AngloSaxon Scripture Portions
The AngloSaxon or Old English scriptures that we know about do not include the whole Bible, only separate 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 noone as far as we are aware have set out to combine all extant Old English scriptures together as we have done here.
The Gospels
The Four Gospels in AngloSaxon or Old English were translated from Latin into Old English by Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham (c.955 – c.1010), probably some time within the period 990 – 1010; just as for the Heptateuch, he was commissioned by King Alfred to do this task.
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. ‘iscald’ 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).
This digital text has preserved the various abbreviations found in the manuscripts only as appeared in source texts which came to me already digitised, most commonly the symbol ⁊ which represents ‘and’; for example: ⁊he bodede ⁊cwæð = and he bobede and cwæð; and þt or ꝥ which stands for ‘þæt’ (ME ‘that’).
