What is the oldest piece of English literature?

Old English literature or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses literature written in Old English, in Anglo-Saxon England from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066. "Cædmon's Hymn", composed in the 7th century, according to Bede, is often considered the oldest extant poem in English, whereas the later poem, The Grave is one of the final poems written in Old English, and presents a transitional text between Old and Middle English. The "Peterborough Chronicle" can also be considered a late-period text, continuing into the 12th century.

Old English literature

The poem "Beowulf", which often begins the traditional canon of English literature, is the most famous work of Old English literature. The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" has also proven significant for historical study, preserving a chronology of early English history.

In descending order of quantity, Old English literature consists of: sermons and saints' lives; biblical translations; translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers; Anglo-Saxon chronicles and narrative history works; laws, wills and other legal works; practical works on grammar, medicine, geography; and poetry. In all there are over 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, of which about 189 are considered "major".

Besides Old English literature, Anglo-Saxons wrote a number of Anglo-Latin works.

Old English literature has gone through different periods of research; in the 19th and early 20th centuries the focus was on the Germanic and pagan roots that scholars thought they could detect in Old English literature. Later, on account of the work of Bernard F. Huppé, the influence of Augustinian exegesis was emphasised. Today, along with a focus upon paleography and the physical manuscripts themselves more generally, scholars debate such issues as dating, place of origin, authorship, and the connections between Anglo-Saxon culture and the rest of Europe in the Middle Ages, and literary merits.

A large number of manuscripts remain from the Anglo-Saxon period, with most written during its last 300 years (9th to 11th centuries).

Manuscripts written in both Latin and the vernacular remain. It is believed that Irish missionaries are responsible for the scripts used in early Anglo-Saxon texts, which include the Insular half-uncial (important Latin texts) and Insular minuscule (both Latin and the vernacular). In the 10th century, the Caroline minuscule was adopted for Latin, however the Insular minuscule continued to be used for Old English texts. Thereafter, it was increasingly influenced by Caroline minuscule, while retaining certain distinctively Insular letter-forms.

There were considerable losses of manuscripts as a result of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century. Scholarly study of the language began when the manuscripts were collected by scholars and antiquarians such as Matthew Parker, Laurence Nowell and Sir Robert Bruce Cotton.

Old English manuscripts have been highly prized by collectors since the 16th century, both for their historic value and for their aesthetic beauty with their uniformly spaced letters and decorative elements.

There are four major poetic manuscripts:

Seven major scriptoria produced a good deal of Old English manuscripts: Winchester; Exeter; Worcester; Abingdon; Durham; and two Canterbury houses, Christ Church and St. Augustine's Abbey. In addition, some Old English text survives on stone structures and other ornate objects.

Regional dialects include: Northumbrian; Mercian; Kentish; and West dialect, leading to the speculation that much of the poetry may have been translated into West Saxon at a later date. An example of the dominance of the West Saxon dialect is a pair of charters, from the Stowe and British Museum collections, which outline grants of land in Kent and Mercia, but are nonetheless written in the West Saxon dialect of the period.

Early English manuscripts often contain later annotations in the margins of the texts; it is a rarity to find a completely unannotated manuscript. These include corrections, alterations and expansions of the main text, as well as commentary upon it, and even unrelated texts. The majority of these annotations appear to date to the 13th century and later.

Old English poetry falls broadly into two styles or fields of reference, the heroic Germanic and the Christian. Almost all Old English poets are anonymous.

Although there are Anglo-Saxon discourses on Latin prosody, the rules of Old English verse are understood only through modern analysis of the extant texts. The first widely accepted theory was constructed by Eduard Sievers (1893), who distinguished five distinct alliterative patterns. His system of alliterative verse is based on accent, alliteration, the quantity of vowels, and patterns of syllabic accentuation. It consists of five permutations on a base verse scheme; any one of the five types can be used in any verse. The system was inherited from and exists in one form or another in all of the older Germanic languages. Two poetic figures commonly found in Old English poetry are the kenning, an often formulaic phrase that describes one thing in terms of another (e.g. in "Beowulf", the sea is called the "whale road") and litotes, a dramatic understatement employed by the author for ironic effect. Alternative theories have been proposed, such as the theory of John C. Pope (1942), which uses musical notation to track the verse patterns. J. R. R. Tolkien describes and illustrates many of the features of Old English poetry in his 1940 essay "On Translating "Beowulf"".

Even though all extant Old English poetry is written and literate, it is assumed that Old English poetry was an oral craft that was performed by a "scop" and accompanied by a harp.

Most Old English poems are recorded without authors, and very few names are known with any certainty; the primary three are Cædmon, Aldhelm, and Cynewulf.

Cædmon is considered the first Old English poet whose work still survives. According to the account in Bede's "Historia ecclesiastica", he was first a herdsman before living as a monk at the abbey of Whitby in Northumbria in the 7th century. Only his first poem, comprising nine-lines, "Cædmon's Hymn", remains, in Northumbrian, West-Saxon and Latin versions that appear in 19 surviving manuscripts:

Cynewulf has proven to be a difficult figure to identify, but recent research suggests he was an Anglian poet from the early part of the 9th century. Four poems are attributed to him, signed with a runic acrostic at the end of each poem; these are "The Fates of the Apostles" and "Elene" (both found in the Vercelli Book), and "Christ II" and "Juliana" (both found in the Exeter Book).

Although William of Malmesbury claims that Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne (d. 709), performed secular songs while accompanied by a harp, none of these Old English poems survives. Paul G. Remely has recently proposed that the Old English "Exodus" may have been the work of Aldhelm, or someone closely associated with him.

Bede is often thought to be the poet of a five-line poem entitled "Bede's Death Song", on account of its appearance in a letter on his death by Cuthbert. This poem exists in a Northumbrian and later version.

Alfred is said to be the author of some of the metrical prefaces to the Old English translations of Gregory's "Pastoral Care" and Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy". Alfred is also thought to be the author of 50 metrical psalms, but whether the poems were written by him, under his direction or patronage, or as a general part in his reform efforts is unknown.

The hypotheses of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on the Homeric Question came to be applied (by Parry and Lord, but also by Francis Magoun) to verse written in Old English. That is, the theory proposes that certain features of at least some of the poetry may be explained by positing oral-formulaic composition. While Anglo-Saxon (Old English) epic poetry may bear some resemblance to Ancient Greek epics such as the "Iliad" and "Odyssey", the question of if and how Anglo-Saxon poetry was passed down through an oral tradition remains a subject of debate, and the question for any particular poem unlikely to be answered with perfect certainty.

