Old English

[wellinghall]

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that I wanted to learn Old English next year. How would I go about it? Are there any Teach Yourself Anglo-Saxon books? Correspondence courses? Anything else ... ?

(Anyone who says that my modern English could do with brushing up gets scowled at very firmly ;-) )

Comments

[emperor]

Mitchell & Robinson would be the usual approach.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Also that it is worth making the effort to learn the grammar right at the start. Once you've got the grammar sorted, it's just a question of learning 50 synonyms for sword, man, hero, shield, seagull and the like.

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

Can you have a firm scowl?

I suppose Klingons and Luxans can but ...

[tree_and_leaf]

I learned using a university produced reader, which had a simple grammar (less confusing than Sweet) and a glossary, and bashing through some simple texts (i.e. making my own translations), starting in classic style with the Lord's Prayer, and progressing through various parables to the Battle of Maldon and the Wanderer.

[begemotr.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends on whether you are the "analytical" or the "practical" type in terms of language learning, i.e. whether you feel you have to study grammar first or want to go straight to the texts and pick up some grammar in the process.
It also depends on whether you have studied, however briefly, German, Latin, or pretty much any other non-Romance language.

If you are "analytical" and know your basic grammatical terms from German/Latin, then Mitchell&Robinson are probably the best option, esp. their intoductory section. As a reader, they are not very friendly though (no marginal glosses, for example), and here you could also consider Richard Marsden's "Cambridge Old English Reader", or the website produced by Oxford specifically to rectify the faults of M&R: http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/coursepack/ (their notes could do with proofreading and revision, but the overall percentage of glaring mistakes is small).

On the other end of the scale, there is Mark Atherton's "Teach Yourself Old English". I haven't seen it, but from what I gathered at a presentation of his, the book (+CD, apparently!) is designed to be as simple as possible.

Somewhere in between is another decent guide, Peter Baker's "Intro to OE", which has the additional advantage of being available online: http://www.wmich.edu/~medinst/resources/IOE/index.html

On the whole, probably the only way that one is going to benefit from a taught course is learning the basic terms of grammar (if one doesn't know them already). Once you are confident with things like "noun", "participle", "object", "dative case", etc., you will actually be learning OE one-to-one with your textbook, whether you go to a university or not (and whatever university prospectuses are telling you).

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

There's an "Anglo Saxon made simple" which I used as a teen. Seem to remember it was quite good, nice mixture of grammar intro and diving straight into real texts. Neuromancer

[mrkinch.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this post! It's been interesting reading.

I have Mitchell and Robinson on my private, "just like thinking about it" wish list on the recommendation of aesc who's in the field. Dunno if I'll ever actually do anything about it, though.

[muuranker.livejournal.com]

http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/toebi/courses.html is a list of courses. The main TOEBI site has lots of other info, including a couple of online courses (OE Aerobics!!!)

I agree with what's been said before about knowing other languages, and how you learn languages.

I would also add that OE has a really great literature, which it is worth learning OE to read.