The Cambridge Old English Reader

Familiarity

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

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’:

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:

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.