Old English alphabet (725 CE)

This page contains the oldest Latin alphabet used by Anglo-Saxons in England, which was introduced from Ireland as the Insular script. The images below are manuscript fragments from ~725 CE, Jarrow-Wearmouth abbey, Northumbria, hosted as Hs-4262 by the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt. They contain chapters 26-28 of De temporum ratione by Bede, which lists Old English month names in chapter 15 of later copies. This page provided baseline characters in the reconstruction of their initial spelling.

Letter alignment scheme:

Lower case

Lines 1-3: ꝺhL (Modern English: dhl)

Lines 2-3: aBceImNoRsTux (Modern English: abceimnorstux)

Lines 2-4: _FGpq_Y (Modern English: fgpqy)

Upper case

Lines ≥1-3: hLT (Modern English: HLT)

Lines ≥1-4: _a_ꝺ_N_S (Modern English: ADNS)

All upper case letters occurred at the beginning of a line, and were written in the left margin.

Variants

Lines 1-3: N^T (Modern English: n-t ligature)

Lines 1-4: u_ſ (Modern English: u-s ligature)

Lines 2-4: _ſ (Modern English: -s word ending)

All variant letters were uncommon and were only used at the end of lines that were longer than the previous line.

Archived on 2020-07-08.