The Old English Period

1. The Anglo-Saxons and Their Language ( Historical Background).

2. Old English Dialects.

3. Old English Written records.

4. Old English Alphabets.

5. Linguistic Features of Old English

1) Old English Phonetics.

2) Old English Grammar.

3) Old English Vocabulary.

1. The Anglo-Saxons and Their Language (Historical Background).

“Anglo-Saxon” is the term applied to the English-speaking inhabitants of Britain from around the middle of the fifth century until the time of the Norman Conquest, when the Anglo-Saxon line of English kings came to an end.

The Venerable Bede completed his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum [Ecclesiastical History of the English People] in 731 and this work is the most important source for the early history of England. According to the Venerable Bede, the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the island of Britain during the reign of Martian, who in 449 became co-emperor of the Roman Empire with Valentinian III and ruled for seven years.

Before that time, Britain had been inhabited by speakers of Celtic languages: the Scots and Picts in the north, and in the south various groups which had been united under Roman rule since their conquest by the emperor Claudius in A.D. 43. By the beginning of the fifth century the Roman Empire was under increasing pressure from advancing barbarians, and the Roman garrisons in Britain were being depleted as troops were withdrawn to face threats closer to home.

In A.D. 410 the last of the Roman troops were withdrawn and the Britons had to defend themselves. Facing hostile Picts and Scots in the north and Germanic raiders in the east, the Britons decided to hire one enemy to fight the other: they engaged Germanic mercenaries to fight the Picts and Scots.

It was during the reign of Martian that the newly-hired mercenaries arrived. These were from three Germanic nations situated near the northern coasts of Europe: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. According to Bede, the mercenaries succeeded quickly in defeating the Picts and Scots. Then they sent word to their homes of the fertility of the island and the cowardice of the Britons. They soon found a pretext to break with their employers, made an alliance with the Picts, and began to conquer the territory that would eventually be known as England—a slow-moving conquest that would take more than a century.

It has been many years since Bede’s narrative was accepted uncritically, but recent research has introduced especially significant complications into his traditional account of the origins of the Anglo-Saxons. Genetic research generally suggests that neither the Anglo-Saxon invasion nor any other brought about a wholesale replacement of the British population, which has remained surprisingly stable for thousands of years. Presumably the landholding and ruling classes were widely replaced while the greatest proportion of the population remained and eventually adopted Germanic ethnicity—a process that has parallels on the continent. Yet in some areas it may well be that some, at least, of the older British landholding class survived by intermarrying with the invaders. The occurrence of Celtic names among early West Saxon kings points to the possibility.Genetic research appears to bear it out, especially for the south. It increasingly appears that the “Anglo-Saxon invasion” is as much the invasion of an ethnicity as that of a population.

Bede’s story gives us essential information about how the Anglo-Saxons looked at themselves. They considered themselves a warrior people, and they were proud to have been conquerors of the territory they inhabited. Indeed, the warrior ethic that pervades Anglo-Saxon culture is among the first things that students notice on approaching the field.

But Europe had no shortage of warrior cultures in the last half of the first millennium. What makes Anglo-Saxon England especially worthy of study is the remarkable literature that flourished there. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms converted to Christianity in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. By the late seventh and early eighth centuries they had already produced two major authors: Aldhelm, who composed his most important work, De Virginitate [On Virginity], twice, in prose and in verse; and the Venerable Bede, whose vast output includes biblical commentaries, homilies, textbooks on orthography, meter, rhetoric, nature and time, and of course the Historia Ecclesiastica, mentioned above. A small army of authors, Bede’s contemporaries and successors, produced saints’ lives and a variety of other works in prose and verse, largely on Christian themes.

These seventh- and eighth-century authors wrote in Latin, as did a great many Anglo-Saxon authors of later periods. But the Anglo-Saxons also created an extensive body of vernacular literature at a time when relatively little was being written in most of the other languages of western Europe. In addition to such well-known classic poems as Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, The Wanderer, The Seafarer and The Battle of Maldon, they left us the translations associated with King Alfred’s educational program, a large body of devotional works by such writers as Ælfric and Wulfstan, biblical translations and adaptations, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other historical writings, law codes, handbooks of medicine and magic, and much more.

While most of the manuscripts that preserve vernacular works date from the late ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, the Anglo-Saxons were producing written work in their own language by the early seventh century. Many scholars believe that Beowulf and several other important poems date from the eighth century. Thus we may speak of five centuries of Anglo-Saxon vernacular literature.

Where did their language come from? Bede tells us that the Anglo-Saxons came from Germania. Presumably he was using that term as the Romans had used it, to refer to a vast and ill-defined territory. It was the territory east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, extending as far east as the Vistula in present-day Poland and as far north as present-day Sweden and Norway. This territory was inhabited by numerous tribes which were closely related culturally and linguistically.

The languages spoken by the inhabitants of Germania were a branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The Germanic branch of the Indo-European family is usually divided into three groups: North Germanic, that is, the Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese; East Germanic, that is, Gothic, now extinct but preserved in a fragmentary biblical translation from the fourth century; West Germanic, which includes High German, English, Dutch, Flemish and Frisian.

Surely the language spoken by the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain was precisely the same as that spoken by the people they left behind on the continent. But between the time of the migration and the appearance of the earliest written records in the first years of the eighth century, the language of the Anglo-Saxons came to differ from that of the people they had left behind. This distinct language is called Old English to emphasize its continuity with Modern English, which is directly descended from it.

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