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Osweald Bera
Join Ōsweald the talking bear on his adventures through Anglo-Saxon England, as he makes friends (and enemies), gets involved in royal intrigue, and learns all about the world. This book will teach you all the main points of Old English grammar and a large portion of its most essential vocabulary. But it will teach you these things in a rather strange way: simply by telling a story. Come to an implicit knowledge of Old English - the same way you learned your first language.
237 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 15, 2025
Ic lufode þas bōc. Heo rečeþ spell be Oswealde Beran, Æþelstane mys, and be manfullan munuce Cuþberhte. Soþlice heo is spell be Englalande, lange forþgewiten.
July 6, 2025
It builds up from the equivalent of "See Spot run" to a mighty tale of friendship, betrayal, escape from bondage, and a big slaughter-field battle between our anthropomorphic heroes and their plain-vanilla villains.
Plus it's got shout-outs to Watership Down, the Canterbury Tales, and The Consolation of Philosophy. (And quite possibly other references I didn't even catch.)
What's not to love?!
Plus it's got shout-outs to Watership Down, the Canterbury Tales, and The Consolation of Philosophy. (And quite possibly other references I didn't even catch.)
What's not to love?!
December 7, 2025
Not only is this book an excellent resource for taking first steps into Old English, but it's also a delightful story with charming characters. The book uses 'the natural method', which was a common second-language teaching format in the middle of the century, but for some reason has fallen out of favor recently. The method is essentially to immerse you in the language from sentence one, beginning with simple sentences and vocabulary which a modern English speaker could successfully guess at, and gradually repeating these structures and vocabulary to reinforce them, while slowly introducing more complex grammatical structures and varied vocabulary along the course of the book.
To increase my exposure to the vocabulary, and ensure that at no point I would get lost in the story, my reading strategy was to read three chapters per day, with the first two being re-reads of previous chapter, and the final daily chapter being a new chapter, like so:
...
Monday: chs. 8, 9, 10
Tuesday: chs. 9, 10, 11
Wednesday: chs. 10, 11, 12
... and so on, reading each chapter a minimum of three times with one day between each reading.
The difficulty does begin to ramp up more steeply in the later chapters, and based off some of the author's youtube interviews, I'm confident this is by design. By increasing the difficulty, he's able to offer you a greater breadth of structures and vocabulary in a book of the same size/price. The idea that you will do some re-reading (and importantly, that you are always reading with focused intention) is built in to the method.
Upon finishing the story and sadly parting from Ōsweald and his friends, I was pretty well prepared to start diving into some basic authentic OE texts--which is the stated aim of the book. With some help from the grammar sections, I was generally able to cruise through the prose selections in Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English (excellent), and had little trouble with most of the simpler, yet longer, selections in Sweet's An Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse. It was around that point that life got in the way and I was no longer able to devote much time to studying OE, however I can't emphasize enough how satisfied I was with my progress, and how the initial 70% of that journey was handled for me through Osweald Bera.
It's important to note that this book will not prepare you for a reading of Beowulf, which is the primary goal of many would-be OE learners (this should maybe be obvious, but I'd like to state it anyway). It does introduce you to some OE poetry, but you should know that the difficulty gap between OE prose and verse is vast, and a confident, fluid reading of longer poetry will require much more involved study. That being said, if you'd like to undertake that journey, a reading of Osweald Bera should certainly be your first step. A journey of any length into the world of Old English should realistically begin with this book.
--
For the sake of completeness, I should state that my progress with this book and with OE in general was greatly helped by knowing German at an advanced level. It really cannot be overstated how much a knowledge of German (or to a lesser extent, Latin or a North Germanic language) will assist you when learning OE. That being said, this book will be a phenomenal resource for any modern English speaker with an interest in Old English, regardless of their other language-learning experience.
Despite this review being mostly about the merits of the book as a language-learning resource, I'd also like to reiterate that the story itself is well worth reading for its own sake. I had to delay leaving a Goodreads review, because the book wasn't even listed by the time I'd finished it!
To increase my exposure to the vocabulary, and ensure that at no point I would get lost in the story, my reading strategy was to read three chapters per day, with the first two being re-reads of previous chapter, and the final daily chapter being a new chapter, like so:
...
Monday: chs. 8, 9, 10
Tuesday: chs. 9, 10, 11
Wednesday: chs. 10, 11, 12
... and so on, reading each chapter a minimum of three times with one day between each reading.
The difficulty does begin to ramp up more steeply in the later chapters, and based off some of the author's youtube interviews, I'm confident this is by design. By increasing the difficulty, he's able to offer you a greater breadth of structures and vocabulary in a book of the same size/price. The idea that you will do some re-reading (and importantly, that you are always reading with focused intention) is built in to the method.
