At the end of his life, the titular hero of Beowulf asks his young kinsman Wiglaf to build a mounment, hoping that his presence in the landscape will defend and preserve the memory of the people he leaves behind. Put another way, Beowulf seeks to remain a conceptual landmark by becoming a literal landmark. But in his desire to be reiterated, Beowulf is not alone. Navigating Landmarks of Identity shows that, across early medieval English literature, relational reiteration stabilizes relational identity when a subject’s relationships are uncertain or under threat—whether that be in riddles, catalogue poems, elegies, or charter boundary clauses. Such textual reiteration takes place not only when a boundary is transgressed, or a person is exiled, but throughout Old English literature when an author is confronted with the problem of “who” or “what” something is.

The exiles, landowners, bookworms, and kings of early medieval English texts all faced a common problem: how do you know yourself, or anything else, in a relational and therefore constantly changing world? They answered that problem with relational reiteration: sometimes literally walking the edges of property bounds, and sometimes figuratively inviting a reader to walk the edges of a riddle’s solution, or an exile’s lost home. The reiteration of relational landmarks is a temporary solution; each time a relationship is altered or challenged, the bounds of relational identity must be traced anew. And in fact this problem of mutable identity changes only when literary characters or hagiographical narratives achieve Christian salvation, positioning God in these texts as an eternal relationship that cannot be lost, changed, or forgotten. But in the age of their making, most Old English and Anglo-Latin texts and characters relied upon reiteration to stabilize (or sometimes reimagine) their unsaved, ephemeral, relationally-constructed worlds.

Relational reiteration brings the allusive story worlds of Widsith into focus. Widsith has traditionally been defined as a catalogue of seemingly-random people and places visited by the speaker. But almost half of these “random” names and places, and all names repeated more than twice, are grouped and linked together through Old English and Old Norse narrative. In claiming lived experiential knowledge of these legendary worlds, Widsith establishes himself as a “local” guide to the intricacies of authority, kingship, and power. Leading the reader through a reiteration of these narrative landmarks, the poem both anticipates and rewards a reader’s previously acquired knowledge of the story—just as the reiteration of property bounds rewards the re-walking of familiar routes. The speaker’s positive references to kings are juxtaposed without comment alongside catalogues of the characters they have betrayed or killed, and the speaker says that he has been given “cystum,” choices, and knowledge of good and evil. These lists function as an implicit critique of what stories can be told, as the speaker quietly shows us the misdeeds of his benefactors even while celebrating their glory.

The Old English exile elegies attempt to recuperate loss by reiterating an inverted set of social and physical landmarks, mapping the past onto the present. The familiar imagery of the hall, the lord, and the voices of other human beings – the relationships that constitute community – are not absent in exile: instead, in the absence of the “real thing,” each exile must reconstruct and reiterate a set of replacement landmarks to understand their current situation. Similarly, The Ruin navigates the loss of living memory by imagining the past context necessary to fit its subject back into the fabric of a living world. The frequent depiction of the exile elegies as nostalgic, repetitive, or static is not an incidental formal element, but a core response to the loss of relational landmarks. In exile, alienation from the past—the spoliation of memory as well as the loss of community—suspends the relational self in time. Yet the Old English exiles continue to navigate inverted relational landmarks of identity. The solution is not to abandon relational reiteration; it is instead to seek a new point of departure when familiar points of reference are lost.

The conclusion brings together the findings of the previous chapters. It reiterates the importance of the mid-ninth century, since the written word was used more extensively than in prior decades to uphold and confirm social, political and economic transactions. This provides an important context for understanding the extraordinary literary endeavours of Alfred’s later reign: in the generation before Alfred, both lay and ecclesiastic people were already experimenting with – and thinking about – the social values of literary culture. It must be stressed, however, that developments were not uniform across Kent, Mercia and Wessex. Literary culture was not limited to a single agency or context, and competing visions and practices existed throughout the ninth and early tenth centuries. One of the most striking aspects to this is that, in some contexts, resources and Latin literacy levels appear to have been limited, yet documentary production continued. If anything, such limited resources intensified the value of the written word as a commodity. The Conclusion also considers what follows in the mid- and late tenth century. Several strands of continuity are identified, though social and institutional changes need to be borne in mind.

Chapter 4 opens Part II of the study with an overview of literary activity during the late ninth and early tenth centuries, and the political backdrop of the emergent kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. A summary of the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons itself is provided, followed by discussion of three categories of evidence: epistolary correspondences, the corpus of Alfredian Old English literature, and Asser’s Life of King Alfred. Throughout, several points of continuity with earlier decades of literary activity are stressed, particularly the continued importance of letter-writing and international communication. It is also emphasised that contemporary investment in vernacular literary production was extraordinary, yet Latin remained a valued commodity as well. Just as there would have been competing political visions within the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons, so too there would have been preferences for literary patronage of Latin or Old English. The decision specifically to compose the Life of King Alfred in Latin is assessed, particularly in light of Asser’s intended audiences. The overview provided by this chapter sets the scene for the case studies explored in the subsequent two chapters.

American English is part of a historical process. Within its own time, American English can be divided into periods that correspond to important stages in its development. Before that time, we begin with the ancient history of language and then move on to the beginnings of English. The chapter ends as American English begins, in the first years of the seventeenth century.

This chapter examines the Old English period, outlining some of the key historical developments from the settlement of Germanic-speaking groups in England through to the Norman Conquest. The key features of Old English are discussed, including phonology and orthography, inflexional morphology, syntax, and lexis. The discussion also deals with Old English dialects, the impact of Old Norse on the development of English during this period, the preservation of textual material in Old English, and the West Saxon Schriftsprache. The chapter concludes with two specimen passages of late Old English prose and verse, accompanied by commentary on key linguistic features of the passages.

This chapter addresses the study of the geographical aspects of English linguistic variation in England, from the beginnings to the sixteenth century. The major challenge in the study of early periods of English is the scarcity of sources, which are often not easy to localise. Only in the fifteenth century does the production of administrative materials in English, in a highly variable writing system, allow for a systematic study of geographical variation covering the entire country; for earlier periods materials are much scantier, and many studies have therefore made use of reconstructive methods. This chapter discusses and problematises the different approaches used by earlier scholars; finally, using the newly compiled Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD), it addresses the possibilities of studying early geographical variation directly, with focus on individual items, rather than through the reconstruction of dialect areas or continua.

Shifts in the perception of the role of language users in the history of standardisation in the early periods of the language are evident as the scholarly narrative develops across time. This chapter begins with the notions of standardisation in Old English. The main focus is on the Middle English period, and Samuels’s (1989 [1963]: 66) suggestion that the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English could be used to classify the less obviously dialectal forms of language, and thus might offer a way to discover the sources of the emerging standard language in fifteenth century English writing. This chapter notes the long shadow cast by this aperçu. It then examines more recent work spearheaded by Wright (1994, 1996, 2000, 2005, 2013, 2017, 2020), which has re-evaluated the narrative of standardisation in early English, focusing on multilingualism and the rejection of a single ancestor of Standard English.

This chapter explores the link between education and linguistic innovation in the early history of English, by looking at the evolution of the school system and the languages of school instruction. Varieties of spoken and written Latin and Latin as a second (and third) language are among the other sociolinguistic anchors of this chapter. The turning points are located at about 650 CE, the spread of Christianity and formal schooling in Latin among the Anglo-Saxons, at 1066, the introduction of French as a second vernacular and language of school instruction, and at 1349, the reversal of the latter situation in the wake of the socio-demographic changes caused by the Black Death. The survey starts on the eve of the Germanic migration to Britain and ends around 1500; it is illustrated with a selection of lexical and structural features introduced into English through contact with Latin.

This chapter introduces and explores the complex evidence for the Scandinavian influence on English. This influence resulted from the period of intense contact following the settlement of speakers of the early Scandinavian languages (Old Norse) in Viking age Britain, and its effects were extensive and profound, most measurably upon the lexicon. We begin by addressing the considerable difficulty of identifying Scandinavian input at the etymological level. We then highlight the wide range of English sources, medieval and modern, which need to be examined in order to find and analyse lexical material influenced by Norse. We assess the evidence provided by some of these sources for how Norse-derived words were integrated into early English vocabulary, paying attention to dialect distribution and to the semantic and stylistic relationships that these terms established with other members of their semantic fields.

This chapter investigates the syntactic development of full-verb inversion in the history of English. It aims to connect so-called late subjects in Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME) to full-verb inversion in Present-Day English (PDE), also known as locative inversion. They share crucial characteristics – occurrence with unaccusative verbs and passivised transitive verbs and an information-structural function – but have so far been studied as distinct phenomena. Crucially, PDE inversion is non-canonical, but late subjects are only one of the many inversion orders in earlier English, raising questions regarding the status of late subjects in OE and ME and full-verb inversion throughout the history of English. Using data from four syntactically parsed corpora of historical English, the study shows that (i) late subjects are already a somewhat non-canonical pattern in OE/ME, infrequent and not part of the dominant verb-second system; (ii) full-verb inversion becomes more non-canonical, limited to certain initial elements and verbs, while other inversion patterns are lost. Full-verb inversion is thus a continuation of existing patterns and it also emerges as a more non-canonical word order option over time. Further research needs to establish whether the information-structural function can explain the continued presence of this inversion pattern throughout the history of English.