Hi!
I saw your comment on the -ard post, and wondered if you know beowulf-era english? (Not sure what the proper name for that is, is it old english, or is there a more precise name for it?). I have a friend looking to check the grammer of a phrase before she gets a tattoo, wondered if you could help.
Thanks!
I can’t help except with advice, because I last seriously studied Old English (Anglo-Saxon) at University in the late ‘70s and most of what I learned for exams is long forgotten.
If your friend is planning on a historical (real) phrase or quotation, I’d advise checking several books to find out how its wording averages out and hopefully see some pictures of the original.
If it’s a modern (made-up) phrase, then I can only suggest asking someone on Tumblr; I’m sure there must be current OE scholars willing to help, or indeed Lord of the Rings fans, since the Rohirric language was OE as near as never-mind.
Also, and this is IMPORTANT for something permanent like a tattoo, make sure your friend knows what it looks like in the proper lettering, and can bring an example to the tattooist, because the font commonly called “Old English”...
...is really Gothic Black-Letter or Fraktur.
It’s about 450 years later than anything written in Anglo-Saxon times, which used variations of Uncial, Half-uncial, Insular and Carolingian script. If it looks Irish, that’s because Hibernian monastic scribes played a major role in preserving and copying written records during the “Dark Ages”.
Here’s an example of Beowulf, and below it an example from The Peterborough Chronicle, both of them written using Old English (Ænglisc) language, neither of them using so-called “Old English” letters.
