Theme 3. The Old English Period: 450-1100 A.D. Historical Background.

Linguistic Situation. Written Records.

Aims:

be able to define the beginnings of English through its origins and

history; be familiar with Old English

dialects and Written Records: runic inscriptions, manuscripts, works of

prose and poetry.

The Celtic settlers of Britain: The Pre-English Period.

The Roman Conquest of Britain. The Anglo-Saxon Invasion. Early Runic Inscriptions.

The Old English Manuscripts.

Points for discussion:

KEY WORDS

Celts,

Roman conquest,

Germanic tribes,

Old English,

Anglo-Saxon English,

Venerable Bede,

Julius Caesar,

the Ruthwell Cross,

the Franks Casket,

King Alfred (871-889),

Beowulf,

the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

Emperor Claudius

Obligatory: David Crystal. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. – Cambridge, 1994. — PP. 7-15

Elly van Gelderen. A History of the English Language. - Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2006. - PP. 1-11

Valery V. Mykhailenko. Paradigmatics in the Evolution of English. - Chernivtsi, 1999. - PP. 13-16

T.A. Rastorgueva. A History of English. - Moscow, 1983. - PP. 35-71

Additional: Аракин В. Д. История английского языка. - М., 1985. Иванова И.П., Чахоян Л.П, Белеева Т.М. История английского языка. - СПб., 2001.

Recommended Literature

1. The Celtic settlers of Britain: The Pre-English Period.

The Celtic settles of Britain: The Pre­English period

The British Isles – (inhabited) –

 for 50000 years.

The Celtic tribes (Britons, Picts, Scots) 

The British Isles – 3000 years ago

Pre-Historic Britain

The Celtic languages(Indo-European family)

Gaelic Branch Britonnic Branch

Irish (Erse)(Ireland)

Scoth-Gaelic(Scotland, the

Isle of Man(The Manxlanguage)

Kymric (Welsh)

(modern Wales)

Breton(Armorican)

(modernFrance:

Bretagneor Brittany)

Cornish(Cornwall)

(until the 18th c.)

Celtic influenced English little

river names: Thames Avon Don Exe Usk Wye

other include: crag, cumb

'deep valley' carr 'rock' rice 'rule' stær 'history'

place-names

town names: Dover 'water' Eccles 'church' Bray 'hill' London (a tribal

name) Kent (meaning

unknown)

2. The Roman Conquest

55/54 B.C.J. Ceasar failed to subjugate 

Britain

43 A.D. Emperor Claudius made Britain a province of the Roman 

Empire (nearly 400 years)

In 410 A.D. the Roman were withdrawn to Rome by Constantine  ( to defend the Empire from the attacks of barbarian tribes, e.g. Teutons).

Linguistic consequences of the Roman conquest

names of plants,animals, food anddrink:pise 'pea', win 'wine',plante 'plant'.

clothing items:belt 'belt', cemes

'shirt', sutere 'shoemaker'.

military and legal institutions:

wic 'camp', scrifan 'decree'.

buildings and settlements:tigle 'tile', weall 'wall', ceaster

 'sity', stræt 'road'.

religion:mæsse “Mass', munuc 'monk',

mynster 'minster'.

RomanBritain

3. Anglo-SaxonInvasions

Anglo-Saxon

England

England650-750

The name 'Viking' comes from the language which is called 'Old Norse'. It means 'a pirate raid'.

Scandinavian(Viking)invasion

Who were the Vikings?

The Viking people came from three countries of Scandinavia: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. They were also known as the Norse people. They were mostly farmers, but some worked as craftsmen or traders.

The Vikings fought battles with swords, spears, axes, bows and arrows. They protected themselves with round wooden shields.

In 865 a 'Great Army' of Danish Vikings invaded England. There were fierce battles for several years. In the end the Vikings conquered all of northern, central and eastern England, and seized much of the land for their own farms. This area was called 'The Danelaw'.

The Vikings and ChristianityEngland, Scotland and Wales had been Christian countries for a long time. As the years went by, most

Vikings living in Britain also became Christians. However, some

continued to follow their old religion at the same time.

When the Vikings discovered America they called it 'Vinland' (Wine-land) because they found grapes growing there.

Discovering new landsThe Vikings were brave sailors and explorers. They thought nothing of

taking their families on long, dangerous journeys across the sea. They

discovered and settled in several remote countries that lay to the west of Britain in the north Atlantic Ocean: the Faeroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland.

The Franks Casket (or the Auzon Runic Casket) is a little whalebone chest, carved with narrative scenes in flat two-dimensional low-relief and inscribed with runes, dateable from its pagan elements to the mid-seventh century (that is, during the height of the Heptarchy and the period of Christianization of England).

4. Early Runic Inscriptions.

The Ruthwell Cross is an important Anglo Saxon cross, also known as a preaching cross, dating back to the eighth century. This cross is remarkable for its runic inscription, which contains excerpts from The Dream of the Rood, an Old English poem. It is 18 feet (5.5 metres) high. The cross was smashed in 1664, but it was restored in 1818 by Henry Duncan. It now rests in Ruthwell church, Dumfriesshire, Scotland.

Among the earliest insertions in Latin texts are pieces of OE poetry. Bede's HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM (written in Latin in the 8th c.) contains an English fragment of five lines known as "Bede's Death Song" and a religious poem of nine lines,  "Caedmon's Hymn".

