Why One Ought To Study OE

[highlyeccentric]

Courtesy of Dr Richard No-A Nokes:

"The taproot, Anglo-Saxon, can never be abandoned. The man who does not know it remains all his life a child among real English student. There we find the speech-rhythms that we use every day made the basis of metre; there we find the origins of that romanticism for which the ignorant invent such odd explanations. This is our own stuff and its life is in every branch of the tree to the remotest twigs. That we cannot abandon." -- C.S. Lewis*

*qtd. in Tripp, Raymond P., "Power as a Measure of Humanism in Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Arthurian and Other Studies presented to Shunichi Noguchi. Ed. Takashi Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Mukai. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer: 1.