07. The Old English Worldview

We left the Germanic peoples in our last lecture having separated from the IndoEuropean rootstock of language, moving north and west, and ultimately splitting off again into various regional groups. One such group came to the British Isles in the 5 th and 6 th centuries. The history of this peopleand, thus, of the earliest speakers of what we can now call the English languageis written in the words they used and the poetry and prose they wrote. In this lecture, well look at loan words that came into the Germanic languages in the continental and insular periods of borrowing, and well see how the first known poet in English, Caedmon, used the resources of his vocabulary and his literary inheritance to give vernacular expression to new Christian concepts.