Parry and Lord had already demonstrated the density of metrical formulas in Ancient Greek, and observed that the same phenomenon was apparent in the Old English alliterative line:

In addition to verbal formulas, many themes have been shown to appear among the various works of Anglo-Saxon literature. The theory proposes to explain this fact by suggesting that the poetry was composed of formulae and themes from a stock common to the poetic profession, as well as literary passages composed by individual artists in a more modern sense. Larry Benson introduced the concept of "written-formulaic" to describe the status of some Anglo-Saxon poetry which, while demonstrably written, contains evidence of oral influences, including heavy reliance on formulas and themes. Frequent oral-formulaic themes in Old English poetry include "Beasts of Battle" and the "Cliff of Death". The former, for example, is characterised by the mention of ravens, eagles, and wolves preceding particularly violent depictions of battle. Among the most thoroughly documented themes is "The Hero on the Beach". D. K. Crowne first proposed this theme, defined by four characteristics:One example Crowne cites in his article is that which concludes Beowulf's fight with the monsters during his swimming match with Breca:

Crowne drew on examples of the theme's appearance in twelve Anglo-Saxon texts, including one occurrence in Beowulf. It was also observed in other works of Germanic origin, Middle English poetry, and even an Icelandic prose saga. John Richardson held that the schema was so general as to apply to virtually any character at some point in the narrative, and thought it an instance of the "threshold" feature of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey monomyth. J.A. Dane, in an article (characterised by Foley as "polemics without rigour") claimed that the appearance of the theme in Ancient Greek poetry, a tradition without known connection to the Germanic, invalidated the notion of "an autonomous theme in the baggage of an oral poet." Foley's response was that Dane misunderstood the nature of oral tradition, and that in fact the appearance of the theme in other cultures showed that it was a traditional form.

The Old English poetry which has received the most attention deals with the Germanic heroic past. The longest at 3,182 lines, and the most important, is "Beowulf", which appears in the damaged Nowell Codex. Beowulf relates the exploits of the hero Beowulf, King of the Weder-Geats or Angles, around the middle of the 5th century. The author is unknown, and no mention of Britain occurs. Scholars are divided over the date of the present text, with hypotheses ranging from the 8th to the 11th centuries. It has achieved much acclaim as well as sustained academic and artistic interest.

Other heroic poems besides "Beowulf" exist. Two have survived in fragments: "The Fight at Finnsburh", controversially interpreted by many to be a retelling of one of the battle scenes in "Beowulf", and "Waldere", a version of the events of the life of Walter of Aquitaine. Two other poems mention heroic figures: "Widsith" is believed to be very old in parts, dating back to events in the 4th century concerning Eormanric and the Goths, and contains a catalogue of names and places associated with valiant deeds. "Deor" is a lyric, in the style of "Consolation of Philosophy", applying examples of famous heroes, including Weland and Eormanric, to the narrator's own case.

The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" contains various heroic poems inserted throughout. The earliest from 937 is called "The Battle of Brunanburh", which celebrates the victory of King Athelstan over the Scots and Norse. There are five shorter poems: capture of the Five Boroughs (942); coronation of King Edgar (973); death of King Edgar (975); death of Alfred the son of King Æthelred (1036); and death of King Edward the Confessor (1065).

The 325 line poem "The Battle of Maldon" celebrates Earl Byrhtnoth and his men who fell in battle against the Vikings in 991. It is considered one of the finest, but both the beginning and end are missing and the only manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1731. A well-known speech is near the end of the poem:

Old English heroic poetry was handed down orally from generation to generation. As Christianity began to appear, re-tellers often recast the tales of Christianity into the older heroic stories.

Related to the heroic tales are a number of short poems from the Exeter Book which have come to be described as "elegies" or "wisdom poetry". They are lyrical and Boethian in their description of the up and down fortunes of life. Gloomy in mood is "The Ruin", which tells of the decay of a once glorious city of Roman Britain (cities in Britain fell into decline after the Romans departed in the early 5th century, as the early English continued to live their rural life), and "The Wanderer", in which an older man talks about an attack that happened in his youth, where his close friends and kin were all killed; memories of the slaughter have remained with him all his life. He questions the wisdom of the impetuous decision to engage a possibly superior fighting force: the wise man engages in warfare to "preserve" civil society, and must not rush into battle but seek out allies when the odds may be against him. This poet finds little glory in bravery for bravery's sake. "The Seafarer" is the story of a somber exile from home on the sea, from which the only hope of redemption is the joy of heaven. Other wisdom poems include "Wulf and Eadwacer", "The Wife's Lament", and "The Husband's Message". Alfred the Great wrote a wisdom poem over the course of his reign based loosely on the neoplatonic philosophy of Boethius called the "Lays of Boethius".

Several Old English poems are adaptations of late classical philosophical texts. The longest is a 10th-century translation of Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" contained in the Cotton manuscript Otho A.vi. Another is "The Phoenix" in the Exeter Book, an allegorisation of the "De ave phoenice" by Lactantius.

Other short poems derive from the Latin bestiary tradition. Some examples include "The Panther", "The Whale" and "The Partridge".

Anglo-Saxon riddles are part of Anglo-Saxon literature. The most famous Anglo-Saxon riddles are found in the Exeter Book. This book contains secular and religious poems and other writings, along with a collection of 94 riddles, although there is speculation that there may have been closer to 100 riddles in the book. The riddles are written in a similar manner, but "it is unlikely that the whole collection was written by one person." It is more likely that many scribes worked on this collection of riddles. Although the Exeter Book has a unique and extensive collection of Anglo-Saxon riddles, riddles were not uncommon during this era. Riddles were both comical and obscene.

The Vercelli Book and Exeter Book contain four long narrative poems of saints' lives, or hagiography. In Vercelli are "Andreas" and "Elene" and in Exeter are "Guthlac" and "Juliana".

"Andreas" is 1,722 lines long and is the closest of the surviving Old English poems to "Beowulf" in style and tone. It is the story of Saint Andrew and his journey to rescue Saint Matthew from the Mermedonians. "Elene" is the story of Saint Helena (mother of Constantine) and her discovery of the True Cross. The cult of the True Cross was popular in Anglo-Saxon England and this poem was instrumental in promoting it.

"Guthlac" consists of two poems about the English 7th century Saint Guthlac. "Juliana" describes the life of Saint Juliana, including a discussion with the devil during her imprisonment.

There are a number of partial Old English Bible translations and paraphrases surviving. The Junius manuscript contains three paraphrases of Old Testament texts. These were re-wordings of Biblical passages in Old English, not exact translations, but paraphrasing, sometimes into beautiful poetry in its own right. The first and longest is of "Genesis" (originally presented as one work in the Junius manuscript but now thought to consist of two separate poems, A and B), the second is of "Exodus" and the third is "Daniel". Contained in Daniel are two lyrics, "Song of the Three Children" and "Song of Azarias", the latter also appearing in the Exeter Book after "Guthlac". The fourth and last poem, "Christ and Satan", which is contained in the second part of the Junius manuscript, does not paraphrase any particular biblical book, but retells a number of episodes from both the Old and New Testament.

The Nowell Codex contains a Biblical poetic paraphrase, which appears right after "Beowulf", called "Judith", a retelling of the story of Judith. This is not to be confused with Ælfric's homily "Judith", which retells the same Biblical story in alliterative prose.

Old English translations of Psalms 51-150 have been preserved, following a prose version of the first 50 Psalms. There are verse translations of the Gloria in Excelsis, the Lord's Prayer, and the Apostles' Creed, as well as some hymns and proverbs.

