This study had its origins in my doctoral dissertation on Early Middle English changes of vowel quantity. Since I was a student at Vienna University, it is no big surprise that my thesis took the great Viennese philologist Karl Luick's treatment of the topic as a starting point. In some way, even, it started out as an attempt to translate the story Luick had told of the changes into the language of historical linguists of our time. As often happens with translations, however, mine turned out to become an interpretation, a deconstruction and eventually an almost complete recreation of the text it set out merely to ‘make understandable’. The obvious reason for this was, of course, that many of the Neogrammarian concepts Luick had employed have come to be refuted by the linguistic community and that even the very existence of sound laws that had long counted as well established has come to be questioned in brilliant and convincing ways by modern historical linguists. Most eye-opening to me, in this respect, was Donka Minkova's radical re-interpretation of Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening in her 1982 paper in Folia Linguistica Historica. At some stages during my work, then, I thought that the purpose of my study was to discover ‘errors’ in the stories of Luick and my other predecessors, to set them right and to make their accounts more ‘true’. Certainly, while I was working on my dissertation, such a heroic search for ‘truth’ appeared as a noble and worthy task to me and motivated me greatly.