New edition with facing-page translation of a highly significant and influential Old English text.

This reader remains the only major new reader of Old English prose and verse in the past forty years. The second edition is extensively revised throughout, with the addition of a new 'Beginning Old English' section for newcomers to the Old English language, along with a new extract from Beowulf. The fifty-seven individual texts include established favourites such as The Battle of Maldon and Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf, as well as others not otherwise readily available, such as an extract from Apollonius of Tyre. Modern English glosses for every prose-passage and poem are provided on the same page as the text, along with extensive notes. A succinct reference grammar is appended, along with guides to pronunciation and to grammatical terminology. A comprehensive glossary lists and analyses all the Old English words that occur in the book. Headnotes to each of the six text sections, and to every individual text, establish their literary and historical contexts, and illustrate the rich cultural variety of Anglo-Saxon England. This second edition is an accessible and scholarly introduction to Old English.

First published in 1900, this Reader uses four manuscripts from the British Museum and Corpus Christi College Cambridge to present a thorough introduction along with a dual-language edition of the text. The original manuscripts, as Herzfeld demonstrates, are of varying qualities and comprise of the Anglian, West Saxon, Kentish and Mercian dialects. The re-edited text is presented alongside historical remarks, criticism of the manuscript, the text’s ultimate date and place of origin and an exploration of its potential sources.

An edition of two Old English versions of the colourful legend of St Margaret of Antioch.