A Brief Primer on Old, Middle & Modern English

It's Important That You Learn the Difference

As a language pedant, I find it very irritating when I post about Dickens or Shakespeare and some wag pops into my mentions to scold me for demanding that people read books in “Old English.” This happens more often than you would expect. Most egregiously, a widely derided post last year argued that we need to “modernize” all books written before 1970 (!) to make them readable for today’s readers. One pictures a man of thirty-five, an Andrew Tate acolyte with a brain scrambled by ChatGPT, attempting to decipher Beezus and Ramona with the resolve of a novice monk hunched over a manuscript by Bede. You see this eagerness to simplify language manifesting everywhere: an AI app known as Magibook promises to “turn hard books into easy books,” and alters the famous first line of The Great Gatsby to read, “When I was young, my dad told me something that I still think about.” Ugh.

One almost can’t help but despair. A part of me dies whenever someone accuses Jane Austen of writing in Old English because it suggests that person hasn’t encountered actual Old English. And I think that’s sad, and I think it’s a shame, because I find the language of Aelfric and Bede and the Beowulf poet to be exceptionally beautiful, to the degree that I’m actively teaching myself to read and speak it. Here, for example, is a translation of the Lord’s Prayer dating from about 995:

I think folks who have never seen Old English in the wild can glance at this and feel tempted to give up straightaway, feeling hopelessly confused. What trips them up is the pronunciation, which differs slightly from ours, and the presence of an additional letter, the thorn, that letter you see at the beginning of the third and fourth words and which forms a “th” sound. Also worth noting: f’s that appear between two vowels—like the f in “heofonum” and “yfele”—are pronounced like v’s. G appearing before i, e or ae is pronounced like modern y. Once you know this, the prayer begins to look a bit more recognizable: for example, you can probably discern that “eorÞan” is “earth” and “heofonum” is “heaven.” The wonderful thing about Old English is that it is, in fact, English.

My excellent friend Rachel Christine shared a link to a video of someone reading this version of the Lord’s Prayer aloud, so you can get a sense of the proper pronunciation and the beauty of the spoken words:

Here’s a second translation of the Lord’s Prayer, this one from the Lindesfarne Gospels circa 940:

Those mysterious symbols that resemble sevens throughout the text are abbreviated “and”s—essentially early ampersands. The slashed symbol at the end of the first two lines is a scribal gloss indicating that two different renderings of the line are being offered for the reader to choose from.

Moving ahead a few hundred years, here’s John Wycliffe’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Middle English circa 1380:

You’ll notice that it’s much more recognizably modern; you should be able to read and understand most words in the text without a great deal of difficulty. The only thing that might trip you up is the presence of the letter yogh, which flickered briefly into English during the late medieval period before disappearing. I quite like the Wycliffe Bible; I think it’s charming, and the language is much simpler than that of Chaucer or, especially, the Gawain poet so it’s an excellent point of entry for those seeking the door into the garden of Middle English.

Below the jump, we’ll chat about the Lord’s Prayer of 1611.