In addition to Biblical paraphrases are a number of original religious poems, mostly lyrical (non-narrative).

The Exeter Book contains a series of poems entitled "Christ", sectioned into "Christ I", "Christ II" and "Christ III".

Considered one of the most beautiful of all Old English poems is "Dream of the Rood", contained in the Vercelli Book. The presence of a portion of the poem (in Northumbrian dialect) carved in ruins
on an 8th century stone cross found in Ruthwell, Dumfriesshire, verifies the age of at least this portion of the poem. The Dream of the Rood is a dream vision in which the personified cross tells the story of the crucifixion. Christ appears as a young hero-king, confidant of victory, while the cross itself feels all the physical pain of the crucifixion, as well as the pain of being forced to kill the young lord.

The dreamer resolves to trust in the cross, and the dream ends with a vision of heaven.

There are a number of religious debate poems. The longest is "Christ and Satan" in the Junius manuscript, it deals with the conflict between Christ and Satan during the forty days in the desert. Another debate poem is "Solomon and Saturn", surviving in a number of textual fragments, Saturn is portrayed as a magician debating with the wise king Solomon.

Other poetic forms exist in Old English including short verses, gnomes, and mnemonic poems for remembering long lists of names.

There are short verses found in the margins of manuscripts which offer practical advice, such as remedies against the loss of cattle or how to deal with a delayed birth, often grouped as charms. The longest is called "Nine Herbs Charm" and is probably of pagan origin. Other similar short verses, or charms, include "For a Swarm of Bees", "Against a Dwarf", "Against a Stabbing Pain", and "Against a Wen".

There are a group of mnemonic poems designed to help memorise lists and sequences of names and to keep objects in order. These poems are named "Menologium", "The Fates of the Apostles", "The Rune Poem", "The Seasons for Fasting", and the "Instructions for Christians".

Anglo-Saxon poetry is marked by the comparative rarity of similes. This is a particular feature of Anglo-Saxon verse style, and is a consequence both of its structure and of the rapidity with which images are deployed, to be unable to effectively support the expanded simile. As an example of this, "Beowulf" contains at best five similes, and these are of the short variety. This can be contrasted sharply with the strong and extensive dependence that Anglo-Saxon poetry has upon metaphor, particularly that afforded by the use of kennings. The most prominent example of this in "The Wanderer" is the reference to battle as a "storm of spears". This reference to battle shows how Anglo-Saxons viewed battle: as unpredictable, chaotic, violent, and perhaps even a function of nature.

Old English poetry traditionally alliterates, meaning that a sound (usually the initial consonant sound) is repeated throughout a line. For instance, in the first line of "Beowulf", "Hwaet! We Gar-Dena | in gear-dagum", (meaning "Lo! We... of the Spear Danes in days of yore"), the stressed words "Gar-Dena" and "gear-dagum" alliterate on the consonant "G".

The Old English poet was particularly fond of describing the same person or object with varied phrases, (often appositives) that indicated different qualities of that person or object. For instance, the "Beowulf" poet refers in three and a half lines to a Danish king as "lord of the Danes" (referring to the people in general), "king of the Scyldings" (the name of the specific Danish tribe), "giver of rings" (one of the king's functions is to distribute treasure), and "famous chief". Such variation, which the modern reader (who likes verbal precision) is not used to, is frequently a difficulty in producing a readable translation.

Old English poetry, like other Old Germanic alliterative verse, is also commonly marked by the caesura or pause. In addition to setting pace for the line, the caesura also grouped each line into two couplets.

The amount of surviving Old English prose is much greater than the amount of poetry. Of the surviving prose, the majority consists of the homilies, saints' lives and biblical translations from Latin. The division of early medieval written prose works into categories of "Christian" and "secular", as below, is for convenience's sake only, for literacy in Anglo-Saxon England was largely the province of monks, nuns, and ecclesiastics (or of those laypeople to whom they had taught the skills of reading and writing Latin and/or Old English). Old English prose first appears in the 9th century, and continues to be recorded through the 12th century as the last generation of scribes, trained as boys in the standardised West Saxon before the Conquest, died as old men.

The most widely known secular author of Old English was King Alfred the Great (849–899), who translated several books, many of them religious, from Latin into Old English. Alfred, wanting to restore English culture, lamented the poor state of Latin education: Alfred proposed that students be educated in Old English, and those who excelled should go on to learn Latin. Alfred's cultural program produced the following translations: Gregory the Great's "The Pastoral Care", a manual for priests on how to conduct their duties; "The Consolation of Philosophy" by Boethius; and "The Soliloquies" of Saint Augustine. In the process, some original content was interweaved through the translations.

Other important Old English translations include: "Historiae adversum paganos" by Orosius, a companion piece for St. Augustine's "The City of God"; the "Dialogues" of Gregory the Great; and Bede's "Ecclesiastical History of the English People".

Ælfric of Eynsham, who wrote in the late 10th and early 11th century, is believed to have been a pupil of Æthelwold. He was the greatest and most prolific writer of Anglo-Saxon sermons, which were copied and adapted for use well into the 13th century. In the translation of the first six books of the Bible ("Old English Hexateuch"), portions have been assigned to Ælfric on stylistic grounds. He included some lives of the saints in the "Catholic Homilies", as well as a cycle of saints' lives to be used in sermons. Ælfric also wrote an Old English work on time-reckoning, and pastoral letters.

In the same category as Ælfric, and a contemporary, was Wulfstan II, archbishop of York. His sermons were highly stylistic. His best known work is "Sermo Lupi ad Anglos" in which he blames the sins of the English for the Viking invasions. He wrote a number of clerical legal texts "Institutes of Polity" and "Canons of Edgar".

One of the earliest Old English texts in prose is the "Martyrology", information about saints and martyrs according to their anniversaries and feasts in the church calendar. It has survived in six fragments. It is believed to date from the 9th century by an anonymous Mercian author.

The oldest collections of church sermons is the "Blickling homilies", found in a 10th-century manuscript.

There are a number of saint's lives prose works; beyond those written by Ælfric are the prose life of Saint Guthlac (Vercelli Book), the life of Saint Margaret and the life of Saint Chad. There are four additional lives in the earliest manuscript of the "Lives of Saints", the Julius manuscript: Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, Saint Mary of Egypt, Saint Eustace and Saint Euphrosyne.

There are six major manuscripts of the Wessex Gospels, dating from the 11th and 12th centuries. The most popular, "Old English Gospel of Nicodemus", is treated in one manuscript as though it were a 5th gospel; other apocryphal gospels in translation include the "Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew", "Vindicta salvatoris", "Vision of Saint Paul" and the "Apocalypse of Thomas".

The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" was probably started in the time of King Alfred the Great and continued for over 300 years as a historical record of Anglo-Saxon history.

A single example of a Classical romance has survived: a fragment of the story of "Apollonius of Tyre" was translated in the 11th century from the Gesta Romanorum.

A monk who was writing in Old English at the same time as Ælfric and Wulfstan was Byrhtferth of Ramsey, whose book "Handboc" was a study of mathematics and rhetoric. He also produced a work entitled "Computus", which outlined the practical application of arithmetic to the calculation of calendar days and movable feasts, as well as tide tables.

