Why read and study Anglo-Saxon poetry?

Although it is the primary linguistic basis of modern English, in 1066 the Anglo-Saxon language was culturally oppressed, along with England itself, by the French and Latin languages of the Norman conquerors. Thereafter the English language went through rapid and large-scale changes (see below, Chapter 1) that turned it into the later medieval language (such as that of Chaucer) which we can easily recognize as a form of English. By fairly soon after the eleventh century Anglo-Saxon had become a dead language, scarcely surviving in spoken use, its writing unintelligible until deciphered centuries later by scholars who had to reconstruct the language.

Anglo-Saxon is as much a foundational form of English as Latin is the root of Italian, French, and Spanish. Yet while Latin continued to be written and even spoken in England until the seventeenth century, Anglo-Saxon was dead by the early Middle Ages. Latin was preserved in consistent usage after the fall of Rome mainly because it was the language of the Christian church – for the English after the Conquest, the Latin ‘Vulgate’ Bible was the Christian scripture until English translations began to be made around the turn of the millennium. After 1066 Anglo-Saxon, the language of a conquered people, had no powerful institution to preserve or continue its usage, and so as a living language it soon ceased to exist.

Thus English culture has for a long time preserved a certain lopsidedness in its approach to different aspects of its linguistic heritage. Since the English language was formed largely from both Germanic and Romance roots (on the one hand from ‘Common Germanic’, including Danish, on the other from Latin and French) educational traditions ought to have paid equal respects to both originating contexts. But Latin, though also a dead language, continued, and to some extent even now continues, to be an essential component of some educational programmes (it is still a compulsory element in the curriculum of more traditional independent schools, even for pupils of an early age). Anglo- Saxon, on the other hand, has never enjoyed a similar privilege.