<p>I’m in a bit of a dilemma. I’m looking for top schools which offer Anglo-Saxon courses, and I’m not having much luck. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale all appear to only offer one class in the subject, and I don’t believe Stanford offers any.</p>
<p>Would it be possible to audit graduate courses (if the school offers them)? Does anybody know of any other highly ranked schools that offer classes in Old English (perhaps an LAC)?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>The University of Chicago offers a [BA</a> in Medieval Studies,](<a href=“http://medieval.uchicago.edu/ba.shtml]BA”>http://medieval.uchicago.edu/ba.shtml) looks like it’s 2 courses in Old English and some Old English Lit/Medieval English Lit (Beowulf, Chaucer, general Lit, Arthurian cycle, etc). Looks like you need to take Latin as well, though.</p>
<p>I know that the University of Michigan has well respected graduate programs in Old and Middle English. I don’t know about the Undergrad options, but it would be worth checking it out</p>
<p>edit: a quick search yielded this
<a href=“http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/undergraduate/courses/specAreaDetail.asp?sem=1&yr=2010&aos=2&Submit2=Submit[/url]”>http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/undergraduate/courses/specAreaDetail.asp?sem=1&yr=2010&aos=2&Submit2=Submit</a></p>
<p>409: Old English <a href=“http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/undergraduate/courses/courseDetailFull.asp?ID=1177&sem=1&yr=2009&relCRID=2[/url]”>http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/undergraduate/courses/courseDetailFull.asp?ID=1177&sem=1&yr=2009&relCRID=2</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/undergraduate/courses/conReqsDetail.asp?sem=1&yr=2008#pre_1600[/url]”>http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/undergraduate/courses/conReqsDetail.asp?sem=1&yr=2008#pre_1600</a></p>
<p>You could look for chapters of [The SCA](<a href=“http://www.sca.org/”>http://www.sca.org/</a>)</p>
<p>I would look at LACs, I know Smith offers a BA in Medevial Studies, and it teaches some Old Norse courses, but I don’t know about Anglo-Saxon. Maybe look at St. John’s College (the Great Books college).</p>
<p>If that’s what you’re looking for for sure, you’re going to be very very limited. Medevial Studies departments (Where I guess you would find this…?) are very small, usually much smaller than even the classics departments, and ancient language programs that are not Greek or Latin are rarer still. Even for Academia, it’s not a high demand language. </p>
<p>I would consider expanding your search to schools that have really strong early Anglo Saxon history programs or early European history programs in general, and take whatever ancient language is offered and shoot for Anglo Saxon in graduate school.</p>
<p>Old English is the kind of thing where there may not be more than one or two courses offered. No one takes it who is not basically adept at learning languages, and there’s no question of learning how to make colloquial chit-chat with a good accent. Chances are, too, that the undergraduate course is also the graduate course.</p>
<p>Michigan and Berkeley have Old English courses listed for undergraduates. (At Michigan, the undergraduate course is also clearly the graduate course.) Cornell has a two-semester sequence of Old English and Chaucer. I looked at Hopkins and didn’t see one, which surprised me. I would expect that every significant English Department would have someone teaching Old/Middle English, and Beowulf, Chaucer, etc.</p>
<p>Also – There are going to be a lot of places that have one or more faculty members conversant with Old English, but not enough demand for courses to be offered on a regular basis. For example, Penn has two medievalists in the English Department, each of whom has taught an Old English course in the past. That particular course appears not to have been offered in six or seven years, but they are still teaching Chaucer and Piers Plowman. A motivated student should not have a hard time setting up a tutorial in Old English with one of them. It’s the kind of thing that universities are there for.</p>
<p>^ JHS makes an excellent point. You should ask if the university or college you’re interested in has a simple process (or even just a process) for creating a special studies or self designed course. Usually for something like that you just have to find a willing professor who is able to supervise you and help you develop the work of the course (sometimes this is a long research paper along with weekly readings, sometimes it’s regular language coursework, or sometimes it’s something else entirely) and who will then grade you at the end. You can’t do all of your coursework that way, obviously, but it’s a good way to build depth in a particular area.</p>
