eala beorht bune!

ic lufie eow :)

[oldenglishtextposts]

wes hal!

my name is Misha (he/him). im a linguistics student who learned Old English a few years ago and am trying not to lose it! i post translations of posts i like into OE and reblog various medieval studies stuff. my personal account is @bufobuff but i pretty much just reblog stuff there

this blog is absolutely not for terfs/radfems or white supremacists. free palestine

please feel free to send me things to translate or questions about OE/historical linguistics! a few translation request ground rules: under ~50 words. only uses vocab that people from the 900's would use. nothing too dark or violent (esp no suicide or domestic violence jokes). i'm happy to bend those rules some if i think its funny

if you have questions about a translation i did: there's a good chance i already talked about it in the tags of my reblog, so check there first. i may have also answered it in another reblog or an ask! if not, you are welcome to send an ask (me frign means ask me)

if you're interested in learning OE, check out my resources tag. you can ask me questions but i am no expert! at some point i am planning to go through my archive and tag things more thoroughly. but who knows when that will happen

i make mistakes, but so did scribes. historical accuracy!

[oldenglishtextposts]

eadig gebyrddæg to me! Ic eom nu an and twentig geara :)

[translatingpostsintolatin]

natalem felicem :D

[translatingpostsintoancientgreek]

χαῖρε, φίλε· πολλὰ ἔτη βιώοις καὶ εὐτύχοις!

[oldenglishtextposts]

ic þancige eow! χάριν οἶδα ὑμῖν, ὦ φίλoι :)

[mythosphere]

"Blorbo from my shows" no. Blorbo from my BA. Blorbo from my major. Blorbo from my primary source document.

[oldenglishtextposts]

eadig gebyrddæg to me! Ic eom nu an and twentig geara :)

[heavensenthousepet]

you learn something new everyday. unless you're a historian. then you learn something old

[melonisopod]

[oldenglishtextposts]

leornast þu aht niwe æghwylcum dæge. butan sie þu stærleornere. ðonne leornast þu aht eald

[thesilicontribesman]

Anglo-Saxon Bird Brooch, The British Museum, London

[memories-of-ancients]

Viking silver brooch uncovered at Ortan Scar near Westmoreland, England, dated 9th-10th century

from The Society of Antiquaries of London

[resismedievalmenagerie]

Certified Good Boys spotted in this Bestiary from ~1175. According to the Latin, "Nothing is smarter than dogs, for they have more senses than other animals, for they alone recognize their own names; they love their masters."

[yvanspijk]

Early Latin borrowings: utensils

Over the past few days, I’ve created two infographics on early Germanic loanwords from Latin: one on construction, with words such as kitchen and street, and one on food, with cheese, butter and others.

Today, I’m wrapping up the trilogy with an infographic on utensils. Fork, pan, sack, mint and chest – they were all borrowed into Proto-West Germanic, the ancestor of English, when the Romans controlled large parts of north-western Europe during the early first millennium AD.

How do we know these words were borrowed from Latin? You can read all about it in this article. And this article tells you three ways can you identify early borrowings from Latin.

[garaks-padded-bra]

Something bad has been happening to me lately. I keep saying “oh a puppy” when i see something i find cute. I was on a walk on the cliffs and I saw a slug and said it because i thought I was alone, but then an old lady on her walk teleported behind me and said “Im afraid not…”

[oldenglishtextposts]

aht efel hæfð gelamp a me niwane. ic cweðe "la hwelp" hwanne ic locie aht leoflic. ic eode on glofe and ic locode snegel and hit cwæð forþam ic gewende þæt ic wæs æne, ac þa eald cwen in hire færelde gelende bæfte me and cwæð "ic ne swa gewenie "

[garaks-padded-bra]

^ time travelling imp transcribing my post onto parchment for the town bulletin of their fave anglo saxon settlement, Rendlæsham, in 732 AD

[papayajuan2019]

Translator's Note: I love you.

[dolmetsher]

‮באַמערקונג פונעם איבערזעצער׃ איך האָב דיך ליב.

