Anglo-Saxon Scripture Portions
The Anglo-Saxon or Old English scriptures that we know about do not include the whole Bible, only those parts that were translated from the Latin by different individuals in the period c.880 to c.950 AD. These were the parts that were most valued by the English people of the Middle Ages - the Pentateuch (later expanded to include parts of Joshua and Judges), the Psalms and the Gospels.
We have added chapter and verse divisions following modern Protestant English Bibles without showing the divisions used in the Old English manuscripts, except for the book of Psalms where we have noted the Old English Psalm number in the heading of each Psalm.
Disclaimer: this is not a scholarly edition with detailed apparatus, but is designed for simplicity and ease of use. There are scholarly edition editions available for those interested; but no-one as far as we are aware have set out to combine all extant Old English scriptures together as we have done here.
Recommended font
Although most major fonts support the Anglo-Saxon characters, for the best reading experience we recommend that the Junicode font be used. It can be installed from https://sourceforge.net/projects/junicode/files/
The Psalms
This edition of the Old English Psalms is based on the Paris Psalter, a manuscript that contains the OE prose Psalms - those numbered 1-50 in Old English, 1-51 in Modern English bibles, with the remainder taken from an OE metrical translation of the Psalms, loosely translated from a Latin version known as the ‘Roman Psalter’ but occasionally influenced by other Latin Psalters current in England in the 9th and 10th centuries.
Both OE versions - the prose and the poetic - are anonymous, but there is widespread consensus that the translator of the prose Psalms was none other than King Alfred himself, who reigned over much of southern England from 871 to 899 AD. One compelling piece of evidence is a statement by William of Malmesbury in c.1125 AD that Alfred had finished translating the first 50 Psalms shortly before his death. The remaining Psalms are copied from a metrical version composed anonymously in the decades following Alfred's death. It is presumed that the metrical translation covered all 150 Psalms, but apart from a few fragments, only those numbered 51-150 in the OE (correstonding to 52-150 in ME) have survived, by virtue of having been incorporated in the Paris Psalter.
The Paris Psalter, whilst largely complete, has some missing or damaged folios; the text in these instances has, wherever possible, been filled in from other surviving fragments.
Chapter divisions in the Old English Paris Psalter are as in the Septuagint (LXX). These differ from those used in Hebrew (Masoretic text) and Modern English Bibles, as follows:
OE/LXX chapters == ME/Heb. chapters
1-8 == 1-8
9 == 9-10
10-112 == 11-113
113 == 114-115
114-115 == 116
116-145 == 117-146
146-147 == 147
148-150 == 148-150
Within the chapters we have used the ME versification which frequently differs from the versification of the Paris Psalter (actually there are no verse numbers shown in the manuscript itself - the verse numbers shown in some print editions of the Paris Psalter were added wherever the manuscript had a decorated capital letter). Note that the Hebrew Bible matches the ME in its chapter divisions but not always in verse numbering.
Sources:
The Prose Psalms were taken from https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.medievalacademy.org/resource/resmgr/maa_books_online/oneill_0104.htm#hd_ma0104_head_066, whose source was: O'Neill, Patrick P./ King Alfred's Old English Prose Translation of the First Fifty Psalms. Medieval Academy Books, No. 104 (2001).
The Metric Psalms were digitised on Dokumen.pub (The Anglo Saxon Poetic Record) using OCR from a print copy of ‘The Paris Psalter and the Meters of Boethius’ ed. by George Philip Krapp, Columbia University Press (1932).
Old English pronunciation guide
It will be helpful to readers to know how Old English should be pronounced, according to modern scholarly opinion.
The consonsants were for the most part pronounced as in modern English, but note in particular:
- F is pronounced the same as the modern English when at the start or end of a word, or when it is beside an unvoiced consonant. However, it is pronounced like V if it comes between two vowels (heofan, seofan, yfel) (ME ‘heaven’, ‘seven’, ‘evil’), or between a vowel and a voiced consonant within a word (wulfas) (ME ‘wolves’).
- S also changes in the same way, being pronounced like Z when between two vowels (dysig, ceosan) (as their modern equivalents ‘dizzy’, ‘chosen’).
- C is pronounced like ‘ch’ when before a front vowel (i, e, æ); for example, cild, lice, ceaster are pronounced ‘child’, ‘liché’, and ‘chester’. If ‘c’ comes before a back vowel (a, o, u) or a consonant, it is pronounced like K, for example, cyning, cræft, cnapa.
- G can be pronounced one of three ways depending on where it occurs in a word. Before front vowels (i, e, æ) the ‘g’ is pronounced /j/ like modern ‘y’ in ‘yet’. For example, þegen, geond, werig (‘thane’, ‘yond[er]’, ‘weary’). If ‘g’ is before or after a consonant or back vowel (a, o, u), the g is pronounced like in ‘garden’. For example, god, gar, lang. Between two back vowels, g is pronounced /ɣ/ (voiced velar fricative), for example, boga, dragan. This sound is no longer used in modern English and is hard for anglophones to pronounce.
- Sc is pronounced like the modern English ‘sh’, so words like biscop, scip, and fisc are all pronounced like their modern English equivalents bishop, ship, and fish. There are however two instances where ‘sc’ is pronounced like ‘sk’. The first is if the ‘sc’ occurs due to a compound e.g. ‘is-cald’ - ice cold. The second is when ‘sc’ occurs before or after a back vowel (a, o, u). For example, ascian and tusc are pronounced ‘askian’ and ‘tusk’.
- Cg in Old English is pronounced like ‘dg’ in modern English. So ‘brycg’ is pronounced just like its modern equivalent ‘bridge’. Similarly, ‘ecg’ is pronounced ‘edge’.
- þ, ð (capitals: Þ, Ð) were interchangeable in Old English by the 9th century on, are pronounced as unvoiced or voiced θ (‘th’), as in ‘thing’ (unvoiced) or ‘then’ (voiced).
In many instances where a consonant changes sound in Old English, it is preserved in the modern English spelling. We write ‘heaven’, ‘ship’, ‘bridge’, ‘ask’ and ‘dizzy’ as these are how the words have always been pronounced and the letters we use to represent these sounds have evolved. Finally, it is important to remember that there are no silent letters in Old English so all letters are pronounced.
A good resource for the pronunciation of the OE vowels is https://oldenglish.info/advpronunciationguide.html. Here I will just mention one point, that is, most vowels have a long and a short form which are pronounced differently, but are not distinguished in OE manuscripts. I have not therefore not distinguished them by diacritics in this publication, except where I felt it desirable to distinguish certain homographs in order to enable a more useful wordlist to be generated from the text. For example, it is helpful to distinguish OE ‘god’ (God) and ‘gōd’ (good); and OE ‘man’ (human) and ‘mān’ (evil).
