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This chapter investigates Seamus Heaney's studies of Old English at the Queen's University of Belfast, drawing on unpublished papers recently deposited there. Noting that Heaney constructs a Romantic primitivist view of Old English, the chapter works chronologically through his oeuvre, observing how this view plays itself out in the poetry. The gothic linguistic texture of North is defended as a deliberate translatorese, drawing on Old English to illustrate the perceived strange likeness between ancient Germanic tribal violence and the contemporary crisis in Ulster. Moving more swiftly through subsequent volumes, the chapter then considers postcolonial arguments that have been put forward regarding Heaney's Hibernicization of Beowulf. Rather than seeing Heaney's translation as an appropriation of an authoritative cultural document by the once-linguistically dispossessed, this chapter argues that it more sensibly fits a narrative observable over the course of Heaney's career, that of coming to terms with a sense of linguistic binarism.

This chapter investigates Edwin Morgan's experience of Old English at Glasgow University. It argues that his translation of Beowulf negotiates two opposing theoretical positions, respecting the alterity of Old English while bringing it towards a more familiar contemporary idiom. Morgan's experimentalism with the trope of translatio in its wider sense is related to his futurist sympathies and science-fiction poems. Previous critical emphasis on Morgan as a futurist misrepresents his breadth and complexity, and a view is advanced of Morgan as also a medievalist. His sense of Old English as the root of an incipient Scottish literary tradition leads to a consideration of the linguistic politics of a ‘Scottish Old English’. Translation from Old English into Scots is discussed, not only in the case of Morgan but also Alexander and Tom Scott. Finally, a number of Old English echoes and allusions in Morgan's mature poetry are explicated for the first time.

By the early 17th century, the blurred religious allegiances of previous decades were rapidly giving way to a clear confessionalization. The Protestant Church of Ireland had become a colonial institution, in which a clergy overwhelmingly recruited from England ministered to an almost exclusively settler population. Meanwhile, the Catholicism of the Gaelic Irish and Old English was being reorganized along Counter-Reformation lines. Conflict between the government and the Old English reached a peak at the parliament of 1613. A later agreement to trade religious toleration for assistance in resolving the crown's financial difficulties (‘the Graces’) only confirmed the estrangement that now existed. The writings of the growing community of Irish exiles in Catholic Europe reflect the development of a militant Catholic ideology. By contrast, the dominant theme within Ireland itself was the continued attempt to seek an accommodation with the new political and social order.

The introductory chapter considers several diverging views on the origins of what might be called an ‘English’ poetic tradition, noting that for some critics Old English is not part of such a tradition. It is argued that while Old English is in some respects ‘other’, it is at the same time aboriginally English, and that this paradox is precisely what makes it attractive to several poets at certain moments during the 20th century. Primitivist interest in Old English is likened to other, better-known forms of modernist primitivism. The rediscovery of Old English is briefly situated within its wider historical contexts: a more general medievalism, and the rise of English studies as an academic discipline. The potential breadth of the topic is indicated by cursory mention of some of the figures not studied in depth for reasons of space: J. R. R. Tolkien, David Jones, Basil Bunting, Geoffrey Hill, and Harold Massingham.

This chapter presents an account of Auden's experiences of Old English at Oxford, then demonstrates that his early style owes many of its distinctive features to Old English poetry, and that allusions to Old English are more common than has been previously realized. Auden associates Old English with various kinds of anxiety, and in its poetry he finds analogues for the violence of his own century. He redeploys the idiom of Old English when writing of conflict, whether imaginary as in ‘Paid on Both Sides’, or historical as in The Age of Anxiety. Auden also associates Old English with sexual anxiety; an informed reading of ‘The Wanderer’ as a coming-out narrative is contingent on understanding several Old English allusions. Finally, it is argued that Auden's move from an intimate poetic voice to a more public form of address in The Orators, is achieved partly through his development of an Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric.

For many 19th- and 20th-century theorists and activists, language was crucial to nationalism. Scholars suggest that the linguistic effects of the Norman conquest constituted an important though temporary blow to English identity, and that survival of English was important for survival of Englishness. This chapter argues that whatever connection there was between the English language and English identity, it was fairly weak. The discernible influence of Old English literature after the middle of the 12th century is also negligible. However, it contends that bilingualism was also very important in facilitating the process of cultural assimilation. In particular, England fairly quickly developed into a bilingual society, at least in towns, the aristocracy, and perhaps among the middling sort.

This chapter re-examines the role of the Irish in the origins of the Old English alphabet. There are many theories about the Old English alphabet's origins. These include those contained in Karl Luick's Historische Grammatik and E. Sievers and K. Brunner's Altenglische Grammatik, which both offered the view that the model for the Old English alphabet was the Latin alphabet. But the first work to cover Old English orthography was Alistair Campbell's Old English Grammar, which rejected the notion that the Latin alphabet which underlay the Old English alphabet was the one taught by the Irish.

This chapter examines study in Britain of Old English during the twentieth century. It explains that the field of Old English, the nature of the language and the corpus of literature, was essentially discovered and defined during the course of the nineteenth century, principally by scholars in Germany and Scandinavia. It highlights the institutional support provided by the British Academy to Old English studies.

The defeat of the rebellion of the earl of Desmond opened the way for the first large scale experiment in colonization — the plantation of Munster. Government policy met with less opposition in the west, where the composition of Connacht won the support of major landowners, although the local administration also used extreme violence to impose its authority. There was less open resistance than in England to the return to Protestantism under Elizabeth I. However, committed Irish-born Protestants remained a small minority. The descendants of the medieval colonists continued to emphasize their English culture and allegiance. But their anomalous position as Catholic subjects of a Protestant queen, along with disputes over taxation and competition from more recent settlers, led to the emergence of a new defensive sense of identity, reflected in the appearance of the term ‘Old English’.

English vocabulary owes an enormous debt to the other languages of medieval Britain. Arguably, nowhere is this debt more significant than in the 12th century—a complex and fascinating period of ‘transition’, when (amongst many other things) influence from both Norse and French is increasingly apparent in writing. This article explores the etymologies, semantics and textual contexts of some key words from this crucial time, as a way to think about the evidence for contact and change at the boundary of Old and Middle English, and to illustrate how rich, diverse, challenging and surprising its voices can be. It concludes with a case study of words meaning ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ in Old and early Middle English, concentrating on the vocabulary of the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 343.

This chapter constitutes a comprehensive investigation of the extant references to Sodom in Old English texts, except for Genesis A which is considered in Chapter 6. It divides these allusions into four categories: those using Sodom's destruction as the prime example of the punishment of sin; those where the Sodomites' behaviour exemplifies sin of an unusual gravity; those where Sodom is especially associated with sexual sin; and those in which Sodom is associated with unnatural sin. It shows that, contrary to the assumptions of many medieval scholars, not only do none of the references explicitly link Sodom to same‐sex acts, but many make quite other associations with the city.