April 6, 2009

About the Anglo-Saxon Bible

The Bible of the Anglo-Saxons was primarily the Latin Vulgate. In the days before printing had been invented, few people would have owned a Bible at all. And because of the size of the complete Bible (which would have included the Apocrypha) it is not certain a complete Bible in any language ever existed in England of the first millennium AD. What has survived are individual books (in particular the Psalter) or some selections of books (e.g. the Gospels and the Pentateuch). Very few of these texts were ever deliberately translated for an Anglo-Saxon audience, since books were very expensive. Also, literacy was extremely limited, even among the clergy, as King Alfred the Great lamented.

Much of what does survive in Old English are so-called interlinear glosses, the translations of individual words or phrases written above the lines of Latin Bible texts. We have quite a few Psalters with interlinear Old English glosses. The problem with such glosses is that they often distort the syntax. They were not intended as a translation but rather as crib notes for monks whose Latin was shaky. So they tend to slavishly follow the Latin word order and be very literal and do not accurately represent Old English usage. Nevertheless, we do have some actual translations in Old English, in particular the larger part of the first seven books of the Old Testament (Ælfric’s Heptateuch), both prose and verse translations of the Psalter, and all four Gospels. Much of the rest of the Bible was probably never translated as a unit, though it often survives scattered in the form of quotations used in homilies and similar texts.

Goal of the website

This website aims to make as much of the vernacular Old English Bible available as possible. The work consists of two parts:

1. Finding, editing and making available authentic Bible texts; and

2. Providing new translations for the ‘missing’ parts

The project is entirely volunteer-driven. The editor takes all effort to preserve the copyright on other editions and will not make available copyrighted material. All non-original texts made available on this website are believed to be in the public domain. Please contact the editor in case of believed infringement of rights.

Helping us

If you want to help us by transcribing existing texts or by translating texts into Old English, please contact the editor.

Contributors

Michel van der Hoek, editor

Matthew Carver (Romans)

Rachel Klippenstein (Acts)

Mark Langley (Mark)

Rich Rhodes (Mark)