Old English Poetry in Fascimile

Finding Old English sources can be difficult, especially for some of the less frequently published poems. Old English Poetry in Fascimile begins to address this issue, and is an important step in the democratisation of history and increased access to sources.

Now, if you’re looking for a straightforward set of translations into English, then the Old English Poetry Project is probably a more useful resource. However, if you’re interested more in the original language or the manuscript culture, Old English Poetry in Fascimile is your best bet.

You can find this website here.

The website here provides the texts in the original Old English – it’s often very hard to find editions of these, and where they do exist they’re often in expensive books. Having an original text in close conjunction with a translation is a useful tool for those trying to learn the language. The website also includes pictures of the original manuscripts – particularly interesting to anyone focusing on the history and form of the documents themselves. Frequent annotations allow you to quickly access editorial comments, and to correlate manuscripts with transcripts.

Instead of squirreling through a hundred expensive volumes, here is the corpus of OE poetry easily and freely accessible, in one place!

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