I am drumming ahead like anything with my Anglo-Saxon, and it is great fun. One begins it in a Reader constructed on the admirable system of having nearly all the text in one dialect and nearly all the glossary in another. You can imagine what happy hours this gives the young student—for example, you will read a word like 'WADO' in the text: in the glossary this may appear as WEDO, WAEDO, WEODO, WAEDU, or WIEDU. Clever bloke, ain't he? The language in general, gives the impression of parodied English badly spelled. Thus the word 'CWIC' may baffle you till you remember the 'quick and the dead' and suddenly realize that it means 'Alive'. Or again TINGUL for a star, until you think of 'Twinkle, twinkle little star'.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, July 20, 2026
Learning Anglo-Saxon
C.S. Lewis, letter to his father (October 28, 1922):