Introduction

Whatever their other achievements, the Anglo-Saxons could not lay claim to being outstanding grammarians. Indeed, to judge by the paucity of grammatical writing during the Old English period, where Ælfric's Latin Grammar (ca 1000) stands out because it is the exception that proves the rule, the Anglo-Saxons would not have wished to make such a claim, their intellectual interests lying in entirely different areas.

This, of course, makes the task of reconstructing the nature of the Old English language that much more difficult. Thus, in the areas which are the concern of this chapter, we have no equivalent of the Icelandic First Grammarian, who, writing in the thirteenth century, gives a wealth of detail about the sound system of Old Icelandic (see Benediktsson 1972, Haugen 1950). At much the same time as the First Grammarian was writing, an East Midlands monk of Scandinavian origin, Orm, composed a lengthy verse work entitled Orrmulum, in which he employed a writing system of his own devising from which we can glean a considerable amount of information about his pronunciation (see Burchfield 1956, Sisam 1953b: 188–95 and vol. II, ch. 2 of this History). However, Orm's spelling system, valuable as it is, is not only ambiguous in its aims and effects, but also relates to a period when the English language had considerably altered in structure and system. For Old English itself we have no direct testamentary evidence from any contemporary or near-contemporary source.