Most Old English poetry and a considerable amount of Old English prose is now accessible through Modern English translations. But in order to understand fully and appreciate the literature of the Anglo- Saxon period - its style, verse structure and content - it is necessary to read the texts in their original language. The following chapter is intended as an introduction to Old English, with emphasis on those characteristics and developments that distinguish this older stage of the language from Modern English. The chapter is not, however, meant as a grammar or work of reference, particularly since some simplification of the complex linguistic facts has been unavoidable. Some standard works on Old English language are listed below (Further reading, pp. 284-5).

For the speaker and reader of Modern English who is beginning to study Old English, texts written in that language may at first appear strange and somewhat difficult. This is due mainly to the momentous changes that English has undergone during the last nine hundred years of its development, particularly during the Middle English period (c. 1100- 1500), when the structure of English changed from that of an inflected language to one with hardly any inflexional endings, when sound changes affected the pronunciation and spelling of most of the vocabulary, and when this vocabulary became subject to almost revolutionary changes owing to the loss of a large number of older, native words and to the large-scale borrowing of words from other languages, especially French and Latin.

Scholarly tradition wants us to speak well of the works we study; there would be little point in talking about something that was not beautiful and truthful, not 'interesting'. Germanic legend has interest, almost too much so, but its beauty is not in the usual places. The names of heroes and nations that the poets so endlessly roll off are not there for their euphony. It is a rare ear that lingers in delight over –

or

As for uplifting plots, the poets seldom tell the stories they allude to, and their allusions are elliptical to the point of obscurity. When the tales are told, they turn out to be about sibling rivalry, kin murder, incest, shaky marriages, treachery and theft. Germanic legend seldom eulogizes the figures it condemns to historical action, and its themes are the stuff that fantasies of younger brothers are made of: an underdog's defiant resistance, the fall of a leader, the automaticity of revenge (called by Auden the earth's only perpetual motion machine). And as for truth, the poets prove by their inventiveness, their cavalier reorganization of chronology and geography, that the urge to create history out of next to nothing was not lost with the Greeks and Romans.

Bede tells the story of the conversion of the pagan English with lively detail and predictable bias in the first half of his Ecclesiastical History, For Bede, as for the sixth-century British historian Gildas, on whose writings he leans, the Angles and Saxons were invited to mid-fifth-century Britain as mercenaries who then turned against their Romano-British employers. Bede refers to them bluntly as 'pagans', 'heathen conquerors' and 'the enemy'. On the other hand, he is careful not to direct sympathy towards the Christian Britons, whose heart-wrenching miseries at the hands of the Saxons he paints with equanimity, assuring his readers that 'the fires kindled by the pagans proved to be God's just punishment on the sins of the nation'. Having characterized the main parties in this warfare as equally corrupt, whether through rapacity or inner depravity, Bede proceeds to introduce the heroes of his tale. These are St Gregory's Roman missionaries, together with the enlightened English rulers who accepted their teachings.

Among the major concerns of the Anglo-Saxons, as the surviving Old English prose and poetry attest, were the questions of fate and free will, providence and individual responsibility. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a great deal of scholarly attention was given to a search for a common philosophical background for Germanic literature (distinct from the Latin learned tradition) to complement the readily identifiable shared elements in diction, style and verse form among Old English, Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German. One school of thought, once espoused widely and not without adherents today, holds that the belief in fate was a key feature of paganism, and that the degree to which humankind is seen to be controlled by fate in Old English literature shows the extent to which the inherent paganism of the text comes through untarnished or unalloyed. When fate is in competition with God, the text has been 'contaminated', usually by a 'pious interpolator', whose 'spurious' additions obscured the underlying Germanic heroic fatalism (never clearly defined or exemplified in any extant text).

In an image of compelling sadness, the Wanderer evokes the life of a lordless man. Cold and alone, he can do nothing but remember the joys of the past-companions in the hall, the giving of treasure and the favour of his lord. Not even sleep brings forgetfulness:

Sleeping, the lordless man dreams of what he longs for most, the life of a retainer, here represented by synecdoche in the act of homage and the giving of treasure. To lack a lord is to lack place and role, friend and kin, help in need, and vengeance after death. The Wanderer's misery, having no remedy in this world, is balanced by the astringent comfort of the next. But even the Wanderer's final spiritual rejection of the world is figured in a lovingly detailed enumeration of its heroic joys: horse, kinsman, giftgiving, feasting, hall-joys, treasure, warriors and lord (The Wanderer 92-5).

