The period of English history which we now call ‘Anglo-Saxon’ lasted from the mid-fifth century until about the end of the eleventh, after the Norman Conquest. Most surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts date from the latter part of that period and the majority of them are in Latin, but England was unique in early medieval Europe in having a thriving vernacular literature also – written in the language that we now call ‘Old English’, to distinguish it from the ‘Middle English’ stage of the evolving language, which culminated in the works of Chaucer and Malory.

THE TEXTS

The fifty-six vernacular reading texts selected for this book have been organised under forty headings and in six thematic sections, in a way which it is hoped will provide a coherent view of the range and variety of the preserved OE corpus. Section introductions give a brief overviewof those themes and their significance in the history and the literature of the Anglo-Saxons. However, the sections are not mutually exclusive, and many of the texts could certainly claim a place in more than one. Each text within the sections has its own headnote, which sets it in its historical and literary context and alludes to any major critical problems involved in the editing or reading of it. In a fewcases, where the narrative is particularly complex, a brief summary or paraphrase is given. Some points of linguistic and orthographical interest are noted also (see below), but these are inevitably brief, and readers with an interest in such matters should always turn to the standard editions for fuller details.