Ælfric wrote two proto-scientific works, "Hexameron" and "Interrogationes Sigewulfi", dealing with the stories of Creation. He also wrote a grammar and glossary in Old English called "Latin", later used by students interested in learning Old French because it had been glossed in Old French.

In the Nowell Codex is the text of "The Wonders of the East" which includes a remarkable map of the world, and other illustrations. Also contained in Nowell is "Alexander's Letter to Aristotle". Because this is the same manuscript that contains "Beowulf", some scholars speculate it may have been a collection of materials on exotic places and creatures.

There are a number of interesting medical works. There is a translation of "Apuleius's Herbarium" with striking illustrations, found together with "Medicina de Quadrupedibus". A second collection of texts is "Bald's Leechbook", a 10th-century book containing herbal and even some surgical cures. A third collection, known as the "Lacnunga", includes many charms and incantations.

Anglo-Saxon legal texts are a large and important part of the overall corpus. By the 12th century they had been arranged into two large collections (see "Textus Roffensis"). They include laws of the kings, beginning with those of Aethelbert of Kent and ending with those of Cnut, and texts dealing with specific cases and places in the country. An interesting example is "Gerefa" which outlines the duties of a reeve on a large manor estate. There is also a large volume of legal documents related to religious houses. These include many kinds of texts: records of donations by nobles; wills; documents of emancipation; lists of books and relics; court cases; guild rules. All of these texts provide valuable insights into the social history of Anglo-Saxon times, but are also of literary value. For example, some of the court case narratives are interesting for their use of rhetoric.

Old English literature did not disappear in 1066 with the Norman Conquest. Many sermons and works continued to be read and used in part or whole up through the 14th century, and were further catalogued and organised. During the Reformation, when monastic libraries were dispersed, the manuscripts were collected by antiquarians and scholars. These included Laurence Nowell, Matthew Parker, Robert Bruce Cotton and Humfrey Wanley. In the 17th century there began a tradition of Old English literature dictionaries and references. The first was William Somner's "Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum" (1659). Lexicographer Joseph Bosworth began a dictionary in the 19th century which was completed by Thomas Northcote Toller in 1898 called "An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary", which was updated by Alistair Campbell in 1972.

Because Old English was one of the first vernacular languages to be written down, nineteenth-century scholars searching for the roots of European "national culture" (see Romantic Nationalism) took special interest in studying Anglo-Saxon literature, and Old English became a regular part of university curriculum. Since WWII there has been increasing interest in the manuscripts themselves—Neil Ker, a paleographer, published the groundbreaking "Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon" in 1957, and by 1980 nearly all Anglo-Saxon manuscript texts were in print. J.R.R. Tolkien is credited with creating a movement to look at Old English as a subject of literary theory in his seminal lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (1936).

Old English literature has had some influence on modern literature, and notable poets have translated and incorporated Old English poetry. Well-known early translations include Alfred, Lord Tennyson's translation of "The Battle of Brunanburh" William Morris's translation of "Beowulf" and Ezra Pound's translation of "The Seafarer". The influence of the poetry can be seen in modern poets T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden. Tolkien adapted the subject matter and terminology of heroic poetry for works like "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings", and John Gardner wrote "Grendel", which tells the story of Beowulf's opponent from his own perspective.

More recently other notable poets such as Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Denise Levertov and U. A. Fanthorpe have all shown an interest in Old English poetry. In 1987 Denise Levertov published a translation of Cædmon's Hymn under her title "Caedmon" in the collection "Breathing the Water". This was then followed by Seamus Heaney's version of the poem "Whitby-sur-Moyola" in his "The Spirit Level" (1996) Paul Muldoon's "Caedmona's Hymn" in his "Moy Sand and Gravel" (2002) and U. A. Fanthorpe's "Caedmon's Song" in her "Queuing for the Sun" (2003). These translations differ greatly from one another, just as Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf" (1999) deviates from earlier, similar projects. Heaney uses Irish diction across "Beowulf" to bring what he calls a "special body and force" to the poem, foregrounding his own Ulster heritage, "in order to render (the poem) ever more 'willable forward/again and again and again.'"

The poem "Beowulf", which often begins the traditional canon of English literature, is the most famous work of Old English literature. The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" has also proven significant for historical study, preserving a chronology of early English history.

Old English literature

Old English literature or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses literature written in Old English, in Anglo-Saxon England from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066. "Cædmon's Hymn", composed in the 7th century, according to Bede, is often considered the oldest extant poem in English, whereas the later poem, The Grave is one of the final poems written in Old English, and presents a transitional text between Old and Middle English. The "Peterborough Chronicle" can also be considered a late-period text, continuing into the 12th century.

In descending order of quantity, Old English literature consists of: sermons and saints' lives; biblical translations; translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers; Anglo-Saxon chronicles and narrative history works; laws, wills and other legal works; practical works on grammar, medicine, geography; and poetry. In all there are over 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, of which about 189 are considered "major".

Besides Old English literature, Anglo-Saxons wrote a number of Anglo-Latin works.

A large number of manuscripts remain from the Anglo-Saxon period, with most written during its last 300 years (9th to 11th centuries).

Manuscripts written in both Latin and the vernacular remain. It is believed that Irish missionaries are responsible for the scripts used in early Anglo-Saxon texts, which include the Insular half-uncial (important Latin texts) and Insular minuscule (both Latin and the vernacular). In the 10th century, the Caroline minuscule was adopted for Latin, however the Insular minuscule continued to be used for Old English texts. Thereafter, it was increasingly influenced by Caroline minuscule, while retaining certain distinctively Insular letter-forms.

There were considerable losses of manuscripts as a result of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century. Scholarly study of the language began when the manuscripts were collected by scholars and antiquarians such as Matthew Parker, Laurence Nowell and Sir Robert Bruce Cotton.

Old English manuscripts have been highly prized by collectors since the 16th century, both for their historic value and for their aesthetic beauty with their uniformly spaced letters and decorative elements.

There are four major poetic manuscripts:

Seven major scriptoria produced a good deal of Old English manuscripts: Winchester; Exeter; Worcester; Abingdon; Durham; and two Canterbury houses, Christ Church and St. Augustine's Abbey. In addition, some Old English text survives on stone structures and other ornate objects.

Regional dialects include: Northumbrian; Mercian; Kentish; and West dialect, leading to the speculation that much of the poetry may have been translated into West Saxon at a later date. An example of the dominance of the West Saxon dialect is a pair of charters, from the Stowe and British Museum collections, which outline grants of land in Kent and Mercia, but are nonetheless written in the West Saxon dialect of the period.

Early English manuscripts often contain later annotations in the margins of the texts; it is a rarity to find a completely unannotated manuscript. These include corrections, alterations and expansions of the main text, as well as commentary upon it, and even unrelated texts. The majority of these annotations appear to date to the 13th century and later.

Old English poetry falls broadly into two styles or fields of reference, the heroic Germanic and the Christian. Almost all Old English poets are anonymous.

