Ōsweald Bera
Review by Andrew Ellison
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Gorrie, Colin. Ōsweald Bera: An Introduction to Old English. Vergil Press, 2024. 235 pp.
Dr. Colin Gorrie’s Ōsweald Bera is the very first such book of its kind: a graded reader for learning Old English (Late West Saxon, to be precise) according to the natural method. Published under the auspices of the Ancient Language Institute, and used in the first two semesters of the Institute’s affordable and accessible online, non-credit-yielding courses in Old English (the current catalogue lists 9 total OE offerings, with the most advanced being a course in verse composition), it is a revolutionary text with a revolutionary purpose.
In Ōsweald there is no didactic grammatical instruction, no noun and pronoun declension charts, no verb paradigms; there is no lengthy introduction about comparative Indo-European linguistics, the Germanic language family, the history of Old, Middle, and Modern English; there are no historical maps, illustrations of silver jewelry, or images of the Sutton Hoo ship burial. (Speaking of which, if you are reading this, chances are you would enjoy the 2021 film The Dig, with Ralph Fiennes. Support cinema about Anglo-Saxon antiquities.)
Ōsweald doesn’t even begin with a written pronunciation guide, directing students instead to the internet where such things are widely available, and where author Collin Gorrie’s own 31-minute YouTube video on the topic would suffice, or, for the more adventurous seafarers among you, Simon Roper’s two-and-a-half-hour tutorial. You are given a four-page “how to use this book” guide with explanations of how vocabulary is notated, ten grammatical abbreviations, and then off you go straight to the woods of 11th-century Wessex. This is NOT your great-great grandfather’s dead-language textbook.
What you will find in Ōsweald Bera is 28 chapters of comprehensible input for reading, i.e. a continuous story of gradually-increasing difficulty and steadily-accumulating vocabulary. Each chapter includes a wordhoard of 30-50 new vocabulary words (glossed in Modern English), along with ten comprehension questions (written in Old English). The text is an engaging, continuous narrative about Osweald, a curious bear and rational animal if I ever saw one, and his adventures, a story that I think will delight younger students without turning off those more mature, and that can engage more sophisticated learners without going over the heads of others. The frame-story involves a father telling his daughter Mildreth the story of Osweald, and interspersed with the bear’s adventures, these characters and their neighbors pop up again throughout the narrative. As we follow Osweald, there are visits to taverns, cathedrals, encounters with King Ethelred the Unready, his beautiful Queen Aelfgifu, a talking mouse, the Archbishop of York, and an Irish slave, among others. A climactic battle comes near the end; talk of the Danish occupation in the north and the constant threat of further conflict with the Scandiavian foe establishes a threatening context. There are stories-within-stories, and, cleverly, an episode in which Osweald dreams a tale from Greek mythology. Each chapter begins with a charming illustration by Alex Swanson, not merely decorative, but integral to orienting the student in a physical scene that will aid comprehension of the story. The narrative finishes with another ursine dream, a somnium Osvaldi, of the future of England: war, political instability, conquest and re-conquest, and the coming of the Normans. But “Þæt is ōþer spell,” are the final words—“That is another story.” (Readers who want to continue with an engaging, continuous narrative about a minor landlord’s experience of the Norman Conquest and his bloody, futile forest rebellion against it are advised to take up Paul Kingsnorth’s recent novel The Wake, written in a clever New-Old English of the author’s invention, a modern “English as if William had never conquered.”1)
What is revolutionary about Ōsweald Bera is the pedagogy. Think here of the now-standard Lingua Latina books of Hans Ørberg, but for the study of Old English. With or without a teacher—more on that later—a native speaker of modern English begins by encountering simple, repetitive sentences featuring LOTS of super-obvious words, and while a quick flip to the chapter’s wordhoard might be necessary a few times per page, in short order the beginner is reading and understanding authentic Old English without parsing and thinking explicitly about grammatical forms. The language is understood implicitly, in a way that closely imitates the way children acquire a native language simply by being absorbed in it. Nothing breeds success like success, and this gradual, comprehensible approach succeeds in making the beginner feel like he’s making progress along every step of the way.
To see how this works, let’s take a look at the very beginning of Chapter 1:
Mildþrȳþ and hire fæder
On Englalande is lȳtel tūn. And on þam tūne is lȳtel hūs. And on þām hūse is lȳtel mæġden. Hēo is Mildþrȳþ. Mildþrȳþ wunaþ on þām hūse. Hire fæder wunaþ ēac þǣr.
This is presented with no notes or gloss on the page at all. Let’s assume several things about you, the beginner. First, you know modern English. Second, you have internalized OE spelling and phonetics, so you know your thorn (þ) sounds like a ‘th’ sound, your ash (æ) sounds like the ă of the word ‘hat’, the ġ is a consonantal ‘y’, and the y is like a French u or a German ü (close to an “ew” for those unacquainted with French or German). Let’s also assume, for the time being, that you have no acquaintance with any inflected language, ancient or modern.
