literate societies it was the bard, minstrel, poet or (to use an OE term) scop on whom the roles not only of entertainer but also of historian fell. The oral poet was the keeper of the collective memory and transmitter of the narratives which recreated a nation's or tribe's past and the achievements of its heroes, and thereby forged its present sense of identity. The OE poem known as Widsith, which is a sort of catalogue of the professional poet's repertoire, shows this well, and so does Deor, given below in section VI (Text 36).

The poet of Beowulf, too, never misses the chance to promote his own craft within his story. After Beowulf's defeat of Grendel, the monster's blood is hardly dry on the ground before a bard among the Danish king's thegns is produced to commemorate the hero's exploit in song (Text 31a). Then, that same evening, a minstrel performs at a celebratory feast, applying a timely check on the triumphalism of the occasion by telling the sad tale of the Danish princess Hildeburh's ill-fated marriage to Finn of the Frisians (Text 31b). It is a reminder to the Danes of how sorrow invariably seems to follow joy, and the allusive way in which this tale is told shows that the Beowulf-poet's audience were thoroughly familiar with it. Indeed, they may have known it from a version of another OE poem which has come down to us, though only in a fragment – The Fight at Finnsburh (Text 32). The surviving lines present a blow-by-blow account of an encounter between Danes and Frisians which is only lightly sketched in the longer poem. In Beowulf, the arrival of Grendel's mother to avenge her son after the Danish celebrations proves the minstrel's point about changing fortunes. The details of Beowulf's subsequent tracking down and killing of this she-monster suggest how close in character monsters and heroes may be (Text 31c). They illustrate, too, with the inclusion of an episode of divine intervention to enable the hero to complete his task, how Christianity can be used to colour a tale of the Germanic pagan world without diminishing it.

Summary

Little is known about Wulfstan before he was appointed bishop of London in 996, though he seems to have had family connections in the East Midlands, around Peterborough or Ely. Thereafter, however, he became a prominent and influential figure in church and state, being involved among other things in the drawing up of lawcodes for two kings, Æthelred and Cnut. In 1002, he was appointed bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York and held the two sees in plurality until 1016, after which he retained York until his death in 1023.

Four sermons in Latin and twenty-two in OE have been identified as Wulfstan's, though the number of the latter should certainly be put higher, in view of several fragments which show his highly distinctive style (discussed below). Their subjects are often eschatological – dealing, that is, with ‘end things’: death, judgement, heaven and hell – or they offer guidance on specific aspects of faith, such as baptism. Among Wulfstan's other known works are the Institutes of Polity, which sets out the distribution of authority among members of church and state, and the Canons of Edgar, a handbook of instruction for the secular clergy.

The sermon De falsis deis is preserved in a single copy in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113, a two-volume homiliary (a collection of homilies) compiled at Worcester between 1064 and 1083 for the presiding bishop (another Wulfstan); it contains several items by Ælfric, as well as most of Wulfstan's sermons. De falsis deis is in fact an expansion of part of one of Ælfric's homilies (not one of the main collection of Sermones catholicae), which in turn drew on the work of a sixth-century continental writer, Martin of Braga. Pagan practices had survived into Christian times in England and Wulfstan denounced them regularly in his works; each of the lawcodes with which he was involved includes injunctions against such practices. With his archiepiscopal see at York, in a strongly Scandinavian area, he may have been particularly aware of the problem.

The equation of Germanic deities with classical counterparts was well established in the early medieval period, with consequences still visible today in the names of the days of the week in Germanic and Romance languages.

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Beginning Old English

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19 - Judith

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IV - Example and exhortation

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Reference Grammar of Old English

1 - Getting started

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List of abbreviations

3 - Medicinal Remedies (from Bald's Leechbook)

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1 - Peoples of the Book (380–661)

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III - Spreading the word

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4 - Keys to test sentences and texts

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Preface

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Introduction

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List of maps

Index

THE TEXTS

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Index

VI - Reflection and lament

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V - Telling tales

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24 - On False Gods (Wulfstan's De falsis deis)

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2 - Practice sentences

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