Fulk Robert D. An Introductory Grammar of Old English with an Anthology of Readings

Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2020. — 344 p. — (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 463).This book was originally published in 2014 by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University, Tempe Arizona. When the book went out of print, the press kindly allowed the copyright to revert to the author, so that this corrected reprint could be made freely available as an Open Access book.This book was initially drafted in 1998. The grammar has been employed and refined in the many intervening years in the almost yearly classes in elementary Old English that I have been fortunate to offer. My greatest burdern of debt is to the many students, mostly graduates, though also some undergraduates, who have studied it intensively and offered keen insights into how it might be improved. I am particularly grateful to Colin Grant, who compiled an enormous amount of material to be added to the Glossary. Users of the book will doubtless recognize its heavy reliance upon the example of its forebears in the history of Old English pedagogy. I was myself taught elementary Old English from Marckwardt and Rosier’s Old English Language and Literature, which plainly owes a heavy debt to Moore, Knott, and Hulbert’s Elements of Old English, and from Bright’s Old English Grammar and Reader, as revised by Cassidy and Ringler, a book which in its earlier editions must in turn have inspired much in Moore and Knott’s book. The structure of this book, offering elements of grammar distributed among measured chapters capped by graduated readings, a structure particularly suited to use by graduate and advanced undergraduate students, is common to all of these books, and its disappearance from the considerable array of Old English grammars currently available is the chief rationale for contributing yet another work to that pile.
The book was accepted for publication some ten years ago, but other obligations prevented its completion, since the labor demanded by the need to compile an anthology of texts to accompany the grammar and glossarize it was considerable. I wish to express my warmest gratitude to Robert E. Bjork, not only for supporting this project from the start, but for prodding me in gentle and kindly fashion after many years of neglect to fulfill the obligation incurred. Thanks are also due to the anonymous referees for the press, who suggested the most beneficial changes, and specifically to Donka Minkova, who after many years (correctly) thought the assessment so remote in time that she might safely admit to having been one of those referees, and who thereupon offered further needed encouragement about completing the project. My thanks also go to Roy Rukkila and Todd Halvorsen at ACMRS for their patience and their kind assistance with the production of this volume.