In the opening section header, you have at first glance no idea what a Mildþrȳþ is, but and hire fæder is straightforward, for “fădder” kind of sounds like a foreigner saying “father”, and since you have internalized Old English vowel quality, you know that hire is not a homophone for “higher”, but rather rhymes with “hear-a”: “her” seems quite likely, again, as if an old Scotsman were saying her father…heer fădder. Now you can infer now that Mildþrȳþ is a female name of some kind. Mildthrewth is kind of a mouthful, so you say it again to yourself, Mildthrewth…Mildrewth…Mildreth…Mildred! Likely you know no Mildreds under the age of 97, but you’ve at least encountered the name in old children’s books, so what was off-puttingly foreign at first glance has in fact turned out to be entirely comprehensible. You get a little squirt of dopamine in satisfaction at how smart you are, and you proceed to the first full sentence.
On Englalande is lȳtel tūn.
Now this has to mean “In England is a little town”—you don’t even have to think about it. There are some things about this Old English sentence that are a little wonky: why “on England”? and why isn’t there an “a” before the little town? On England is little town. But it’s likely you aren’t even thinking about these things at this point, because you understand it, and you’re just cruising to the next sentence. Nothing to puzzle over—just keep moving.
And on þām tūne is lȳtel hūs. And on þām hūse is lȳtel mæġden.
Only that final word mæġden looks like trouble to the eye, but having studied your Old English phonics, you know it’s pronounced may-den, so “maiden” or maybe just plain “girl” is a highly likely correspondence, and now you’ve made it through three sentences without having to look up a single unfamiliar word. The word þam doesn’t trouble you in the least—that must just be the OE word for “the”, easy-peasy: And on the town is little house. And on the house is little maiden. This is a piece of cake! You remain unbothered by on—by now it seems like it must always mean “in” (I wonder how they actually say “on”, though?) and by the lack of indefinite articles; it just sounds like a speaker of a foreign language trying to get by in rudimentary English. But maybe at this point, some apparent irregularities start to strike the more attentive of you: in the first sentence we had a tūn for “town”, but in this second sentence it’s tūne. And the same thing happened to hūs/hūse between the second and third sentences. Random? Well, the little change happened when you had the on immediately in front of it. We might also remember that in the first sentence we saw on Englalande, suggesting again that on seems to like words that end in -e, or maybe vice-versa. (I wonder if we will soon encounter the form Englaland, with no on before it.) But it doesn’t really matter too much at this point, and again, if you aren’t thinking consciously about it, then you are proceeding precisely according to the plan of the natural method. You are comprehending and absorbing. Don’t stop—just understand and continue.
Hēo is Mildþrȳþ.
Now that certainly looks like “he is Mildred”, but we know Mildred is a female, so it can’t be “he”. Maybe it’s “here is Mildred”? Or is heo the word for “she”? Now you decide to consult the vocab list, the wordhoard at the end of the chapter, and there you learn that heo does in fact mean “she” (but sometimes “it”), while he just means “he” (and also sometimes “it”, which is puzzling to you, but this doesn’t seem to be a problem at the moment).
Mildþrȳþ wunaþ on þām hūse.
Here, wunaþ doesn’t immediately suggest any modern English words. But the rest of the sentence we’ve seen before: “Mildred (something) in the house.” There are lots of things she could be doing in the house, but by context you’ve got to be thinking that the first thing we would say about Mildred and her house is that she lives there; a quick flip to the wordhoard doesn’t yield the word wunaþ, but we do see wunian means “to live, reside”. You may or may not be recalling your King James Bible at this point and thinking of third person singular verb forms such as runneth, goeth, panteth, stinketh and so on; whether you do or you don’t is unimportant so long as you continue to understand and move quickly, because you are absorbing input and processing it naturally and without analysis. You get it, and the dopamine cometh.
If we skip ahead a few lines, we encounter this group of sentences, highly illustrative of how the natural method works:
Sē bera hātte Ōsweald: Ōsweald is his nama. Ōsweald bera wunaþ on holte. Wunaþ Ōsweald on hūse? Nese, ne wunaþ hē on hūse, ac on holte.
The first pair of clauses is a restatement of the same thing with slightly different words: I might not know what hatte means, but when I get to the second clause and see the obvious “Osweald is his name”, then “The bear (something) Osweald” becomes almost certainly “The bear is named or is called Osweald”, and a check of the wordhoard almost isn’t necessary but confirms it. We read that he lives on holte, which, since we know a thing or two about bears, probably means “in a forest” (wordhoard says YES—another little squirt of dopamine!) Now we get some Q and A to make sure we’ve really got it: “Does Osweald live in a house? No, he doesn’t live in a house, but in a forest.” Picture the delight that a young child takes in saying no when you ask her a silly question: “Would you like some shoes on your hamburger?” “NOOOO hahahahaha Uncle Andrew you’re so silly!” That’s the way in which the natural method is working on you here: the answer to the question is not the main thing—the fun ritual of asking and answering as an operation of language is.
