Beowulf Reading and Analysis
On this page we will read an exerpt from the Old English epic poem Beowulf and discuss some linguistic features of Old English.
Reading: Beowulf, Lines 94-98
gesette sigehreþig
sunnan ond monan
In His splendor He set the sun and the moon
leoman to leohte
landbuendum,
To be earth’s lamplight, lanterns for men,
ond gefrætwade
foldan sceatas
And filled the broad lap of the world
leomum ond leafum,
lif eac gesceop
With branches and leaves; and quickened life
cynna gehwylcum
þara ðe cwice hwyrfaþ.
In every other thing that moved.
Analysis
Case Endings
Rather than having a strict word order, Old English changes the endings of words to communicate their purpose in a sentence. There are four major caes: Nominative, for subjects; Accusative, for direct objects; Genitive, indicating possession; and Dative, for indirect objects. Verb endings also depend on number (singular/plural), meaning that there are 8 possible endings for a given word. The inflection of a word is dependent on its gender, discussed below, but there are dozens of exceptions to the rules.
Gender and Declension
Old English nouns are classified into three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. This influences the inflection patterns. Gender is not usually determined by semantic meaning but by their historical endings in Proto-Germanic. These endings are not still present, but the gender assignments are kept. Pronouns take on the gender of the word they are replacing.
Nouns are further differentiated into strong and weak declensions. Weak nouns are so called because they are weakly inflected. That is, their endings do not change much. Weak masculine and femenine nouns are inflected exactly the same except for the nominative singular, where feminines end in -e and masculines end in -a.
Here are examples of each gender/declension:
- Weak Masculine: monan (accusative singular), landbuendum (dative plural)
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Strong Masculine: sceatas (accusative plural)
- Weak Neuter: gehwylcum (dative plural)
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Strong Neuter: leomum (dative plural), leafum (dative plural), lif (accusative singular), cynna (genitive plural)
- Weak Feminine: sunnan (accusative singular)
- Strong Feminine: foldan (genitive singular)
Orthographic Features
The most noticable orthographic features of Old English are the use of the thorn (Þ, þ) and eth (Ð, ð) characters to represent interdental fricatives ([θ] as in “thin”, [ð] as in “this”). There are two other characters not seen in modern English: ash (Æ, æ), representing a near-open front unrounded vowel ([æ] as in “bat”); and the wynn (Ƿ, ƿ), representing a voiced labial–velar approximant ([w] as in “wait”).
Sources and Further Reading
Beowulf Exerpt with Pronunciation:
https://stella.glasgow.ac.uk/readings/?oe-8
Seamus Heaney’s Translation of Beowulf:
http://www.harbornet.com/folks/theedrich/hive/Medieval/Beowulf.htm
Lessons on Old English:
https://oldenglish.info/
Old English Grammar on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar