Read more
Excerpt from An Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse: With Grammar, Metre, Notes and Glossary
Primer, a series of texts which will give a general knowledge of the language in its chief periods and dialects, without neglecting the interests of literary and antiquarian study, with such additional helps in the way of grammar, metre, notes, and glossary as seemed necessary.
In every old-english Reader the preference must meces sarily be given to west-saxon texts; but the exclusion of the other dialects - as in the previous editions of this book and in Bright's - is a mistake in any but a very elementary book. Dialectal texts are absolutely necessary for linguistic students, for modern English is bf dialectal origin; and the Anglian dialect in particular is of great importance for the critical study of the poetry (see Grammar, Hence I have given specimens of Northumbrian and late and early Kentish together with a long piece of early Mercian from the Well-known Vespasian Psalter; but as the hymns in that ms. Give a more varied vocabulary than the psalms themselves, I have given the hymns in full, although they are also in my Second anglo-saxon Reader, where, however, they are accompanied by the Latin original, Which I have omitted here, so as to induce the learner to master the forms more thoroughly; I have also marked the quantities in the present work.
Otherwise I have excluded glosses and glossaries, for which I must refer to the Second Reader.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