Even though all extant Old English poetry is written and literate, it is assumed that Old English poetry was an oral craft that was performed by a "scop" and accompanied by a harp.

Most Old English poems are recorded without authors, and very few names are known with any certainty; the primary three are Cædmon, Aldhelm, and Cynewulf.

Cædmon is considered the first Old English poet whose work still survives. According to the account in Bede's "Historia ecclesiastica", he was first a herdsman before living as a monk at the abbey of Whitby in Northumbria in the 7th century. Only his first poem, comprising nine-lines, "Cædmon's Hymn", remains, in Northumbrian, West-Saxon and Latin versions that appear in 19 surviving manuscripts:

Cynewulf has proven to be a difficult figure to identify, but recent research suggests he was an Anglian poet from the early part of the 9th century. Four poems are attributed to him, signed with a runic acrostic at the end of each poem; these are "The Fates of the Apostles" and "Elene" (both found in the Vercelli Book), and "Christ II" and "Juliana" (both found in the Exeter Book).

Although William of Malmesbury claims that Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne (d. 709), performed secular songs while accompanied by a harp, none of these Old English poems survives. Paul G. Remely has recently proposed that the Old English "Exodus" may have been the work of Aldhelm, or someone closely associated with him.

Bede is often thought to be the poet of a five-line poem entitled "Bede's Death Song", on account of its appearance in a letter on his death by Cuthbert. This poem exists in a Northumbrian and later version.

Alfred is said to be the author of some of the metrical prefaces to the Old English translations of Gregory's "Pastoral Care" and Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy". Alfred is also thought to be the author of 50 metrical psalms, but whether the poems were written by him, under his direction or patronage, or as a general part in his reform efforts is unknown.

Parry and Lord had already demonstrated the density of metrical formulas in Ancient Greek, and observed that the same phenomenon was apparent in the Old English alliterative line:

The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" contains various heroic poems inserted throughout. The earliest from 937 is called "The Battle of Brunanburh", which celebrates the victory of King Athelstan over the Scots and Norse. There are five shorter poems: capture of the Five Boroughs (942); coronation of King Edgar (973); death of King Edgar (975); death of Alfred the son of King Æthelred (1036); and death of King Edward the Confessor (1065).

The 325 line poem "The Battle of Maldon" celebrates Earl Byrhtnoth and his men who fell in battle against the Vikings in 991. It is considered one of the finest, but both the beginning and end are missing and the only manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1731. A well-known speech is near the end of the poem:

Old English heroic poetry was handed down orally from generation to generation. As Christianity began to appear, re-tellers often recast the tales of Christianity into the older heroic stories.

Several Old English poems are adaptations of late classical philosophical texts. The longest is a 10th-century translation of Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy" contained in the Cotton manuscript Otho A.vi. Another is "The Phoenix" in the Exeter Book, an allegorisation of the "De ave phoenice" by Lactantius.

Other short poems derive from the Latin bestiary tradition. Some examples include "The Panther", "The Whale" and "The Partridge".

The Vercelli Book and Exeter Book contain four long narrative poems of saints' lives, or hagiography. In Vercelli are "Andreas" and "Elene" and in Exeter are "Guthlac" and "Juliana".

"Andreas" is 1,722 lines long and is the closest of the surviving Old English poems to "Beowulf" in style and tone. It is the story of Saint Andrew and his journey to rescue Saint Matthew from the Mermedonians. "Elene" is the story of Saint Helena (mother of Constantine) and her discovery of the True Cross. The cult of the True Cross was popular in Anglo-Saxon England and this poem was instrumental in promoting it.

"Guthlac" consists of two poems about the English 7th century Saint Guthlac. "Juliana" describes the life of Saint Juliana, including a discussion with the devil during her imprisonment.

The Nowell Codex contains a Biblical poetic paraphrase, which appears right after "Beowulf", called "Judith", a retelling of the story of Judith. This is not to be confused with Ælfric's homily "Judith", which retells the same Biblical story in alliterative prose.

Old English translations of Psalms 51-150 have been preserved, following a prose version of the first 50 Psalms. There are verse translations of the Gloria in Excelsis, the Lord's Prayer, and the Apostles' Creed, as well as some hymns and proverbs.

In addition to Biblical paraphrases are a number of original religious poems, mostly lyrical (non-narrative).

The Exeter Book contains a series of poems entitled "Christ", sectioned into "Christ I", "Christ II" and "Christ III".

The dreamer resolves to trust in the cross, and the dream ends with a vision of heaven.

There are a number of religious debate poems. The longest is "Christ and Satan" in the Junius manuscript, it deals with the conflict between Christ and Satan during the forty days in the desert. Another debate poem is "Solomon and Saturn", surviving in a number of textual fragments, Saturn is portrayed as a magician debating with the wise king Solomon.

Other poetic forms exist in Old English including short verses, gnomes, and mnemonic poems for remembering long lists of names.

There are short verses found in the margins of manuscripts which offer practical advice, such as remedies against the loss of cattle or how to deal with a delayed birth, often grouped as charms. The longest is called "Nine Herbs Charm" and is probably of pagan origin. Other similar short verses, or charms, include "For a Swarm of Bees", "Against a Dwarf", "Against a Stabbing Pain", and "Against a Wen".

There are a group of mnemonic poems designed to help memorise lists and sequences of names and to keep objects in order. These poems are named "Menologium", "The Fates of the Apostles", "The Rune Poem", "The Seasons for Fasting", and the "Instructions for Christians".

Old English poetry traditionally alliterates, meaning that a sound (usually the initial consonant sound) is repeated throughout a line. For instance, in the first line of "Beowulf", "Hwaet! We Gar-Dena | in gear-dagum", (meaning "Lo! We... of the Spear Danes in days of yore"), the stressed words "Gar-Dena" and "gear-dagum" alliterate on the consonant "G".

Old English poetry, like other Old Germanic alliterative verse, is also commonly marked by the caesura or pause. In addition to setting pace for the line, the caesura also grouped each line into two couplets.

Other important Old English translations include: "Historiae adversum paganos" by Orosius, a companion piece for St. Augustine's "The City of God"; the "Dialogues" of Gregory the Great; and Bede's "Ecclesiastical History of the English People".

In the same category as Ælfric, and a contemporary, was Wulfstan II, archbishop of York. His sermons were highly stylistic. His best known work is "Sermo Lupi ad Anglos" in which he blames the sins of the English for the Viking invasions. He wrote a number of clerical legal texts "Institutes of Polity" and "Canons of Edgar".

One of the earliest Old English texts in prose is the "Martyrology", information about saints and martyrs according to their anniversaries and feasts in the church calendar. It has survived in six fragments. It is believed to date from the 9th century by an anonymous Mercian author.

The oldest collections of church sermons is the "Blickling homilies", found in a 10th-century manuscript.

There are a number of saint's lives prose works; beyond those written by Ælfric are the prose life of Saint Guthlac (Vercelli Book), the life of Saint Margaret and the life of Saint Chad. There are four additional lives in the earliest manuscript of the "Lives of Saints", the Julius manuscript: Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, Saint Mary of Egypt, Saint Eustace and Saint Euphrosyne.

