1. The Old and Middle English written records

Old English was first written using the runic alphabet. This alphabet was used in northern Europe, in Scandinavia, present-day Germany, and the British Isles, and has been preserved in about 4000 inscription and a few manuscripts. It dates from around the third century AD. No one knows exactly where the alphabet came from. It is a development of one of the alphabets of southern Europe, probably the Roman, which runes resemble closely. The modifications which Latin letters underwent in the runic alphabet are accounted for by the technique of writing used by Germanic tribes in those early times. Namely, writing at the time did not mean putting a colour or paint on some surface: it meant cutting letters into wood or engraving them on stone or bone. So the letters are angular; straight lines are preferred. Horisontal lines were not made as the knife used to cut it merely separated fibres of the wood, and eventually, when the knife was removed, the fibres of the wood joined again, and no trace of a line remained visible. So horisontal lines were tilted upwards or downwards. Curves were replaced by broken lines. And one more peculiaruty of the runic alphabet not satisfactorily explained yet: tilted lines stretching from top to bottom were avoided: they were shortened in one way or another.

The common runic alphabet used throughout the area consisted of twenty four letters. It is written both from left to right and from right to left. Each letter had a name, and the alphabet as a whole is called the ‘futhorc’ (in Britain), from the names of its first six letters (in a similar way to our name ‘alphabet’, derived from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta). The version found in Britain used extra letters to cope with the range of sounds found in Old English, and at its most developed form, in ninth century Northumbria, consisted of thirty-one letters.

The most famous runic inscriptions in Britain appear on Ruthwell Cross, near Dumfries, a stone monument some 5 metres tall, and around the sides of a small bone box known as the Franks Casket (named after the British archeologist A.W.Franks who discovered it in th 19th c. and presented to the British Museum). The earliest evidence of Old English is a runic inscription on a gold medallion (or bracteate) found at Undley in Suffolk in 1982, which has been dated AD 450-80.

The Middle English period can be taken to begin with the Norman invasion of 1066 and the subsequent conquest of the whole of England. Norman French replaced English as the language of the aristocracy and the church. By the late 11th century the English higher clergy and nobility had been replaced by French. In the Domesday Book (1086), a detailed record of land property in England, proposed by William and carried out in his name, there are virtually no English landlords mentioned — the higher echelons of English society had been rid of the English.

Chaucer’s version of the tragic story of two lovers at the time of the siege of Troy.

The Orrmulum, a verse work of some 10,000 double lines, written ca. 1200, consists of a recounting of the story of the gospels and homilies. Its author is Orrm, a monk who termed his work ‘a little book of Orrm’. This is of linguistic significance because Orrm consistently used double consonants after short vowels. Havelok the Dane is a legend in verse, written sometime before 1300 in Lincolnshire. King Horn is a poetical romance about largely Celtic themes and was written ca. 1260 in Surrey. Handlyne Synne is a translation of a handbook for the lay community in the form of a series of tales. It is about 12,000 lines long and was written ca. 1300 by Robert Mannyng. The Confessio Amantis (ca. 1390) is a long work of some 34,000 rhyming couplets by John Gower (1330-1408), the next major 14th century poet of London after Chaucer.

In the second half of the 14th century there was a revival of interest in alliterative poetry (common in the Old English period). The language of this region can be further subdivided into a southern type — exemplified by Langland — and a northern type — seen in the author of Sir Gawain.

In the history of European languages translations of the Bible play a central role. Such translations often have the effect of standardising the language — to a large extent in written German with the translation by Luther (1483-1546) — or indeed of establishing an accepted written form in the first place as with the Finnish translation by Mikael Agricola (1509-1557). Translations of the Bible or parts of it have been made throughout the history of English. For instance in the Old English period the four gospels were translated into the West Saxon dialect. Another early translation which should be mentioned is that by John Wycliffe and his associates, produced in the late 14th century. It was based on the Latin version by St.Jerome and translated into the East Midland dialect of Middle English. There is, however, a particular period — the 16th and early 17th centuries — in which a number of translations of the Bible appeared which had an influence on the development of written English.