Quotes About Old English

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.

I've spent so many years talking about lame ducks in the White House and Congress, and it's never occurred to me to find out what the heck it means. It turns out it's an old English hunting term - something about firing at a duck without quite killing it. In any case, the hobbled duck limps on, at a distinct disadvantage.

Look at this shirt!" exclaimed Schrift, with sudden irrelevant fury. "Specially made for me by Thresher & Glenny in London—it cost more than you probably spent on coal last winter. If I told 'em once, I told 'em a hundred times—I want the monogram in Old English, not roman type! What do they think I am—a letterhead? No wonder the British Empire's falling apart.

Now, now," said Ellery with a smile. "Surely that's overheated imagination, Jenny? I thought ghosts are indigenous only to old English castles.

I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien's legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.

Language and History in Viking Age England: Language Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Turnbout, 2002).

The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.

Biddy entered on our special agreement, by imparting some information from her little catalogue of Prices, under the head of moist sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old English D which she had imitated from the heading of some newspaper, and which I supposed, until she told me what it was, to be a design for a buckle. Of

There's something weird about Wednesday. Wednesday's child is full of woe. Wednesday is sad and anxious about who he is, where he stands in the week. The word is weird. It should be Weirdsdsay. Wednesday would like to be Latin but took his name from Woden, the Norse God. The Old English had to say Wednesdaeg, which is a bit of a mouthful. Funny things happen on Wednesday.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

The modern word derives from the Old English cyning, meaning something like 'son of the kin'.