Old English Texts

The texts below are taken from several sources and do not precisely reproduce the texts in Mitchell and Robinson’s Guide to Old English. They should not be regarded as new or original editions of any of these texts, and they are obviously no substitute for the annotated texts in Mitchell and Robinson's Guide.

Most of the texts are arranged in a way that is meant to help you in translating them. They are set out phrase-by-phrase rather than line by line or in continuous prose, in order to show you each unit of translation at a glance; lines are indented to show you which clauses are subordinate, which are parallel, and which phrases are nested within clauses or parallel to other phrases. I have done this because I believe that when you translate Old English, it is very important to resist the temptation to start at the beginning of the sentence and look up every word in the glossary. Instead, you should start with a unit of discourse, figure out what it is (a main clause, a subordinate clause, a prepositional phrase, etc.), find the key word — the verb or the noun on which the unit depends — and arrange your understanding of the phrase around that. Try to get as much sense and information as you can from the text before you look up any word in the glossary.

The texts are in .pdf format; to read them you must have the (free) Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded from the Adobe website if it is not already installed on your computer somewhere. Most browsers can read these with a special plug-in, but you may prefer to download them and print them out. I find that drawing on a text — underlining, circling, making loops and arrows, adding words between the lines, and so on — is the best way to learn to read it.

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