The origins of present day English, formally designated Modern English, are fascinating and reside in Germanic languages of the first few centuries AD that were carried to Britain by Germanic tribes: Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. This process began when Germanic warriors were raiding the coast of Britain as early as 360 AD. In 433 AD the Britons asked the Angles to come as mercenaries and help fight off attacks by the Picts of Scotland. Old English is a member of the West Germanic family of languages and its earliest ancestor may be Ingvaeonic (c.100 A.D.) to be followed by Anglo-Frisian (c.300 A.D.). The Norman Conquest (Battle of Hastings) marks the end of Old English and the beginning of Middle English as a great quantity of Latin, (Norman French) and other vocabulary was rapidly introduced into 'English'. "The letter yogh, for example, was adopted from Irish; the letter eth was an alteration of Latin "d", and the runic letters thorn and wynn are borrowings from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction 'and', a character similar to the number seven (.. called a Tironian note), and a symbol for the relative pronoun '..', a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender. Used occasionally were macrons over vowels, abbreviations for following 'm's or 'n's." ... "Like other West Germanic languages of the period, Old English was fully inflected with five grammatical cases, which had dual plural forms for referring to groups of two objects (but only in the personal pronouns) in addition to the usual singular and plural forms. It also assigned gender to all nouns, including those that describe inanimate objects: for example, seo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, while se mona (the Moon) was masculine (cf. modern German die Sonne vs. der Mond)."1 Old English is spelled essentially as it is pronounced and maintains several distinct cases: the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and (vestigially) instrumental, although only remnants survive in a few pronouns in modern English.

The dominant language in Europe at the time of Old English development was Latin, and the vast majority of literate persons were Catholic clergy. Scribal monks spent long hours writing, preserving, and copying precious manuscripts. And of course Latin is the language of the Catholic mass, no matter that few in the audience could understand what was said. Old English was viewed as a 'vernacular language' - an inferior 'folk language' .Alfred the Great was a great supporter of Old English and spent considerable effort to preserve, foster and meld various dialects into a single coherent language.

Three periods of Latin word input into Old English can be identified. The first occurred before any Saxon peoples migrated to England. The second commenced as Saxon peoples were converted to Christianity (~600 AD) and Latin priests then lived among them. The third period occurred immediately after the Norman Invasion of 1066. Old English was further modified as it moved away from the runic alphabet to the Latin alphabet.

Viking invasions into Britain in the ninth and tenth centuries placed large areas of the country under their control along the east coasts of England and Scotland. These invaders spoke Old Norse and they established many place names in their language along with the more significant vocabulary that derived from administration of the Danelaw in regions under their control. Old Norse also derived from Proto-Germanic.

Somewhat surprisingly, the number of Celtic loan words into English is low perhaps reflecting the intense animosity between Saxon invaders and indigenous Celts where there was an intense cultural and religious divide. The Catholic Church has considerable difficulty converting Celtic peoples in the British Isles, conversion moved ahead slowly. The difficulties encountered by St. Patrick in Ireland are well known. Most Celtic loan words are derived from Brythonic, a few from Goidelic (Irish) presumably via missionaries. A handful of Old English words can be traced to Gaulish.

Four main dialects of Old English evolved: Mercian and Northumbrian (collectively known as Anglican), Kentish and West Saxon. Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings in the 9th century. The portion of Mercia that remained independent integrated with Kent to become the Kingdom of Wessex. Alfred the Great unified the Anglo Saxon kingdoms in 878 and the dominance of his rule accorded the dialect of Wessex prominence. Alfred passionately promoted the 'vernacular' and established a program to translate religious texts into Old English using scribes from his home region of Mercia. Alfred himself translated at least one important church book from Latin into English.

Perhaps the three most famous Old English works are the epic poem Beowulf, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle (Bede) which records early English history and Caedmon's Hymn (Caedmon), a Church religious poem. Poetry, however, remained at the heart of Old English literature and provided a vehicle through which a more ancient Celtic symbolism can occasionally be glimpsed..

The links below are offered with the hope they may prove useful to scholars, researchers and anyone interested to know more about Old English, its history structure and literature. Considerable time has been spent roaming the Internet and this list below is quite comprehensive. Some of these links are old academic web pages that are no longer maintained. We hope they remain on the internet from many years, nonetheless. All pages will open in a new window.

The Google Books archive offers an excellent broad selection of the complete text of older scholarship where copyright has expired. The best history and language studies of this period incorporate a holistic, multidiscinplinary view that is often considered to be lacking in rigor by contemporary academic criteria. History and language books of this generation from Google Books are included in the links below. Complete texts of these books are available to read online with the Full View option and, in many instances the book can be downloaded as a large pdf file. Note that if you are still connecting to the Interent with a dialup modem, page load times will be long and downloads will frequently not complete.