Anglo Saxon Quotes

“She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father’s words, and her mother’s, and her sister’s. Utterly unlike Onnen’s otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn’t there.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“Cwædon þæt he wære wyruld-cyninga,
manna mildust ond mon-ðwærust,
leodum liðost ond lof-geornost.”
― Anonymous, Beowulf

“If nature abhors a vacuum, historiography loves a void because it can be filled with any number of plausible accounts;
Howe, Nicholas, Anglo-Saxon England and the postcolonial void”
― Deanne Williams, Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures

“El hecho es que la participación de un dragón en la epopeya de Beowulf parece disminuirla a nuestro ojos. Creemos en el león como realidad y como símbolo; creemos en el minotauro como símbolo, ya que no como realidad; pero el dragón se el menos afortunado de los animales fabulosos.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Literaturas germánicas medievales

“I’ve always like Medieval literature. As a young girl I read mythologies and Norse legends, that sort of thing. I loved Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While I was studying at Middle Tennessee State University for doctoral program I came in contact with more ancient literature. I examined older literature more seriously which intrigued and fascinated me very much; I was drawn to it.
For the book I used all my own translations of Beowulf from my doctorate. Culture is contained in language, if you study a language you’ll see bits of culture, because the words are different and you see into the lives of the people. The Anglo-Saxon language touched me very deeply. Some of it is the heroic. Some of it is the melancholy. But there is also honor. You uphold, you fight to the death. Even if you watch movies, like Marvel comic book movies, like Thor: you want the great ones to win. Its even better if they have a fault. But you want the heroic character to win.”
― Deborah A. Higgens

“The greatest of these drawbacks was not, perhaps, the limitation of the vocabulary, though undoubtedly this was a drawback. But it may be doubted whether the actual word-list, which is very far from inconsiderable, was insufficient for the tasks that it had to perform; and it possessed a power of compounding which, though English has not really lost it, modern precision has sadly hampered and hobbled. You may [...] go too far in the direction of substituting "star-witty man" for astrologer, and there really is no necessity to ostracise "penetration" in favour of "gothroughsomeness." But it is a great thing to be able to do these things when you like; and the languages which, like French, have surrendered, or mostly so, their franchise in tis respect have paid no small penalty.”
― George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm

“So Michele and Stefi's friends don't receive regular pocket monty, which is a very Anglo-Saxon, puritan thing, which its obsession with system and clarity, benefits and punishments, its perverse desire to have little children learn to manage given amounts of money over given periods of time.”
― Tim Parks, An Italian Education