Customer Reviews

A Concise Anglo-Saxon dictionary

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Students, usually a penurious lot, are in a pickle when it comes to dictionaries of ancient languages: a good one is essential, but often expensive. This paperback reprint offers a happy solution, a reasonably-priced dictionary of first resort. This is where to go when all you need is the meaning of a word. Words, their definitions, a few notes--it's really just a glorified glossary. Normalized spellings are used, but variants are included and cross-referenced. The notes consist mainly of abbreviated references to original texts and more advanced works, including the OED (or the NED as it was called when this dictionary first saw print). Latin borrowings are marked, but cognates in other Germanic languages are not supplied--save a few exceptions that occur maybe once every seven pages for no reason I can discern.

A sample entry might give you a better sense of how this dictionary is organized.

bearm I. (a) m. lap, bosom, breast, Lk : middle, inside: (+)possession. II. emotion, excitement? PPs 118. III.=beorma

[Lk = Gospel of Luke; (+) = poetical; PPs = Paris Psalter.]

I haven't anything to add to these reviews, except to offer some clarification on this dictionary's exclusive use of "eth" (ð) and never "thorn" (þ). Several reviewers have complained about this as a defect in the dictionary, so it is worth pointing out that in Old English the eth and thorn characters are used interchangeably. The phonetic quality of each is determined not by the character used, but by its placement in the word. For instance, at the beginning or end of a word, it is voiceless, but it is voiced when falling between other voiced sounds. (Here the other reviewers were, perhaps, confusing things with Old Norse, in which eth does always = voiced "th," and thorn = its voiceless counterpart.)

Now, one may say that the dictionary editors might have been more charitable by standardizing the eth and thorn characters, one each for voiced and voiceless "th" (as some editors do) to aid in pronunciation, and that would be a fair statement; on the other hand, it would be equally fair to assert that students of (or even dabblers in) Old English are expected to be able to tell the difference without the editors' help. In any case, it is highly erroneous to say (as one reviewer did) that this dictionary "screws up" the usage of thorn and eth.

... this is more a lexicon than a dictionary. But it is the only affordable and valuable one on the market, behind the great (but very expensive) Bosworth and Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dict. Thus, sometimes you might not find the word you're looking for. So be smarter than the lexicon: search another word derived from the same root, suppress the prefixes, change the cases, think of the infinitive of the verbs, and you may finally obtain your translation of the word.
But let us be honest: this book is great, and affordable for most of us.
A classic ?

Easy to read, but codes must be looked up constantly in the front of the book. The ubiquitous ge- is dropped, so only the root is given, indented slightly. Well-constructed paperback.

Originally published in 1894, revised in 1916, and enlarged in 1931,
this dictionary saw its fourth edition in 1960, which is reprinted here.
This reprint will surely be of great value for in-depth studies
of Anglo-Saxon by readers who have already got some introduction
to the language. It contains a wealth of lexical materials, part of
which is not so easily accessible from other sources. I have given it
only four stars because it lacks some important essentials of a
high standard dictionary: Compound and derived words are hardly
analyzed, grammatical information is minimal, there is no hint to
pronunciation, and there is no English - Anglo-Saxon index. Although
as a rule there is a clear rendering into Modern English, one will
also note that some words are only translated into Latin. So I see
the dictionary as a very valuable source of knowledge about Anglo-Saxon,
but difficult to use without prior introduction into basic facts of the
language.

I am doing my graduate thesis on Anglo-Saxon literature and have been using borrowed copies of this dictionary for months, to supplement my readings of Anglo-Saxon texts. The dictionary itself is wonderful so I decided to buy a copy. This version, however, is practically a scam. My book arrived today and was an utter disappointment. The original J.R. Clark Hall dictionary was published in the 1890s and there have been 3 subsequent editions (1916, 1930ish, and most recently, around 1964). This book appears to be a scanned version of the 1890s edition, meaning that it is not only lacking the updates of more recent editions, it is also barely legible, because the original font has been condensed and darkened to the extent that it's almost impossible to discern the difference between some Anglo-Saxon characters and Modern English characters. Since this is a dictionary, the importance of being able to tell how something is spelled is quite obvious. Further, the definitions themselves are not much easier to read - the text itself is less thick but it's often broken off mid-letter. I am quite frustrated to find that I cannot order a new copy of a reliable classic without it being so cheaply made. I am going to try to find a used copy of the 1964 edition, since it appears that this is the only version that Amazon sells new. I wish I had not wasted my money on this because I will now have to spend more to send it back and find a usable version.

I was taking a course in Old English last year and bought the dictionary for that. I find this dictionary is better than the Bosworth Toller, which often has definitions in Latin. This particular dictionary is very helpful for translating Beowulf. Course, if you can afford it, access to the Old English Dictionary they are compiling at University of Toronto might be better but I find this one adequate and very handy.

A wonderful source for Anglo-Saxon words and their meanings, which is very reasonably priced. Intended as a teaching aid, I have found it very helpful to the writer of period history and fiction.

Online two-way dictionaries, glosses in readers have nothing on this marvellous book. My friends and I, hacking (far too accurate description, I'm afraid. Quirk's Old English Grammar helped that in time) through Ælfred's laws for the first time for our class Old English and Its Closest Relatives, found that this was by far the most valuable resource we had, even when translating other dialects. Sure, it only has OE -> NE, but with even a little college-level knowledge of grammar, there is nothing in this book that's not either understandable or easily revealed.

My only complaint, and since I'm still no OE master, this may just be my ignorance, is that both words beginning in thorn and words beginning in eth are filed underneath eth, and so written with it.

This is not a new book - it is a photo-reprint of one originally published in 1894 - but do not let that put you off. This book is invaluable for anyone who wants to read Old English text such as Beowulf, Old English Gospels, and the like.