[oldenglishtextposts]

wenderes gewrit: ic þe lufige

[charl0ttan]

i left a poem out over night. one hundred lovesick beetles and ants in the kitchen

[oldenglishtextposts]

ic læfde leoþ ut nihtlanges. hundred lufuseoc bietlas and æmetan in þære cycenan

[mamoru]

yes I DO live under a rock and her name is the Moon and she is always smiling but she teaches me nothing

[oldenglishtextposts]

gese ic WUNIGE under stane and his nama is se Mona and he is a smercigende ac he ne me lærþ nan wiht

[such-a-fellow]

Testing more illumination-style drawing with this!

—

Yde et Olive is a french narrative poem written in the thirteenth century. It’s a section of a larger cycle of poems that are sequels to the legend of Huon de Bordeaux, and may have been an adaptation of the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, though that isn’t known for certain. It hasn’t been studied much in English, but there’s a great translation by Mounawar Abbouchi here, along with analysis and in-depth translation discussion! It tells the story of Yde, the daughter of a king who disguises herself as a man to escape from her father and becomes a renowned knight before gaining the favor of a king and marrying his daughter, Olive. In a very unusual twist for this type of story, when Yde confesses the secret of her identity to Olive, Olive brushes her concerns off and vows that they will be happily married regardless of Yde’s biological gender. Like in the story of Iphis and Ianthe, their secret is found out and Yde is transformed into a man by divine intervention before he can be prosecuted for his transgression of gender.

it’s not an unusual story in itself (a young woman disguising herself as a man, doing brave deeds, and being transformed into a man so she can marry a woman in love with her is a familiar formula!), but its handling of Yde’s gender is striking, both in Olive’s blithe acceptance and in the combination of feminine and masculine language used to refer to Yde throughout. Stories of same-sex romance that end in transformations like this are often written off as heteronormative and of-their-time, and while obviously that’s a necessary lens to apply given the religious and social context Yde et Olive was written in, I don’t think that’s the end-all-be-all of what this story can be. The transformation allows this, a story from the 1200s, to contain both a sympathetically portrayed story of sapphic romance and a wonderful, nuanced tale of a transmasculine character who grows into himself through the story. Yes, this is applying a modern lens to it; we don’t know what the author of Yde et Olive intended when they wrote it and these aren’t terms they would have had or used. But regardless, in a time when being trans is day-to-day becoming more and more difficult in many parts of the world, I think it’s comforting to find glimpses of joy in stories from the past.

[luetta]

[oldenglishtextposts]

[vitoriabas]

Some wacky illustrations for a short dissertation I wrote for my Masters, exploring the relationship between medieval illuminations, marginalia, and online ads.

Markers on cartridge paper.

[oldenglishtextposts]

do you maybe know of any manuscripts with good (or very bad, of course) illustrations of birds? absolutely no worries if not, of course...

I love manuscript illustration but it is not really my forte! I’d recommend asking @cuties-in-codices ! My followers might have recommendations as well :)

[arachneedle]

here are some pictures of bad bird illustrations from one 15th-century manuscript (Oxford Bodleian Library MS Lat. misc. c.66 fol.95v) drawn by a man called Humphrey Newton:

bottom left is labelled 'crou, or egle' (crow or eagle) - he doesn't seem to have had a very clear idea of what he was doodling; top right is an osprey (labelled 'ospray'), and top left is a 'papejaye', the middle english word for a parrot - also pretty inaccurate

here are some more, unlabelled birds:

And here are some badly drawn (but better??? more accurate???) birds from a heraldry manual in Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 733:

these are the only offerings in my camera roll atm but if i think of more i will add them (there are so many busted looking manuscript illustrations)

[shredsandpatches]

Here are some very nice birds from Bodleian MS lat. liturg. f.3, a book of hours that was probably made for Anne of Bohemia en route to her wedding to Richard II (although the miniature depicting the two of them is a 19th-century forgery).

Here's some from the Sherborne Missal, but that one is in the British Library so who knows if it's back online.