There are six major manuscripts of the Wessex Gospels, dating from the 11th and 12th centuries. The most popular, "Old English Gospel of Nicodemus", is treated in one manuscript as though it were a 5th gospel; other apocryphal gospels in translation include the "Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew", "Vindicta salvatoris", "Vision of Saint Paul" and the "Apocalypse of Thomas".

The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" was probably started in the time of King Alfred the Great and continued for over 300 years as a historical record of Anglo-Saxon history.

A single example of a Classical romance has survived: a fragment of the story of "Apollonius of Tyre" was translated in the 11th century from the Gesta Romanorum.

A monk who was writing in Old English at the same time as Ælfric and Wulfstan was Byrhtferth of Ramsey, whose book "Handboc" was a study of mathematics and rhetoric. He also produced a work entitled "Computus", which outlined the practical application of arithmetic to the calculation of calendar days and movable feasts, as well as tide tables.

Ælfric wrote two proto-scientific works, "Hexameron" and "Interrogationes Sigewulfi", dealing with the stories of Creation. He also wrote a grammar and glossary in Old English called "Latin", later used by students interested in learning Old French because it had been glossed in Old French.

In the Nowell Codex is the text of "The Wonders of the East" which includes a remarkable map of the world, and other illustrations. Also contained in Nowell is "Alexander's Letter to Aristotle". Because this is the same manuscript that contains "Beowulf", some scholars speculate it may have been a collection of materials on exotic places and creatures.

There are a number of interesting medical works. There is a translation of "Apuleius's Herbarium" with striking illustrations, found together with "Medicina de Quadrupedibus". A second collection of texts is "Bald's Leechbook", a 10th-century book containing herbal and even some surgical cures. A third collection, known as the "Lacnunga", includes many charms and incantations.

Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century. The oldest surviving text of Old English literature is "Cædmon's Hymn", composed between 658 and 680. There is a limited corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries, but the oldest coherent runic texts (notably the Franks Casket) date to the 8th century. The Old English Latin alphabet was introduced around the 9th century.
With the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (outside the Danelaw) by Alfred the Great in the later 9th century, the language of government and literature became standardised around the West Saxon dialect (Early West Saxon). Alfred advocated education in English alongside Latin, and had many works translated into the English language; some of them, such as Pope Gregory I's treatise "Pastoral Care", appear to have been translated by Alfred himself. In Old English, typical of the development of literature, poetry arose before prose, but King Alfred the Great (871 to 901) chiefly inspired the growth of prose.

Old English

Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers probably in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, as the language of the upper classes by Anglo-Norman, a relative of French. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, as during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English.

Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. As the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain: Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, and Latin, brought to Britain by Roman invasion. Old English had four main dialects, associated with particular Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish and West Saxon. It was West Saxon that formed the basis for the literary standard of the later Old English period, although the dominant forms of Middle and Modern English would develop mainly from Mercian. The speech of eastern and northern parts of England was subject to strong Old Norse influence due to Scandinavian rule and settlement beginning in the 9th century.

Old English is one of the West Germanic languages, and its closest relatives are Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic languages, it is very different from Modern English and difficult for Modern English speakers to understand without study. Old English grammar is quite similar to that of modern German: nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms, and word order is much freer. The oldest Old English inscriptions were written using a runic system, but from about the 9th century this was replaced by a version of the Latin alphabet.

"Englisc", which the term "English" is derived from, means 'pertaining to the Angles'. In Old English, this word was derived from "Angles" (one of the Germanic tribes who conquered parts of Great Britain in the 5th century). During the 9th century, all invading Germanic tribes were referred to as "Englisc". It has been hypothesised that the Angles acquired their name because their land on the coast of Jutland (now mainland Denmark) resembled a fishhook. Proto-Germanic also had the meaning of 'narrow', referring to the shallow waters near the coast. That word ultimately goes back to Proto-Indo-European "", also meaning 'narrow'.

Another theory is that the derivation of 'narrow' is the more likely connection to angling (as in fishing), which itself stems from a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root meaning "bend, angle". The semantic link is the fishing hook, which is curved or bent at an angle. In any case, the Angles may have been called such because they were a fishing people or were originally descended from such, and therefore England would mean 'land of the fishermen', and English would be 'the fishermen's language'.

Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion. While indicating that the establishment of dates is an arbitrary process, Albert Baugh dates Old English from 450 to 1150, a period of full inflections, a synthetic language. Perhaps around 85 per cent of Old English words are no longer in use, but those that survived are basic elements of Modern English vocabulary.

Old English is a West Germanic language, developing out of Ingvaeonic (also known as North Sea Germanic) dialects from the 5th century. It came to be spoken over most of the territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which became the Kingdom of England. This included most of present-day England, as well as part of what is now southeastern Scotland, which for several centuries belonged to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Other parts of the island – Wales and most of Scotland – continued to use Celtic languages, except in the areas of Scandinavian settlements where Old Norse was spoken. Celtic speech also remained established in certain parts of England: Medieval Cornish was spoken all over Cornwall and in adjacent parts of Devon, while Cumbric survived perhaps to the 12th century in parts of Cumbria, and Welsh may have been spoken on the English side of the Anglo-Welsh border. Norse was also widely spoken in the parts of England which fell under Danish law.

A later literary standard, dating from the later 10th century, arose under the influence of Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, and was followed by such writers as the prolific Ælfric of Eynsham ("the Grammarian"). This form of the language is known as the "Winchester standard", or more commonly as Late West Saxon. It is considered to represent the "classical" form of Old English. It retained its position of prestige until the time of the Norman Conquest, after which English ceased for a time to be of importance as a literary language.

The history of Old English can be subdivided into:

The Old English period is followed by Middle English (12th to 15th century), Early Modern English (c. 1480 to 1650) and finally Modern English (after 1650).

Old English should not be regarded as a single monolithic entity, just as Modern English is also not monolithic. It emerged over time out of the many dialects and languages of the colonising tribes, and it is only towards the later Anglo-Saxon period that these can be considered to have constituted a single national language. Even then, Old English continued to exhibit much local and regional variation, remnants of which remain in Modern English dialects.

The four main dialectal forms of Old English were Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon. Mercian and Northumbrian are together referred to as "Anglian". In terms of geography the Northumbrian region lay north of the Humber River; the Mercian lay north of the Thames and South of the Humber River; West Saxon lay south and southwest of the Thames; and the smallest, Kentish region lay southeast of the Thames, a small corner of England. The Kentish region, settled by the Jutes from Jutland, has the scantiest literary remains.

Each of these four dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, Northumbria south of the Tyne, and most of Mercia, were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. The portion of Mercia that was successfully defended, and all of Kent, were then integrated into Wessex under Alfred the Great.
From that time on, the West Saxon dialect (then in the form now known as Early West Saxon) became standardised as the language of government, and as the basis for the many works of literature and religious materials produced or translated from Latin in that period.

The later literary standard known as Late West Saxon (see History, above), although centred in the same region of the country, appears not to have been directly descended from Alfred's Early West Saxon. For example, the former diphthong tended to become monophthongised to in EWS, but to in LWS.

