required reading

I have homework! It feels like years since that has been the norm, but it's going to be a part of my life for the next few weeks, as I am taking an Introduction to Old English course on Wednesday evenings. It's one of the real advantages of living in Oxford; I can't imagine this course being run in Southampton or Sheffield. My enthusiasm for Old English literature has remained undimmed over the past few years, but my knowledge of it has grown patchier. Let me put it this way: if my knowledge of Old English was a T-shirt, and I were wearing it, I'd probably need a coat on top.

I was expecting the Old English class to be populated by one type of person only: the kind of person who is interested in local history, has their family tree all planned out, goes to the theatre and knows lots of facts about the life of Shakespeare and can compare this version of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the one they saw last year in Stratford, likes to go on guided tours but likes to learn a lot beforehand so that they can ask the guide lots of tricky questions in front of all the other people on the tour: irritating enthusiasm personified. And yes, there were a few of those people there, but there was also: an archaeologist who wanted to have a rudimentary reading knowledge of Old English, a 17-year-old who was applying to study Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at Cambridge, plus his dad, a couple of people who had studied Old English at university but who had forgotten it all (it seemed to have taken them a lot longer to forget than it took me, but what can I say; I'm a natural at forgetting things I should know), someone who had stumbled across the course on a leaflet two days before, an American woman who was called "Stacey, but I don't go by that: everybody calls me Leaf", and someone who wanted "to read folk stories in the original". I don't think that it's going to be quite the right cup of tea for the last one. Yes, the words 'folk' and 'tale' come from Old Englsh words, but folklore is mostly a 19th century invention, or so I'm told. How long will it be before he realizes that we're not going to be reading 'The Wizard of Alderley Edge' or 'The Little Red Hen' in the original?

This week was mostly context for the language, plus orthography and pronunciations, so I'll be making some funny noises in the lounge later on. But the interesting fact for the week: 3 million words of Old English survive (no, they're not all different words: "the" and "and" probably come up a few times each). That might sound like a lot, but consider that Bleak House contains a whopping 300,000 words, and it all starts to seem quite, well... manageable.