A complete curriculum for learning Old English

From the Bear to Beowulf

Ōsweald Bera explains to eager students of Old English that jumping straight into Beowulf isn't really the best idea. Original Artwork: Alex Swanson.

Now that Ōsweald Bera, my introductory Old English reader, has started to make its way into people’s hands, I’ve started to receive a few frequent questions from readers:

• How much Old English will Ōsweald Bera teach me?

• What should I do after finishing Ōsweald Bera?

• How quickly will I be able to read Beowulf?

Here is my answer, in the form of a guide intended for someone who would like to learn Old English, starting from zero knowledge of the language, taking you all the way to reading Beowulf in the original.

It’s based on the curriculum I’ve used to take dozens of students from knowing nothing about Old English to being able to read and interpret Beowulf without a Modern English translation.

I’ve divided the guide into three stages: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. So, if you’re not a complete beginner, feel free to skip to the point where your language study has already got you.

Beginner

The beginner stage applies to someone completely new to the language, to someone with about 1000 words of vocabulary and at least a receptive knowledge of the major features of Old English grammar.

This means that, by the end of the beginner stage, Old English's various noun, adjective, and verb endings don’t impede your comprehension of a text, even if you’re not necessarily able to produce them all accurately.

This is the stage that Ōsweald Bera takes you through – more on that shortly. By the end of this phase, you should be able to read the following text with relative ease, although you may need to look up a few words here and there:

Hēr is ġerǣd on þissum godspelle þe wē nū ġehīerdon of þæs diacones mūþe: þæt sē Hǣlend ġenōme onsundran his twelf leorningcnihtas, and cwæþ tō him, “Efne wē nū sċulon faran tō þǣre byrġ Hierusalēm. And þonne bēoþ ġefyllede ealle þā þing þe wǣron be mē āwritene þurh witegan. Iċ sċeal bēon belǣwed þēodum, and hīe dōþ mē tō bismere and beswingaþ, and siþþan ofslēaþ, and iċ ārīse of dēaþe on þām þriddan dæġe.”

Þā nyston his leornungcnihtas nān andġiet þissa worda.

If you’re not a complete beginner and you found this easy, feel free to skip to the intermediate section.

This, by the way, is a normalized version of a section of Ælfric’s Homily for Shrove Sunday, which is an easier authentic prose text. What makes it easier is that knowing the 1000 most frequent words in Old English prose means you know 94% of the words in this text.¹

To get to this point, you have three goals in front of you:

1. To gain a vocabulary of roughly 1000 words – ideally, these would all be frequent words, so as to help you in the next stage.

2. To gain a receptive or passive knowledge of the major patterns and forms of Old English grammar.

3. To gain reading fluency – that is, speed and ease in reading – so that you’ll be able to have a smooth reading experience when you move on to the intermediate phase.

These three goals are all somewhat related: you can’t learn grammar in the absence of vocabulary, and you can’t read fluently without knowing the words and at least being able to recognize what the grammatical forms are contributing to the meaning.

Because these three goals are so intertwined, you can actually accomplish them all by doing the same thing: reading easy material, and lots of it.

But what easy material is out there for Old English? Well, until recently, not very much.

So I wrote a book – Ōsweald Bera: An Introduction to Old English – which fills that gap.

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This is a graded reader for Old English, which starts very, very simply, gradually introducing around 1300 words of Old English (1315 to be exact), the vast majority of which are the most common words in the Old English language, at least as far as prose is concerned. It also exposes you to more or less the entirety of Old English grammar, at least as far as large patterns and word forms are concerned.

The total word count of Ōsweald Bera is 33,022 words, so if you read through the book enough to have good comprehension through to the final chapter, you’ll get hours of practice reading Old English – enough hours that your mind will have started to develop that fluency.

Getting to the point where you have good comprehension all the way to the final chapter may take more than one read-through. Don’t forget to check out my free “How to use Ōsweald Bera” guide for subscribers of the Dead Language Society, which explains my recommended strategy for reading the book, and what else you may want to do alongside it.

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Once you get through Ōsweald Bera, that is, you can read through all 28 chapters with good comprehension and relative ease, you should find texts like Ælfric’s Shrove Sunday homily well within your grasp.

If you’d like some supplementary reading at this stage, you can also tackle the texts in Sweet’s First Steps in Anglo-Saxon for some more practice. These were written (or adapted) for students. But before too long, you will exhaust what you can get from paedagogical texts such as Ōsweald Bera or Sweet’s First Steps, which means you’re ready for the intermediate stage.

