After a hiatus, we're returning to a weekly series highlighting a set of resources to learn about early medieval England. This week we have the Old English Poetry in Fascimile - the perfect resource to explore Old English poetry, improve your translation skills and delve into manuscript culture.
Finding Old English sources can be difficult, especially for some of the less frequently published poems. Old English Poetry in Fascimile begins to address this issue, and is an important step in the democratisation of history and increased access to sources.
Now, if you're looking for a straightforward set of translations into English, then the Old English Poetry Project is probably a more useful resource. However, if you're interested more in the original language or the manuscript culture, Old English Poetry in Fascimile is your best bet.
You can find this website here.
The website here provides the texts in the original Old English - it's often very hard to find editions of these, and where they do exist they're often in expensive books. Having an original text in close conjunction with a translation is a useful tool for those trying to learn the language. The website also includes pictures of the original manuscripts - particularly interesting to anyone focusing on the history and form of the documents themselves. Frequent annotations allow you to quickly access editorial comments, and to correlate manuscripts with transcripts.
Instead of squirreling through a hundred expensive volumes, here is the corpus on OE poetry easily and freely accessible, in one place!
Interested in archaeology, and keen to access more information and resources? I have recently released a set of free, online notes for the archaeology of 'Anglo-Saxon' England - this is available here.
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Check out my previous articles on my own personal PhD research on Anglo-Saxon (here), Viking (here) and obscene (here) nicknames.
A new Deep-Dive article on the so-called 'New Chronology' historiographical conspiracy theory can be found here. It's received some glowingly hateful comments by conspiracy theorists...
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