Unlike the Old Testament poetry from the Anglo-Saxon period, Old English poems on New Testament themes were essentially non-narrative works. Anglo-Saxon poets ignored what one might consider to be the most attractive parts of the gospels, the stories of the nativity, the shepherds and the magi, the baptism of Christ, the turning of water into wine at the marriage at Cana, the raising of Lazarus, the moral teachings of the sermon on the mount and the accounts of miraculous healings, and chose instead to write about the great events of salvation history: the incarnation, the crucifixion, the harrowing of hell, the ascension and the last judgement. Moreover, in treating these subjects they did not draw primarily on the gospel texts: their main sources were the liturgy, apocryphal writings such as the Gospel of Nicodemus, Latin homilies and the traditions of the church.

If in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England there are strong motifs of fatalism about life in this world and a sense of its transience, there is the equally persistent belief that this life prepares one for a more enduring life. At the end of The Seafarer, the speaker declares that wyrd ('what happens') and meotud (God as the ordainer of what happens) are more powerful than anyone's gehygd ('mind', 'thought') and concludes:

This present, worldly life is passing, but there is hope for a more stable and enduring life. The content of this hope and the forms it took are the subject of this chapter. We shall consider first the major thrust of early medieval eschatology, its focus upon the last judgement and the kingdom of God which the judgement will initiate. Then we may review the lesser motif of expectations concerning the state of the soul between the time of death and the day of judgement.

If a modern English traveller could suddenly be transported back a thousand years into an Anglo-Saxon church, he would be astonished at the differences between that and the churches with which he is familiar today: here, the atmosphere inside most churches is one of calm and beatific silence; there, the prevailing atmosphere would be one of tumult and squalor, the church packed day and night with crowds of diseased and penitent persons seeking release from their sufferings through the intercession of the saint whose shrine they were besieging. A memorable picture of such tumult is given by Lantfred, a foreign monk at Winchester in the 970s, who, describing the miracles performed through the agency of St Swithun - then recently discovered and recently translated - shows us the inside of the Old Minster crammed with persons afflicted with appalling physical deformities, festering wounds, blind, paralytic, deaf, dumb, mutilated indescribably by the just process of the law or by self-imposed penitential torture, all clustered around the shrine of St Swithun, lying there day and night moaning in pain and praying aloud for deliverance from their suffering. On occasion, Lantfred reports, the church's precincts were so plugged with diseased persons that they had periodically to be cleared to make way for the clergy. Whereas today such appalling sights of disease, deformity and suffering are hidden from sight in sanitized hospitals, a thousand years ago they were on full view, every day of the year, in every church which had a saint deemed to be capable of performing a miraculous cure.

Beowulfis generally held to be the first great narrative poem in the English language. This heroic tale, 3,182 lines in length, is about a man and his people in north European lands during the period when Germanic precursors of the English were still migrating to Britain. The poem is strongly linked to the Germanic roots of the English nation and displays the qualities of English before the language and literary tradition became quite intermingled with French, classical and other non-Germanic cultures. The style and metre of Beowulf is essentially that of other early Germanic poems like the Old High German Hildebrandslied and the Old Saxon Heliand, and many of the characters and incidents in the poem are referred to independently by early Germanic writers on the Continent. Indeed, although it is usually seen as the first great masterpiece of English literature, from another perspective it may be said that by virtue of its large scale, refined style and lofty theme Beowulf is also the chief glory of early Germanic poetry at large.

The verse form used for vernacular poetry throughout the Anglo-Saxon period was that common to all the Germanic peoples, and was carried to England by the migrating tribes of the fifth century. It is therefore rooted in an oral tradition of poems composed, performed and passed on without benefit of writing. Some signs of the ways in which this poetry was created and transmitted can be gleaned from occasional references in vernacular and Latin literature. Heroic poetry in Old English tells of the professional minstrel at the court of kings, singing traditional legends from the Germanic past, and occasionally adding Christian stories to his repertoire, familiar tales made delightful to his audience by his skill in developing and embellishing them. In Latin works we learn something of the transmission of poems in more humble surroundings: William of Malmesbury, in the twelfth-century Gesta pontificum, reports King Alfred's story of Abbot Aldhelm (d. 709) reciting secular poetry at the bridge in Malmesbury to attract an audience for his preaching, and Bede, in the Ecclesiastical History, suggests that it was normal in the seventh century for men of the lowest social classes when attending festive gatherings to recite poems that they had learnt by heart.