Old English in Switzerland: Manuscripts, Texts and Libraries

Switzerland counts among the small but exciting places for the transmission of Old English, the ancestor language of present-day English which was spoken in England from about AD 500 until the Norman Conquest of England in AD 1066. Swiss libraries preserve some of the earliest Old English written sources including Old English bird names, the Old English names of the months, Anglo-Saxon runes, as well as the earliest version of Bede's Death Song. Other Old English texts found in Swiss libraries were copied in Anglo-Saxon England and only reached Switzerland later, for example, three short legal texts and a fragment of a homily by Aelfric. This book presents Old English texts surviving in Swiss libraries in their historical, cultural and linguistic contexts in ten chapters.