Old English Grammar

Where do you start?

Personally, I soon realised that the more I tried to learn all the rules and principals Old English Grammar, the harder it got and the more I had to learn.

There is a great deal of information on the web that provides learning resources for Old English. For example, explanations of the grammar, tutorials and videos. Many of the resources I used to generate the word endings if not known in the source material (if it is a type x verb the endings go like this etc.) are now no longer available which is disappointing. However, Wikipedia - Old English Grammar seems to get more and more comprehensive over time.

Some useful resources

I will update this list as I discover new resources.

Old English Online, funded by University College Cork

Wikipedia - Old English Grammar

A Short Description of Old English - Glasgow University

My limited contribution

When reading the comments people make about this site one of the most common is that some users have no understanding of Old English Grammar and a common question is, for nouns, what do Nominative, Accusative, Genitive and Dative mean?

The following is an attempt to explain in simple terms what these words mean. As above, there are many online resources and books written on this subject and they provide a much greater depth of accuracy and understanding than I can here.

Having said that, here goes:

Nouns are things - like King, sword and horse. In modern English we usually only change (inflect) the endings of nouns to indicate possession and for the plural case. EG.

• The King's crown ( 's indicates possession)
• The Kings came to London (s on the end implies plural - IE many kings)

In Old English there are four cases for nouns and these occur for both singular and plural. In simplistic terms:

• Nominative: The nominative case is used for the subject of a sentence.
• Accusative: The accusative case is used for the object of the sentence.
• Genitive: The genitive case is used to indicate possession.
• Dative: The dative case is used for the indirect object of the sentence.

So - to examine these concepts for the noun 'king' or Old English cyning



The King killed the slave. King is the subject of the sentence - therefore nominative case and would be translated cyning.

The slave killed the King. King is the object of the sentence - therefore accusative case and would be translated cyning. (Note for the noun 'King' - there is no difference in the inflections for Nominative or Accusative).

The King's crown was red. King is in a possessive sense and therefore genitive case and would be translated cyninges.

The slave rode his horse with the King. King is the indirect object of the sentence - therefore dative case and would be translated cyninge

There are many ways in which the nouns change their endings (inflect) for each of these cases and it is beyond the scope of this page to explain them all. Trying to encapsulate them in a computer program was hard - trying to explain them would be even harder!

Also note that the Old English equivalents to the words we use for the / that also inflect.