Taking a break after finishing the complete corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry was fun, but I have found that I miss reading and re-reading bits of Old English every morning and then staring into the monitor as I try to edit the sound files. So I’m moving on to Anglo-Saxon prose. I am not promising to do the entire corpus this time. The poetic corpus is about 30,000 lines and it took two years. The prose corpus is an order of magnitude larger, and I’m not at this stage prepared to make a 20-year commitment. But we’ll give prose a try and see what sounds good.
Originally I had thought to start with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but there are too many Roman numerals in there right now (not that I can’t read Roman numerals, but I not particularly good at converting them into Old English numbers on the fly), so I’ve decided to go with Wulfstan’s homilies. I’m using Dorothy Bethurum’s edition and working through in chronological order.
As was the case with the poetry, I’ll try to post every weekday with the equivalent of 100 lines of text.