Due to the centralisation of power and the Viking invasions, there is relatively little written record of the non-Wessex dialects after Alfred's unification. Some Mercian texts continued to be written, however, and the influence of Mercian is apparent in some of the translations produced under Alfred's programme, many of which were produced by Mercian scholars. Other dialects certainly continued to be spoken, as is evidenced by the continued variation between their successors in Middle and Modern English. In fact, what would become the standard forms of Middle English and of Modern English are descended from Mercian rather than West Saxon, while Scots developed from the Northumbrian dialect. It was once claimed that, owing to its position at the heart of the Kingdom of Wessex, the relics of Anglo-Saxon accent, idiom and vocabulary were best preserved in the dialect of Somerset.

For details of the sound differences between the dialects, see Phonological history of Old English (dialects).

The language of the Anglo-Saxon settlers appears not to have been significantly affected by the native British Celtic languages which it largely displaced. The number of Celtic loanwords introduced into the language is very small. However, various suggestions have been made concerning possible influence that Celtic may have had on developments in English syntax in the post-Old English period, such as the regular progressive construction and analytic word order, as well as the eventual development of the periphrastic auxiliary verb "do".

Old English contained a certain number of loanwords from Latin, which was the scholarly and diplomatic "lingua franca" of Western Europe. It is sometimes possible to give approximate dates for the borrowing of individual Latin words based on which patterns of sound change they have undergone. Some Latin words had already been borrowed into the Germanic languages before the ancestral Angles and Saxons left continental Europe for Britain. More entered the language when the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and Latin-speaking priests became influential. It was also through Irish Christian missionaries that the Latin alphabet was introduced and adapted for the writing of Old English, replacing the earlier runic system. Nonetheless, the largest transfer of Latin-based (mainly Old French) words into English occurred after the Norman Conquest of 1066, and thus in the Middle English rather than the Old English period.

Another source of loanwords was Old Norse, which came into contact with Old English via the Scandinavian rulers and settlers in the Danelaw from the late 9th century, and during the rule of Cnut and other Danish kings in the early 11th century. Many place-names in eastern and northern England are of Scandinavian origin. Norse borrowings are relatively rare in Old English literature, being mostly terms relating to government and administration. The literary standard, however, was based on the West Saxon dialect, away from the main area of Scandinavian influence; the impact of Norse may have been greater in the eastern and northern dialects. Certainly in Middle English texts, which are more often based on eastern dialects, a strong Norse influence becomes apparent. Modern English contains a great many, often everyday, words that were borrowed from Old Norse, and the grammatical simplification that occurred after the Old English period is also often attributed to Norse influence.

The influence of Old Norse certainly helped move English from a synthetic language along the continuum to a more analytic word order, and Old Norse most likely made a greater impact on the English language than any other language. The eagerness of Vikings in the Danelaw to communicate with their southern Anglo-Saxon neighbours produced a friction that led to the erosion of the complicated inflectional word-endings. Simeon Potter notes: "No less far-reaching was the influence of Scandinavian upon the inflexional endings of English in hastening that wearing away and leveling of grammatical forms which gradually spread from north to south. It was, after all, a salutary influence. The gain was greater than the loss. There was a gain in directness, in clarity, and in strength."

The strength of the Viking influence on Old English appears from the fact that the indispensable elements of the language – pronouns, modals, comparatives, pronominal adverbs (like "hence" and "together"), conjunctions and prepositions – show the most marked Danish influence; the best evidence of Scandinavian influence appears in the extensive word borrowings for, as Jespersen indicates, no texts exist in either Scandinavia or in Northern England from this time to give certain evidence of an influence on syntax. The change to Old English from Old Norse was substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic character. Old Norse and Old English resembled each other closely like cousins and with some words in common, they roughly understood each other; in time the inflections melted away and the analytic pattern emerged. It is most "important to recognize that in many words the English and Scandinavian language differed chiefly in their inflectional elements. The body of the word was so nearly the same in the two languages that only the endings would put obstacles in the way of mutual understanding. In the mixed population which existed in the Danelaw these endings must have led to much confusion, tending gradually to become obscured and finally lost." This blending of peoples and languages resulted in "simplifying English grammar".

The inventory of classical Old English (Late West Saxon) surface phones, as usually reconstructed, is as follows.
The sounds enclosed in parentheses in the chart above are not considered to be phonemes:

The above system is largely similar to that of Modern English, except that (and for most speakers) have generally been lost, while the voiced affricate and fricatives (now also including ) have become independent phonemes, as has.
The mid front rounded vowels had merged into unrounded before the Late West Saxon period. During the 11th century such vowels arose again, as monophthongisations of the diphthongs, but quickly merged again with in most dialects.

The exact pronunciation of the West Saxon close diphthongs, spelt, is disputed; it may have been. Other dialects may have had different systems of diphthongs; for example, Anglian dialects retained, which had merged with in West Saxon.

For more on dialectal differences, see Phonological history of Old English (dialects).

Some of the principal sound changes occurring in the pre-history and history of Old English were the following:

For more details of these processes, see the main article, linked above. For sound changes before and after the Old English period, see Phonological history of English.

Nouns decline for five cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental; three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter; and two numbers: singular, and plural; and are strong or weak. The instrumental is vestigial and only used with the masculine and neuter singular and often replaced by the dative. Only pronouns and strong adjectives retain separate instrumental forms. There is also sparse early Northumbrian evidence of a sixth case: the locative. Adjectives agree with nouns in case, gender, number, and strong, or weak forms. Pronouns and sometimes participles agree in case, gender, and number. First-person and second-person personal pronouns occasionally distinguish dual-number forms. The definite article and its inflections serve as a definite article ("the"), a demonstrative adjective ("that"), and demonstrative pronoun. Other demonstratives are ("this"), and ("yon"). These words inflect for case, gender, number. Adjectives have both strong and weak sets of endings, weak ones being used when a definite or possessive determiner is also present.

Verbs conjugate for three persons: first, second, and third; two numbers: singular, plural; two tenses: present, and past; three moods: indicative, subjunctive, and imperative; and are strong (exhibiting ablaut) or weak (exhibiting a dental suffix). Verbs have two infinitive forms: bare, and bound; and two participles: present, and past. The subjunctive has past and present forms. Finite verbs agree with subjects in person, and number. The future tense, passive voice, and other aspects are formed with compounds.
Adpositions are mostly before but often after their object. If the object of an adposition is marked in the dative case, an adposition may conceivably be located anywhere in the sentence.

Remnants of the Old English case system in Modern English are in the forms of a few pronouns (such as "I/me/mine", "she/her", "who/whom/whose") and in the possessive ending "-'s", which derives from the masculine and neuter genitive ending "-es". The modern English plural ending "-(e)s" derives from the Old English "-as", but the latter applied only to "strong" masculine nouns in the nominative and accusative cases; different plural endings were used in other instances. Old English nouns had grammatical gender, while modern English has only natural gender. Pronoun usage could reflect either natural or grammatical gender when those conflicted, as in the case of, a neuter noun referring to a female person.