Intermediate

For any historical language, the intermediate stage begins when you are able to read authentic texts: texts written not for learners of the language but for speakers of the language. You may not yet read most texts with fluency – that is, with speed and ease – but you can read them.

The intermediate stage ends when a reader is prepared to read most prose texts with relative ease, without excessive recourse to a dictionary. By “excessive”, I mean that any use of a dictionary is occasional and does not cause the act of reading to become a chore.

Let’s talk specifically about Old English, though. Most poetry is still out of the question at this point: not only does poetry use a vocabulary distinct from prose, but the grammar of poetry also often features archaic characteristics or is otherwise different from prose grammar due to the constraints of writing in verse. 

The jobs of a student in the intermediate stage are:

1. To gain a vocabulary of around 3000 words. Not all of these will be particularly common – most texts share a common core of words, but after that, we encounter relatively low-frequency words that are nevertheless very important for specific topics.

2. To become familiar with different genres of literary prose text. Much of this is a matter of learning vocabulary, but there are also different rhetorical conventions to become comfortable with. In Old English, I’d expect an intermediate reader to have read some biblical translations, homilies, saints’ lives, historical prose, as well as some translations of classical works.

3. To become comfortable with variation in how words are spelled. In the Middle Ages, people didn’t have the same notions of spelling we have today. In particular, they didn’t have the modern idea that one word has one spelling. Instead, the same scribe will spell the same word in two different ways on the same page. We just have to get used to that – but it’s surprisingly easy to do so, and it happens more or less automatically as you read more authentic texts.

4. Another source of variation to get used to is the difference between the Early and Late West Saxon dialects. For the record, Ōsweald Bera starts you off in Late West Saxon. These differences are fairly minor in the grand scheme of things but significant enough to cause difficulty when first encountered.

5. Finally, it’s good for intermediate students to work on their productive skills: speaking or writing. Not that I expect you to conduct your life in Old English, but putting your knowledge of the language into practice crystallizes it. I know no better way of doing so.

As before, most of this can be accomplished by reading. But you need to take a bit of care with what you read and in what order.

Here’s a sequence I recommend. Plus, for each section, I’ll give you a reference to where you can find some of the material in freely available readers: Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer (8th edition) and his Anglo-Saxon Reader (7th edition) – apparently, Sweet liked to revise!

1. Wessex Gospels. These are translations into Late West Saxon of the four Gospels. Many stories are familiar, and if not, there is no more translated text! The parables, in particular, are nice short narratives that are great for language learners. You can find selections from the Gospel of Matthew in Sweet’s Primer Ch 2, although the spelling here is normalized.

2. Old English Hexateuch. Ditto, but the material is a bit harder. Still, you can read passages in Modern English first to get yourself ready. Selections in Sweet’s Primer, Ch 3–4. Also normalized spelling.

3. Ælfric’s writings. Still Late West Saxon, but often persuasive texts rather than narrative texts, which makes it harder. Still, this is authentic Old English – not a translation, unlike the previous texts – so you’re getting the good stuff. Unnormalized in Sweet’s Reader, Ch 13–15.

4. The Old English Orosius. This is an easy introduction to Early West Saxon. This is a translation of a Latin history, with some original material added on matters of interest to Northern Europeans. Here, the narrative helps with the difficulty of adapting to a new dialect, although most of it is a translation. Unnormalized in Sweet’s Reader, Ch 6–8.

5. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, especially up to and around Alfred’s reign (871–899). The narrative nature of the text helps but you often do need to know the history, as the authors play fast and loose with pronouns, and it’s often tricky to determine who is doing what. Normalized in Sweet’s Primer Ch. 4–5, unnormalized in Sweet’s Reader Ch 1, 6–8, 17–18.

6. Alfred’s writings, especially his translation of the Pastoral Care (the preface to which is a popular text in readers) and Boethius. Unnormalized in Sweet’s Reader, Ch 2–3, 9).

It’s a rough order, but it's one that I think works. But feel free to play with it.

As you read, use the method I outlined in How to Use Ōsweald Bera, which involves multiple read-throughs, each of which focuses on a different aspect or phase of understanding.

I’d recommend reading each set of texts until you find that they have become easy. Then move on to the next. Don’t feel you need to finish everything in each set of text at this point. It’s all worth reading, but if your aim is to get to the advanced level as quickly as possible, what you need is (1) experience reading authentic texts in all their messiness, and (2) to increase your vocabulary. The fastest way to get these things is to keep challenging yourself.

Finally, to work on your productive skills, I recommend starting to do some composition in Old English. There are many exercises you could use for this, but one exercise I love is paraphrasing.

