Old English: Language and Literature

Old English: Language and literature

Old English was spoken in very different dialects until 1066, when England was invaded by William the Conqueror and the Normans from France, who were descended from Scandinavian adventurers. It was a heavily inflected language, that is, the words changed form to indicated person, number, tense, case and mood, and its vocabulary was almost entirely Germanic. After conversion to Christianity became more general in the seventh century, some of the Old English poems, until then passed on only orally, were written down, and probably modified, by monks. Only about thirty thousand lines of these poems have survived.

For about five hundred years, almost all Old English verse had the following characteristics:

( each line was made up of two half-lines, separated by a caesura (a pause) and
      joined by alliteration;
( each half-line consisted of two ‘feet’(a ‘foot contains a number of unstressed syllables and a stressed syllable);
( the alliteration linking the two half-lines fell on the stressed syllables (at least one of the main stresses in the first half-line began with the same consonant sound as the first main stress in the second half-line);
    ← words beginning with the same consonant had the same sound and therefore alliterated (unlike in modern English);
    ← a word beginning with a vowel was regarded as ‘alliterating’ with any other word beginning with a vowel even if that vowel sound was not the same.

Although the metrical style of Old English was later replaced by the rhyming poetic forms brought in by the Normans, alliterative verse, in a modified style, continued to be written until the fifteen century.

[Roger Gower, Past into Present: An Anthology of British and American Literature
      (Longman), p.20.]