Beowulf - "Opening Lines"

Benjamin Bagby and the late (and dearly missed) Barbara Thornton are the principal founders of Sequentia; an early music ensemble founded in 1977. They have done more than anyone else to recreate western Early Music based on scholarship. So, you can bet that Bagby knows how to play the lyre as well as other period instruments in their original modal scales!

Thanks. I hope to go to the British Museum next week and take some photos of the Sutton-Hoo lyre; I've finished two German lyres and am working on a Sutton-Hoo repro. Still can't play very well. Ah, some of us craft in wood, some in song.
I've noticed that Bagby holds the lyre with his left hand. I have a strap that goes around my left; it lets me pluck with both hands.

The Anglo-Saxons might have been from the area which is now Germany, but they definitely weren't Germans.
Old English is more closely related to Old Norse than it is to modern German.

aknotz, the Gothic language had no influence whatsoever on modern German. Gothic was an Easten Germanic language spoken in what is now the Ukraine, which died out several hundred years ago. Modern German came directly from West Germanic.

It just sounds so epic and beautiful. Most say that the latinization of English enriched it - I most definitely disagree.

It didn't enrich it, it just changed it.

indeed, my English class just got done with Beowulf, it just doesn't have the "drama" and phonetics of the old English way of storytelling. I wish we could have read it in Old English n_n

@Snesgamer I think it both enriched AND polluted it. Made certain things clunkier, other things cleaner. I love old english, I love modern english - I think it lends itself to expression then and now :)

1:15 ÞÆT was gód cyning!

Gothic is not the parent of Modern German. It is an extinct branch of the germanic languages, East Germanic. German and English are descended from West Germanic, the Scandinavian languages from North Germanic.