In Old English's verbal compound constructions are the beginnings of the compound tenses of Modern English. Old English verbs include strong verbs, which form the past tense by altering the root vowel, and weak verbs, which use a suffix such as. As in Modern English, and peculiar to the Germanic languages, the verbs formed two great classes: weak (regular), and strong (irregular). Like today, Old English had fewer strong verbs, and many of these have over time decayed into weak forms. Then, as now, dental suffixes indicated the past tense of the weak verbs, as in "work" and "worked".

Old English syntax is similar to that of modern English. Some differences are consequences of the greater level of nominal and verbal inflection, allowing freer word order.

Old English was first written in runes, using the futhorc – a rune set derived from the Germanic 24-character elder futhark, extended by five more runes used to represent Anglo-Saxon vowel sounds, and sometimes by several more additional characters. From around the 9th century, the runic system came to be supplanted by a (minuscule) half-uncial script of the Latin alphabet introduced by Irish Christian missionaries. This was replaced by insular script, a cursive and pointed version of the half-uncial script. This was used until the end of the 12th century when continental Carolingian minuscule (also known as "Caroline") replaced the insular.

The Latin alphabet of the time still lacked the letters and, and there was no as distinct from ; moreover native Old English spellings did not use, or. The remaining 20 Latin letters were supplemented by four more: (, modern "ash") and (, now called eth or edh), which were modified Latin letters, and thorn and wynn, which are borrowings from the futhorc. A few letter pairs were used as digraphs, representing a single sound. Also used was the Tironian note (a character similar to the digit 7) for the conjunction "and", and a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender for the pronoun. Macrons over vowels were originally used not to mark long vowels (as in modern editions), but to indicate stress, or as abbreviations for a following "m" or "n".

Modern editions of Old English manuscripts generally introduce some additional conventions. The modern forms of Latin letters are used, including in place of the insular G, for long S, and others which may differ considerably from the insular script, notably, and. Macrons are used to indicate long vowels, where usually no distinction was made between long and short vowels in the originals. (In some older editions an acute accent mark was used for consistency with Old Norse conventions.) Additionally, modern editions often distinguish between velar and palatal and by placing dots above the palatals:,. The letter wynn is usually replaced with, but, eth and thorn are normally retained (except when eth is replaced by thorn).

In contrast with Modern English orthography, that of Old English was reasonably regular, with a mostly predictable correspondence between letters and phonemes. There were not usually any silent letters—in the word "cniht", for example, both the and were pronounced, unlike the and in the modern "knight". The following table lists the Old English letters and digraphs together with the phonemes they represent, using the same notation as in the Phonology section above.

Doubled consonants are geminated; the geminate fricatives /, and cannot be voiced.

Old English literature, though more abundant than literature of the continent before AD 1000, is nonetheless scant. The pagan and Christian streams mingle in Old English, one of the richest and most significant bodies of literature preserved among the early Germanic peoples. In his supplementary article to the 1935 posthumous edition of Bright's "Anglo-Saxon Reader", Dr. James Hulbert writes:

Some of the most important surviving works of Old English literature are "Beowulf", an epic poem; the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle", a record of early English history; the Franks Casket, an inscribed early whalebone artefact; and Cædmon's Hymn, a Christian religious poem. There are also a number of extant prose works, such as sermons and saints' lives, biblical translations, and translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers, legal documents, such as laws and wills, and practical works on grammar, medicine, and geography. Still, poetry is considered the heart of Old English literature. Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous, with a few exceptions, such as Bede and Cædmon. Cædmon, the earliest English poet we know by name, served as a lay brother in the monastery at Whitby.

The first example is taken from the opening lines of the folk-epic "Beowulf", a poem of some 3,000 lines and the single greatest work of Old English. This passage describes how Hrothgar's legendary ancestor Scyld was found as a baby, washed ashore, and adopted by a noble family. The translation is literal and represents the original poetic word order. As such, it is not typical of Old English prose. The modern cognates of original words have been used whenever practical to give a close approximation of the feel of the original poem.

The words in brackets are implied in the Old English by noun case and the bold words in brackets are explanations of words that have slightly different meanings in a modern context. Notice how "what" is used by the poet where a word like "lo" or "behold" would be expected. This usage is similar to "what-ho!", both an expression of surprise and a call to attention.

English poetry is based on stress and alliteration. In alliteration, the first consonant in a word alliterates with the same consonant at the beginning of another word, as with and. Vowels alliterate with any other vowel, as with and. In the text below, the letters that alliterate are bolded.

A semi-fluent translation in Modern English would be:

Lo! We have heard of majesty of the Spear-Danes, of those nation-kings in the days of yore, and how those noblemen promoted zeal. Scyld Scefing took away mead-benches from bands of enemies, from many tribes; he terrified earls. Since he was first found destitute (he gained consolation for that) he grew under the heavens, prospered in honours, until each of those who lived around him over the sea had to obey him, give him tribute. That was a good king!

This text of the Lord's Prayer is presented in the standardised West Saxon literary dialect, with added macrons for vowel length, markings for probable palatalised consonants, modern punctuation, and the replacement of the letter ƿynn with w.

This is a proclamation from King Cnut the Great to his earl Thorkell the Tall and the English people written in AD 1020. Unlike the previous two examples, this text is prose rather than poetry. For ease of reading, the passage has been divided into sentences while the pilcrows represent the original division.

The earliest history of Old English lexicography lies in the Anglo-Saxon period itself, when English-speaking scholars created English glosses on Latin texts. At first these were often marginal or interlinear glosses, but soon came to be gathered into word-lists such as the Épinal-Erfurt, Leiden and Corpus Glossaries. Over time, these word-lists were consolidated and alphabeticised to create extensive Latin-Old English glossaries with some of the character of dictionaries, such as the Cleopatra Glossaries, the Harley Glossary and the Brussels Glossary. In some cases, the material in these glossaries continued to be circulated and updated in Middle English glossaries, such as the Durham Plant-Name Glossary and the Laud Herbal Glossary.

Old English lexicography was revived in the early modern period, drawing heavily on Anglo-Saxons' own glossaries. The major publication at this time was William Somner's "Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum". The next substantial Old English dictionary was Joseph Bosworth's "Anglo-Saxon Dictionary" of 1838.

In modern scholarship, the following dictionaries remain current:Though focused on later periods, the "Oxford English Dictionary", "Middle English Dictionary", "Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue", and "Historical Thesaurus of English" all also include material relevant to Old English.

Like other historical languages, Old English has been used by scholars and enthusiasts of later periods to create texts either imitating Anglo-Saxon literature or deliberately transferring it to a different cultural context. Examples include Alistair Campbell and J. R. R. Tolkien. Ransom Riggs uses several Old English words, such as syndrigast(singular, peculia), ymbryne(period, cycle), etc., dubbed as "Old Peculiar" ones.

A number of websites devoted to Modern Paganism and historical reenactment offer reference material and forums promoting the active use of Old English. There is also an. However, one investigation found that many Neo-Old English texts published online bear little resemblance to the historical language and have many basic grammatical mistakes.