Upon finishing the story and sadly parting from Ōsweald and his friends, I was pretty well prepared to start diving into some basic authentic OE texts--which is the stated aim of the book. With some help from the grammar sections, I was generally able to cruise through the prose selections in Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English (excellent), and had little trouble with most of the simpler, yet longer, selections in Sweet's An Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse. It was around that point that life got in the way and I was no longer able to devote much time to studying OE, however I can't emphasize enough how satisfied I was with my progress, and how the initial 70% of that journey was handled for me through Osweald Bera.
It's important to note that this book will not prepare you for a reading of Beowulf, which is the primary goal of many would-be OE learners (this should maybe be obvious, but I'd like to state it anyway). It does introduce you to some OE poetry, but you should know that the difficulty gap between OE prose and verse is vast, and a confident, fluid reading of longer poetry will require much more involved study. That being said, if you'd like to undertake that journey, a reading of Osweald Bera should certainly be your first step. A journey of any length into the world of Old English should realistically begin with this book.
--
For the sake of completeness, I should state that my progress with this book and with OE in general was greatly helped by knowing German at an advanced level. It really cannot be overstated how much a knowledge of German (or to a lesser extent, Latin or a North Germanic language) will assist you when learning OE. That being said, this book will be a phenomenal resource for any modern English speaker with an interest in Old English, regardless of their other language-learning experience.
Despite this review being mostly about the merits of the book as a language-learning resource, I'd also like to reiterate that the story itself is well worth reading for its own sake. I had to delay leaving a Goodreads review, because the book wasn't even listed by the time I'd finished it!
August 11, 2025
I *really* enjoyed this book!
The story, which starts out seeming like a child's talking bear story (ala Winnie the Pooh aka Ēadweard Bera) quickly becomes much more, incorporating everything from the Battle of Maldon to the Consolation of Philosophy in more-or-less comprehensible* Old English. The beginning chapters are very typical CI with lots of questioning and circling of the 'Is a bear a man? Nooooo.' type thing (and therefore sort of boring), but the later ones are really entertaining on their own; I was SO INVESTED in what would happen next from about the halfway point on.
*Unfortunately, if one *doesn't* comprehend a particular sentence, there's not much to help other than the OE - ModEng glossaries following each chapter and at the end.) I find it hard to imagine anyone learning OE from this book alone, for precisely that reason, but perhaps I am underestimating what a naïve reader would think. There's a fairly large vocab load (lots of words I didn't know, as a casual 'I've read through some readers of OE'-type reader), and it's definitely not repeated enough in different contexts for me to learn it all from the book, but it's not completely unworkable as long as you're willing to look things up multiple times.
Highly recommend if you want to read some OE. And do hang in past the first few chapters; the story gets so much better.
The story, which starts out seeming like a child's talking bear story (ala Winnie the Pooh aka Ēadweard Bera) quickly becomes much more, incorporating everything from the Battle of Maldon to the Consolation of Philosophy in more-or-less comprehensible* Old English. The beginning chapters are very typical CI with lots of questioning and circling of the 'Is a bear a man? Nooooo.' type thing (and therefore sort of boring), but the later ones are really entertaining on their own; I was SO INVESTED in what would happen next from about the halfway point on.
*Unfortunately, if one *doesn't* comprehend a particular sentence, there's not much to help other than the OE - ModEng glossaries following each chapter and at the end.) I find it hard to imagine anyone learning OE from this book alone, for precisely that reason, but perhaps I am underestimating what a naïve reader would think. There's a fairly large vocab load (lots of words I didn't know, as a casual 'I've read through some readers of OE'-type reader), and it's definitely not repeated enough in different contexts for me to learn it all from the book, but it's not completely unworkable as long as you're willing to look things up multiple times.
Highly recommend if you want to read some OE. And do hang in past the first few chapters; the story gets so much better.
June 6, 2025
The narrative of this book is written entirely in Old English, with Chapter 1 starting in very basic OE but succeeding chapters gradually increasing in complexity. There is a fairly comprehensive glossary, and occasional repetition of words and phrase structures in order to promote familiarity with them. The story itself is entertaining: funny, sad in places, and always informative and interesting. It concerns the adventures of a talking bear who mixes with a variety of characters, both human and other animals. I found it charming and very cleverly written; it was a book that was difficult to put down. It is just the sort of text needed if you are keen to learn Old English or, indeed, if you are already reasonably or even very competent in it. The author is a linguistics expert and it shows. I really hope he will write another book; we could do with a range of novels written in such a beautiful language as Old English.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews