Old English

Summary

During The Fifth Century A.D. Germanic tribes from around the north German littoral and the modern-day Land of Schleswig-Holstein migrated across the North Sea to the island of Britain. The occupants of Britain at that time were Romanized Celts, who were finding it difficult to defend themselves against invaders, the protecting Roman legions having been withdrawn early in the fifth century. The Germanic invaders — Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and probably some Frisians — conquered and peopled the island of Britain, which thereafter bore the name Engla land (land of the Angles), England. The Celts fled in large numbers into Wales, Cornwall, or across the English Channel into western Gaul.

The Germanic settlers or Anglo-Saxons (as they are usually called) spoke a language which we now call Old English. Between the time of their arrival in Britain and the end of the Old English period around A.D.1100 they produced in that language a rich and varied literary corpus (and an even larger Latin corpus). Natural disasters and human folly both during and after the Old English period took a heavy toll on the vernacular corpus, but a substantial remnant totaling 3,895,061 words survives today in parchment manuscripts, Roman-letter inscriptions, and runic inscriptions.

Runes are the Germanic epigraphic alphabet — designed, that is, for inscriptions — that the Anglo-Saxons brought with them to Britain, and inscriptions carved in runes date from the invaders’ earliest years on the island. With the conversion of England to Christianity, which got underway near the beginning of the seventh century, the Anglo-Saxons were introduced by missionaries to the custom of writing in Roman letters on parchment with pen and ink, a writing system better suited than runes to recording extensive texts. Runes continued in epigraphic use throughout the Old English period, and scribes even developed a tradition of writing runes in manuscripts, but this is relatively rare and sporadic, as is the use of Roman letters for inscriptions. The vast bulk of Old English literature is preserved in parchment manuscripts.