‘Everyone must know their Lord’s Prayer and their creed.’ So wrote Ælfric of Eynsham in the early eleventh century. It may be for this reason, and also because churchpeople may in any case have wished to pray in their own language, that several copies of the Lord’s Prayer or Paternoster survive in Old English translation,…
Category: Translation
Divination for a day of birth
This is my 100th blogpost on For the Wynn! In celebration of this, I am going to share a full version of a fascinating little text which I mentioned briefly in this blogpost for the British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts blog: a divinatory text by which you can discover a person’s fortune based on the position…
Rereading, retelling, rediscovering Beowulf
A strange creature attacks a warrior hall, killing the men night after night, until a hero comes and slays him. The creature’s mother takes her revenge and is likewise vanquished in battle. But the hero meets his own end when, later in life, he kills a dragon who terrorises his own people. I won’t pretend…
Radices and radishes: Latin roots in Old English
How many languages are there in the world? Seventy-two. Why are there no more and no fewer? Because of the three sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet. Shem had twenty-seven sons, Ham had thirty sons, Japhet had fifteen sons. These added together are seventy-two. This text comes from a dialogue between Pope Damasus and…
God bless my epiglottis: why I love the Lorica of Laidcenn
In this blog, I have written a lot about Anglo-Saxon prayer, medicine and poetry. Of course, these aren’t exclusive categories: medicine sometimes involved prayer, and prayers could be in the form of poetry. And sometimes, the same text can be all three. The Lorica of Laidcenn is a good example of this. A lorica is…
Caroline and hiragana: learning to write
As I wrote in a recent post, I currently have less time for blogging due to an impending book deadline. Which is why it is complete foolishness that I have taken up learning a completely new language. Well, sort of. What happened was that, having heard good things about it, I signed up to Duolingo…
Anglo-Saxon Riddles
I hope you’re enjoying the summer (or winter)! I’m spending it adapting my doctoral thesis into a book, which is taking up a lot of my writing time at the moment, and I don’t have much left in which to write this blog. Still, I’d hate to miss a fortnightly post date. A couple of…
The way of the book and the way of the wild: a review of Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake
there is ways to see this world i saes. there is the way of the boc and the way of the wilde there is the god of the boc and the gods of the mere there is the way of the crist and the eald ways of this land Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake, p. 334 Be…
Strange beings: translating some Exeter Riddles
I saw four strange beings travel together: black were their tracks, very dark traces. Fast on its journey, bolder than birds, it flew in the air, dived beneath the waves. The labouring fighter suffered restlessly, he who shows all four of them the paths over ornamented gold. The four strange beings, if you were wondering,…
Anglian-era York at the York Festival of Ideas
The 2017 York Festival of Ideas will be running from 6-18 June, with the title The Story of Things. With a number of the events relating to York’s Anglian era, I was asked to translate a small number of Anglo-Saxon riddles to decorate the promotional bookmarks for this strand of the festival. The three riddles,…
For the Wynn 