5. The Old English Manuscripts.

BEOWULF

Beowulf was written in England, but is set

in Scandinavia. It is an epic poem told in historical

perspective; a story of epic

events and of great people of a heroic past.

Beowulf is most definitely not a Christian hero, however. Since

the epic of Beowulf ispenned to be taking place four centuries

before the actual epic was written and Scandinavia was not Christianized until at least the

12th century.

The greatest poem of the time was BEOWULF, an epic of the 7th or 8th c. It was originally

composed in the Mercian or Northumbrian dialect, but has come down to us in a 10th c. West Saxon

copy. It is valued both as a source of linguistic material and as a work of art; it is the oldest poem in Germanic literature. BEOWULF is built up of several

songs arranged in three chapters (over 3,000 lines in all).

LO, praise of the prowess of people-kingsof spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,

The Old English variant

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,

The Modern English variant

In the 10th c, when the oldheroic verses were alreadydeclining, some new warpoems were composed andinserted in the prose historicalchronicles:THE BATTLE OF BRUNANBURH,THE BATTLE OF MALDON.They bear resemblance tothe ancient heroic poemsbut deal with contemporaryevents: the wars with the Scots,the Picts and the raidersfrom Scandinavia.

The 10th century heroic verses:

Lyrics

Another group of poems are OE elegiac (lyrical) poems: WIDSITH ("The Traveller's Song"), THE WANDERER, THE SEAFARER, and others. THE WANDERER depicts the sorrows and bereavement of a poet in exile: he laments the death of his protectors and friends and expresses his resignation to the gloomy fate. THE SEAFARER is con­sidered to be the most original of the poems; it gives a mournful picture of the dark northern seas and sings joy at the return of the spring.

Religious poemsReligious poems paraphrase, more or less closely, the books of the Bible — GENESIS, EXODUS (written by Caædmon). ELENE, AND­REAS, CHRIST, FATE OF THE APOSTLES tell the life-stories of apostles and saints or deal with various subjects associated with the Gospels (e.g. in the DREAM OF THE ROOD, the tree of which the cross was made tells its story from the time it was cut to the crucifixion of Christ; extracts from this poem were carved in runes on the Ruthwell Cross).

OE prose is a most valuable source of information for the history of the language. The earliest samples of continuous prose are the first pages of the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES: brief annals of the year's happenings made at various monasteries. In the 9th c. the chronicles were unified at Winchester, the capital of Wessex.Several versions of the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES have sur­vived. Having no particular literary value they are of greatest interest to the philologist, as they afford a closer approach to spoken OE than OE poetry or prose translations from Latin; the style lacks conciseness, the syntax is primitive, for it reflects faithfully the style of oral narration.

Appendix

Famous People to Know

Pytheas (Πυθέας), ca. 380 – ca. 310 BC) was a Greek merchant, geographer and explorer from the Greek colony Massilia (today Marseille, France). He made a voyage of exploration to northwestern Europe around 325 BC. He probably travelled around a considerable part of Great Britain, circumnavigating it between 330 and 320 BC.

Commentaries On The Gallic War (Commentarii de Bello Gallico)

Julius Ceasar

(100-44 B.C.)

The Germania (Latin title: De Origine et situ Germanorum) is an ethnographic work on the diverse set of people Tacitus believed to be Germanic tribes outside the Roman Empire.

Tacitus(56-116 A.D.)

Alfred the Great

(also Ælfred from the Old English Ælfrēd, (c. 849 – 26 October 899) was king of the southern Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex from 871 to 899.

Knights of the Round Table were those men awarded the highest order of Chivalry at the Court of King Arthur in the literary cycle the Matter of Britain. The table at which they met was created to have no head or foot, representing the equality of all the members. Different stories had different numbers of knights, ranging from only 12 to 150 or more. The Winchester Round Table, which dates from the 1270s, lists 25 names of knights.

Sir Thomas Malory describes the Knights' code of chivalry as:- To never do outrage nor murder

- Always to flee treason- To by no means be cruel but

to give mercy unto him who asks for mercy

- To always do ladies, gentlewomen and widows succor

- To never force ladies, gentlewomen or widows

- Not to take up battles in wrongful quarrels for love or worldly goods

On the History of the

Ancient Germans,

The Origin of the Family,

Private Property, and the

State is an important and

detailed seminal work connecting

capitalism with what Engels argues

is an unnatural institution

family – designed to"privatize"

wealth and human relationships

contrary to the way animals and

early humans evolved.

Friedrich Engels(1820-1895)

David Crystal(1941)

Nothern Ireland, UK

1) What alphabets did the old Germanis tribes use?2) To what subgroup did the English language belong?3) What tribal dialects did the OE language consist of? 4) When did the written language begin to be used? 5) Name the oldest writings in English. 6) Why did the Wessex dialect dominate by the end of the OE period? 7) When did the Scandinavian invasion begin?8) In what parts was England divided after the Scandinavian invasion? 9) How did the Scandinavian invasion influence the English language?10) Name the oldest runic incriptions.

Questions for Self-Control

Questions for Self-Control (continued)

What event startrd the development of the English language? What tribal dialects did the OE language consist of? Why did the dialects become local? What local dialects constituted the OE language? What was the linguistic situation in the OE period? When did the written language begin to be used? What alphabets did hey use? Name the oldest writings in English. Why did the Wessex dialect dominate by the end of the OE period? When did the Scandinavian invasion begin? In what parts was England divided after the Scandinavian invasion?

How did the Scandinavian invasion influence the English language? What event determined Latin borrowings in OE?