LL-L: "Old English" LOWLANDS-L, 02.MAY.2000 (13) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: john feather [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
Subject: Old English

Bryan E. Schulz wrote:

>Has anyone read the latest translation of Beowulf by Seamus Heaney ?  If
so, what is your opinion of the book.  It has been my understanding that
the ORIGINAL script of this work was in an 'old' version of English which
was very close to early German.  Was the original Beowulf written in a
Lowland variety? I haven't seen a copy of the original script.  Has anyone
seen the original writing?<

I've read excerpts but not the whole thing, so I won't comment on the style.
Heaney, being Heaney, has used various Ulster dialect words (of Anglo-Saxon
origin) in his translation.

There is only one manuscript version of "Beowulf", written in the
"classical" Old English of Wessex of around 1000 CE. Most scholars seem to
think it originated on the Continent long before this - perhaps as early as
730 CE. Heaney calls this earliest language Anglo-Saxon (I seem to remember)
but no-one knows how similar it was to the language of the final written
text.

Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) is, like Old High German, a highly inflected
language and they shared bits of vocabulary which have disappeared from the
modern versions of both languages but they already belong to different
branches of the Germanic language tree.

I have seen the manuscript at an exhibition at the British Museum. I don't
know whether it is normally on display. There are long extracts from it in
Joseph Wright's "Anglo-Saxon Reader" (or some such title). This is the same
Wright who wrote "Grammar of the Gothic Language" which we talked about some
time ago.

John Feather
johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk

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From: Stephen Israel [sisrael at imap.pitt.edu]
Subject: "Old English"

Bryan E. Schulz asked

> It has been my understanding that
> the ORIGINAL script of this work was in an 'old' version of English which
> was very close to early German.  Was the original Beowulf written in a
> Lowland variety? I haven't seen a copy of the original script.  Has anyone
> seen the original writing?

Beowulf was written in Old English (written from the 600's till the
1100's), which was indeed a Lowland language.  Old English/Old Frisian/Old
Low German/Old High German/Old Norse were all similar, since they'd only
been diverging from a single language for only 2-4 centuries, whereas their
modern descendents have had many times that time to diverge

You can see the manuscript etc. at:
http://www.georgetown.edu/irvinemj/english016/beowulf/beowulf.html

Stefan Israel

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