In this exercise, when you come across a sentence with some new vocabulary or a complicated grammatical structure, you rewrite the sentence using words and grammar you already know. This not only cements your understanding of the new material, but gives you practice with the old material and converts your passive understanding to active knowledge.

Once you’re able to read all of these texts with ease and fluency, then you are ready for the advanced stage.

Advanced

In the advanced stage, you are ready to read difficult authentic texts: texts that have great literary value in the language you’re learning. For Old English, this often means poetry. And, more specifically, it often means Beowulf.

But Old English poetry, as I mentioned before, is challenging. Old English verse makes use of certain constructions that are rarer in prose, to be sure, and the peculiar style of Old English poetry, with all its elaborate synonyms for the same thing, takes some getting used to. The biggest reason that poetry is a challenge, however, is its special vocabulary, which features many words that do not occur in prose at all.

So your job in this stage is as follows:

1. To gain a working knowledge of the basic Old English poetic vocabulary. I don’t have a solid number for how many words you’ll need, but it’s probably around 200–300 words that come up over and over again, either alone or in compounds.

2. To gain fluency when reading poetry. Poetry is dense, and what’s happening is not always straightforward. Because of this, you don’t want anything but the inherent difficulty of the material slowing you down – this means you will want to get familiar with the style of Old English poetry, which loves layering synonyms upon synonyms. The only way to get used to this is to read a lot.

When reading poetry, the composition exercise I mentioned in the intermediate stage, where you rephrase what you’re reading in simpler terms, is almost always useful. In fact, an entirely viable strategy for studying poetry would be to write a prose paraphrase of what you’re reading in verse.

To do this, you could start with any poem, but I would recommend (a) starting with a narrative poem, and (b) NOT starting with Beowulf.

Beowulf is a rather obscure poem in many parts, especially when you get away from the fight scenes. Between the three fights that Beowulf undertakes, there are several interludes that refer to characters from history or legend, and you need a bit of context to understand what’s going on. I’ll have a lot more to say about Beowulf in the coming months, but my perspective is that you’ll have more than enough difficulties due to the content of Beowulf.

The poem I recommend, which fills both of these criteria, is Andreas: a 1722-line poem (shorter than Beowulf’s 3812 lines) about St. Andrew and his adventures in the cannibalistic city of Marmadonia. In many ways, it’s similar to Beowulf, and has remarkably similar diction, but it has a relatively straightforward story without all the obscure interludes. There’s even a great recent edition out, which includes a translation and lots of helpful notes. This, in my opinion, is the easiest way to start reading poetry.

As you read, take note of any new words you see more than once. These are very likely to be part of the general poetic vocabulary of Old English, and will serve you well when you come to Andreas.

Another good option for poetry is a great battle poem, The Battle of Maldon. It’s also a narrative poem, which helps with comprehension. Plus, it’s great fun and has some very memorable lines. The Battle of Maldon is in Sweet’s Reader, Ch. 21.

Once you’re through Andreas and/or The Battle of Maldon, you might want to try your hand at Beowulf. But do so with a good edition, perhaps even alongside a translation. I like Chickering’s translation and the so-called “Klaeber 4” edition of Beowulf, which has copious notes. You’ll need them.

Conclusion

And there you have it – that is a complete curriculum that takes you from knowing no Old English to reading through Beowulf. This takes my students just over two years to complete, but if you do it, it may take more or less time, depending on too many factors to count. Just know that it’s not a short process… but I can promise that it is a rewarding one.

Until next time, go learn some Old English!

Links

Chickering, Howell D. (2006). Beowulf. A Dual-Language Edition. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/27024/beowulf-by-translated-and-with-an-introduction-and-commentary-by-howell-d-chickering-jr/

Cichosz et al. (2022). A Frequency Dictionary of Old English Prose. Free download: http://varioe.pelcra.pl/assets/Cichosz-i-in._The-Frequency-Dictionary-.pdf

Klaeber et al. (2008). Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 4e. https://utorontopress.com/9780802095671/klaebers-beowulf-fourth-edition/

North and Bintley (2016). Andreas. An Edition. https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781781382714

Sweet (1897). First Steps in Anglo-Saxon. https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.247480

Sweet (1898). An Anglo Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse. 7e. https://archive.org/details/anglosaxonreader0000henr

Sweet (1905). Anglo-Saxon Primer. 8e. https://archive.org/details/anglosaxonprime00swee

1. So found the team that wrote A Frequency Dictionary of Old English Prose.