The Winged Schwa is Back

Pursued by a bear

Ōsweald Bera, just like your author, is pondering the best Old English word choice for “wood”. Original Artwork: Alex Swanson

Goodness, has it been a year and a half already? As you may have gleaned from the lack of Winged Schwa fluttering into your inbox (even on a sporadic basis), I've been away for a while, working on things out of the public view. 

The most exciting of these things is something I’ve not shared much about here: I’ve written a book! And its name is Ōsweald Bera.

And I’m writing to you now because you’ll soon be able to read it.

But first: what is Ōsweald Bera?

In short, it’s a textbook for learning Old English – the language of Beowulf, The Wanderer, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But if I put it in those terms, it deceives you about the nature of the book.

Because Ōsweald Bera is not really a language textbook in the sense of explaining the grammar of the language and giving you useful phrases to practice – I pause here for a moment to contemplate what kind of phrases could be useful to the learner of a language last spoken almost a thousand years ago: iċ eom of tōweardum tīdum ‘I am from the future’ might serve you well.

Instead, Ōsweald Bera is a story. A story about a bear, in fact. It’s told, at first, in the simplest possible Old English I could muster, using only a scant few dozen words, and gradually increases in grammatical complexity and breadth of vocabulary as the story unfolds. 

It all begins in an English forest in the year AD 1000, where a bear named Ōsweald is feeling very lonely and decides to go on an adventure. His adventure will take him all over England, where he will meet a mouse with a Napoleon complex, a monk of murky loyalties, and the King of the English himself. He studies in a monastery, joins the army to fight against the Danes, gets wrapped up in political intrigue, and it all ends in an epic battle on the edge of a cliff.

In that way, it’s similar to Hans Ørberg’s well-loved Latin textbook Lingua Latina per Se Illustrata: Familia Romana, itself a reader which gradually leads you through the basics of the Latin language through a story about the adventures and misadventures of a Roman household.

This is a book I’ve had experience with as a teacher, and it lives up to the praise heaped on it all over the internet. It truly is one of the best language learning methods out there, for any language, at least in book format.

I’ve attempted to bring the spirit of Ørberg’s work to Old English with Ōsweald Bera, albeit with my own twist. But I’ll pontificate about these small differences in an upcoming issue of this newsletter.

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After 27 months of work, the book is rapidly approaching publication and will be available before the end of the year! I’ve been teaching students with it for two years now, and it’s been forged in the fires of student feedback, gradually improving with every cohort that reads it. 

But the time has come now, finally, for the text to pass out of my hands. And because I’m not able to tinker with it any longer, I have more leisure time than I did when I was busy worrying about plugging plot holes and which word for ‘wood’ was most appropriate to the West Saxon dialect circa AD 1000. (It’s wudu, by the way, although I went with holt at the start of the book since it’s easier to use grammatically for complete beginners.)

So, my friends, I would like to rededicate this newsletter, at least through the next few months, to giving you a sense of how Ōsweald Bera was devised, structured, written, and taught – and, more than that, I’d like to give some advice about how best to use it, or a book like it, to learn an ancient language.

This is needed because, first, we have very few books which, like Ōsweald Bera or Lingua Latina per Se Illustrata, guide students gradually through their acquisition of the language by presenting comprehensible input which is at the same time compelling – in other words, things beginners can understand and yet still desire to read. I’d like there to be more – perhaps one of you will write the next one for a language you’re interested in.

And secondly, these books work well, but I’ve found that students have the most success with them when they use them in a particular way. Simply picking up the book and reading from cover to cover isn’t what gets the best results.

So that is what I propose to do: give you a behind-the-scenes look at how Ōsweald Bera was written, and show you how best to use it, or any book like it, to learn your next language.

Until the end of 2024 I’ll be writing an issue on one of these topics every other week. After that, God āna wāt ‘God only knows’.

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