Drout’s Quick and Easy Old English
Our newest addition to our Patreon Shop is the ebook Drout’s Quick and Easy Old English, by Michael D.C. Drout with Bruce D. Gilchrist and Rachel Kapelle.
The Deorhord with Hana Videen
This week on The Medieval Podcast, Danièle speaks with Hana Videen about her contribution to the field: a brand new Old English bestiary.
Twenty Old English Girls’ Names
The names of people living in Anglo-Saxon England are very different from our modern names. Here is our list of some of our favourite girls’ names in Old English.
The Differences between Old English, Middle English and Modern English
The most noticeable difference between older forms of English and today’s English is the alphabet.
New Medieval Books: Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts
Wolves rarely get positive depictions in the Middle Ages, and the same is true for Old English texts.
How to Start Learning Old English
Hana Videen offers some advice and tips about learning the Old English language.
What is hwæt?
What is that first word, the one that would eventually become modern English ‘what’?
The Wordhord with Hana Videen
This week on The Medieval Podcast, Danièle speaks with Hana Videen, an author who introduces Old English to new audiences through the lens of everyday life. Find out what makes Old English different, what makes it beautiful, and which words really deserve a comeback.
Getting A Word In: Contact, Etymology and English Vocabulary in the Twelfth Century
This lecture explored the etymologies, meanings and contexts of some key words from this crucial time, as a way to think about the evidence for contact and change at the boundary of Old and Middle English and to illustrate how rich, diverse, challenging and surprising its voices can be.
Book Review: Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley
Headley fuses Old English language and poetry devices with contemporary idiom and slang.
‘Now Flying over the Hell-mouth’: The Gap Between St Guðlac and Nordic Volcano Imagery
This investigation into the effects of landscape and place on apocalyptic literature contrasts the portrayal of demonic flights over a hell-mouth with Norse volcanic imagery.
Mægð Modigre or Þeodnes Mægð: Judith’s Heroism in the Anonymous Anglo-Saxon Judith
The Old English Judith tells the story of a Jewish virgin whose people, the Bethulians, are subjugated under the Assyrian King Holofernes by the orders of the great King Nebuchadnezzar.
The Emergence of the English – a new interpretation and an old conundrum
In the past decade or so a number of works have taken a fresh look at post-Roman Britain, in particular at the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in what is now England
Why Is English So Weird?
The English language is notoriously difficult to learn and to spell. In this episode of The Medieval Podcast, Danièle talks about the medieval roots of English and how it got to be so weird.
A literary history of the ‘Soul and Body’ theme in medieval England
This theme is preserved and developed in several medieval English texts, both in prose and verse, dating from the tenth to the fifteenth century.
Breaking with tradition(?): Female representations of heroism in Old English poetry
The characters of Grendel’s mother, Judith, and Juliana serve as primary examples for this analysis. This dissertation identifies these three figures as exhibiting a heroic ethos, explores how they fit into and deviate from the defined Old English heroic ideal
A Lifeʼs Worth: Reexamining Wergild in the Anglo-Saxon Royal Law Codes (c. 600-1035)
In the wide and growing world of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, wergild has an at once ubiquitous and spectral presence.
Mann and Gender in Old English Prose: A Pilot Study
This article aims to present a preliminary study of the various uses of mann as attested in Old English prose, particularly in its surprisingly consistent use by an individual author, namely that of the ninth-century Old English Martyrology.
The Insular Landscape of the Old English Poem The Phoenix
The Old English poem The Phoenix, found in the Exeter Book (fols. 55b–65b), describes the mythical bird, the Edenic landscape it inhabits and the cycle of death and rebirth that it enacts in an extended Christian allegory.
Powerful Patens in the Anglo-Saxon Medical Tradition and Exeter Book Riddle 48
This article discusses Exeter Book Riddle 48 in light of its proposed solutions.
Baptism in Anglo-Saxon England
This thesis examines the lexical field of baptism in Old English. The lexical development of the field and the semantic development of the individual lexemes were evaluated: the verbs fulwian, cristnian, depan, dyppan, and the vocabulary for baptismal water in Old English. At every stage of the project, the linguistic data was correlated to theological, liturgical and cultural backgrounds.
The Ruin: The Past Dreaming of the Past
Besides being chillingly beautiful, this is one of those fantastic moments for literature scholars in which, by describing what life might have been like in a former time, the poet reveals something of his own age: what people of his time thought glory days should be like.
BOOK REVIEW: Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife by Susan Signe Morrison
Grendel’s Mother tells the story of Brimhild, a child found abandoned in a boat on the shores of Denmark. Taken in by a…
Senses of the Past: The Old English Vocabulary of History
How did the Anglo-Saxons think about history?
Hostages in Old English Literature
Hostages in Old English Literature examines the various roles that hostages have played in Anglo-Saxon texts, specifically focusing on the characterization of Æscferth in The Battle of Maldon.