This rather belabored account of how an utter beginner might work his way through the first dozen or so lines of text takes much more time to read than it would to actually occur as a process in the mind of the learner, but I hope that this helps to de-mystify the natural method of foreign language acquisition for those unfamiliar with it. Just imagine this continuing for 200 pages. By the end, you will have a vocabulary the size of a precocious 3 year-old’s, but with an older child’s capacity to understand more complex things such as language that conveys relationships of causality and time sequence, along with the ability to follow sentences of thirty or more words without getting lost. Unless you have studied outside the scope of Ōsweald, you will be unable to give a complete verb conjugation or name the case of articles on sight—but neither could native speakers of Old English, just as many modern speakers of inflected languages like German or Russian cannot: they can use the language perfectly and detect errors in others’ speech, but non-grammar-nerds (i.e. the large majority even of the educated population) don’t have datives and pluperfects at their fingertips. If you reach the end of Ōsweald, you won’t be able to read Beowulf—that would be something like attempting the Aeneid after 2 semesters of high school Latin, or a Korean student studying English for a year and then plunging into Joyce’s Ulysses. But successful completion of Ōsweald will prepare you to pick up authentic pieces of simple prose and, glossary in hand, read them with fluency and pleasure. I would specifically endorse taking up the Old English Gospels as your first post- Ōsweald text to read.
I have never formally studied Old English, though I come to Ōsweald with some advantages, including multiple years of teaching ancient and modern languages, and when I got my hands on the book, I found that I was able to read through the first two chapters with reasonable speed and pleasure in a single sitting, using the glossed vocabulary when needed. My thought after finishing the first chapter was I could go into a sixth grade, a 12thgrade, or a college classroom and teach this today. Today. Give me 15 minutes to get dressed and get there, and we will be absorbing comprehensible Late West Saxon input faster than you can say “Grendel’s mom”. Having taught from the highly-regarded Familia Romana, I can confidently say: Ōsweald Bera is the real deal and can, in the hands of a skilled teacher, do justice to its subject matter.
Now while it is conceivable to me that an English-speaker with absolutely no knowledge of any other languages could successfully use Ōsweald Bera as-is as a self-teaching guide, I believe that the independent learner who already has a fair amount of Latin (or German, because of both its inflections and the numerous vocabulary cognates it will show with OE where modern English cannot) under his belt is at a real advantage and is far more likely to succeed independently. For others, the guidance of some sort of tutor or first-among-equals in a study group would be essential. Such an effective tutor would not, however, need to be an Old English expert like Colin Gorrie. A reasonably proficient philologue with experience in Latin, Greek, or German (or all three) would be more than sufficient to guide a group.
There are some resources which ALI still has in development which would make it easier for absolute beginners to succeed in self-study, and which would go a long way towards supporting study groups of amateurs lacking a Colin Gorrie in their midst. One of these is a complete dramatized audio recording of the narrative with an ensemble cast; another, which I understand is already being beta-tested in ALI courses, is an Ōsweald Bera workbook and answer key aligned to the chapters of the main text. Both of these will be most welcome when they are made available to the public.
I do have one single complaint about Ōsweald Bera. I object to the font for the title on the cover. It is sort of a Gothic black-letter type, the font not infrequently referred to as “Old English” in word processors, the one you would use for the signage if you were opening up an establishment close to campus called Ye Olde Vape Shoppe or something. This is an appalling anachronism: Gothic script is a much later development and should not at all be associated with the Old English of Osweald’s time. If the talking bears of 11th century Wessex read and wrote, which they probably did, they did so in either the Carolingian or Insular Minuscule scripts. I assume some overpaid bozo marketing consultant urged ALI and Vergil Press to dumb it down here since modern people can’t always recognize the thousand-year-old letter shapes of the historical scripts and would be thrown by a period-correct title that looked to them like ofuuald beva or something.
But thank heavens that the Ancient Language Institute is otherwise untouched by such populist suggestions. The revolutionary work they are doing to bring the serious study of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Old English down from the (leaning) towers of academe and to take it via the natural method to learners literally all around the globe for a fraction of the price of university coursework is to be celebrated. Ōsweald Bera deserves wide circulation, and its Alcuin, Colin Gorrie, is one to watch.
For a peek at a complete, live lesson on Ōsweald Chapter 1, conducted by Alcuin himself, watch this.
Andrew Ellison has been a leader in the classical liberal education movement since 1997, having served as a high school teacher, headmaster, and charter school administrator for 26 years in two states before moving into higher education. He is a Senior Writer for Cana Academy and posts regularly about classical education and other topics on LinkedIn. Ellison is currently Vice President of Enrollment Management at the University of Dallas. He writes from Irving, Texas. His weekly column for ClassicalEd Review, Torch and Tub, appears every Friday.
The comparison here might be to the German Rudolf Borchardt’s unusual 1930 translation of Dante’s complete Commedia into an artificial neo-Middle High German, characterized by the contemporary Frankfurt novelist (and Traditionalist Catholic) Martin Mosebach as “German as if there had been no Luther”, a fantasy worth indulging for sure. “Marvelous,” wrote a friend to Borchardt in a letter. “Who exactly is supposed to read it?”