ANGLO-SAXON POETRY.

The Internet Sacred Text Archive has put online the Complete Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. One caveat: the thorns and eths look weird in my browser, small and separated from the rest of their words. (Via Plep, who adds “Including the fabulously ribald riddles from the Exeter Book.”)

Comments

  1. They’re likely just appearing in a different typeface. Enlarge the page and see, or just switch your display face for the moment to Lucide Grande and see if they don’t regularize.

  2. DrJohnEvans says

    Beautiful!
    (And I’m having no problems with the eth and thorn in Mozilla, but I never have…)

  3. OT, but is anyone aware of an English or other modern-language translation of the AS “Wonders of the East”?

  4. Look, look! It has runes represented in Unicode, and my browser displays them correctly. It’s rather exciting to see one of the many fonts I installed for obscure character ranges going to use in an actual document, even if I can’t read Anglo-Saxon.

  5. Wow. I remember when I bought the the six volumes at the Yale bookstore and carried them home. Worth every penny, possibly the most-loved books on my shelves ever since. Very strange to have them floating on the web now.

  6. It’s been up for a year or so now, but if you want a list of Anglo-Saxon poetry in alphabetical order, you should check out this site at the Georgetown Labyrinth. I think the Sacred Text one may be slightly more comprehensive, but based on the formatting they probably have a common source.
    Also, LH, if you want a great Unicode Latin font (and the Runes) you should check out Junicode from Peter Baker at U.Va. His Electronic Introduction to Old English is probably one of the best, if not the best, introductions on the web. And the fact that Blackwell was open to him posting the entire content of the published work on the Internet is pretty great, too.
    Anyway, wes þu hal! And apologies if you have come across any of these before!

  7. I haven’t, and I thank you!

  8. Someone, seemingly a Dane, is working on a Hindi translation of Beowulf. Doesn’t work on my browser, but here it is as a public service.
    I have long thought that if the majority people of India could read Beowulf in their native language, world peace would be that much closer.
    http://www.heorot.dk/beo-hin-fp.html

  9. No, that fellow attempting to translate Beowulf into Hindi is a Ph.D candidate at John Hopkins (I believe) called Benjamin Slade. It is cleverly called heorot.dk because Heorot was in Denmark.
    Actually, if you want a very close translation (completely “unpoetic”, of course), to each half-line, of Beowulf, his Mod. English translation is the way to go [WARNING: Link is about a meg in size]. It is continually updated, and if you’re doing a somewhat close textual study of Beowulf, but still want to have some accessibility for those not as well-versed in Old English, it really shines. For reading, well, there are other options, and some might complain about his textual and translation choices (nirvana is in his translation), but it is great despite its flaws.
    Ahem, before I got carried away, the Hindi translation is probably because his other great interest besides Germanic linguistics seems to be Indo-Aryan. I presume it is some form of practice.
    One of the few things I have any clue about are sites dealing with Old English. 🙂

  10. Thanks, by the way, for letting me know that Gunnlaugur Briem has a website.

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