<p>My son audited an Old English class at Penn when he was doing his college tours in 2007.</p>
<p>Columbia offers Old English and requires a semester of it to study Beowulf. This makes me sad. When I was an undergrad my random state u. offered four semesters of Old English but not now.</p>
<p>So, basically Columbia offers a full year of Old English, since if Old English is a prerequisite for the Beowulf course you can bet that the Beowulf course involves learning a lot more Old English. </p>
<p>Four semesters of Old English for undergraduates seems a bit much. I would imagine that the last one or two involved a fair amount of substantive literature, too, not just the language.</p>
<p>One of my kids’ friends was taking Old Serbian this year at Toronto, and really enjoying it.</p>
<p>JHS: Just the messenger. And yes, I’m sure your assessment is correct. I think the only folks who take Old English as undergrads are those who think they might want to pursue this in grad school.</p>
<p>I read Chaucer etc. in original Middle English but never took Old English. I knew that would not be an area of study for me.</p>
<p>I think that four semesters includes a fair amount of philology and looking at Old High German and looking at the development of Anglo-Saxon.</p>
<p>There is not a huge literature in old English, but there are a few longish narrative poems and a body of shorter works in addition to the iconographic Beowulf.</p>
<p>According to Adam Wheeler, either MIT, Harvard, or Bowdoin offers Old English.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.tnr.com/sites/default/files/Wheeler-redacted.pdf[/url]”>http://www.tnr.com/sites/default/files/Wheeler-redacted.pdf</a></p>
<p>This might not be what you’re looking for but… Oxford and Cambridge?</p>
<p>Yes, Cambridge offers a 3 year BA known as “ASNAC” (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic), and also graduate degrees in this subject.</p>
<p>[Undergraduate</a> Admissions: Cambridge Admissions Office - Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic](<a href=“Study at Cambridge | University of Cambridge”>Study at Cambridge | University of Cambridge)</p>
<p>I took Anglo-Saxon at Harvard Summer School many moons ago. It was taught by a professor from Stanford. There isn’t an enormous amount of literature in the language, but what there is is quite fascinating. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles for example: Alfred the Great had travellers sit with his scribes and recount their adventures. (Did you know that the word starboard comes from the AS? The person steering the boat sat with his back braced against one side–the backboard–and manipulated the steering oar that protruded over the other side: the steerboard.) And there’s some poetry. A lot of it is battle oriented: Byrtwold mathelode, bord onhafen! Byrtwold spoke, shield upraised! (Roughly spelled–it’s been a long time. 
) Some of the figurative language is gorgeous: the binding of the waves for frozen seas, for example. </p>
<p>Even then, undergraduate courses in Anglo-Saxon/Old Norse/the Celtic languages were very few and far between. Your best bet is probably to find a university that has a graduate program, as suggested above. Penn, U of C, Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, U of M: the usual suspects.</p>
<p>Wow guys, thanks for all the responses. :)</p>
<p>The main issue is that I don’t really want to major in Medieval Studies. I would just like to get to a level of fluency in Anglo-Saxon where I would be able to read some of the epics like Beowulf in the original. I am interested in Germanic languages and the other half, if you will, of Anglophone culture which is being forgotten, but not enough to get an unmarketable degree.</p>
<p>I like the idea of setting up an individual course of study, so I’ll email some of the schools today. I’ll also look into the Columbia offerings some more.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the replies, they’re a big help.</p>
<p>P.S. I had to chuckle at the SCA site. I’m not sure that’s the direction I want to take, but I appreciate the link.</p>
<p>This is probably one of my favorite threads ever.</p>
<p>I especially enjoyed Consolation’s post. Thanks so much for the gorgeous language! Made it real and very exciting (as well as beautiful.)</p>
<p>I recall a show on PBS years ago where they showed students at some British university practicing their Old English. And the thing that amazed me was, even though I couldn’t understand what they were saying, it still sounded like English. That is, it still had the same “feel” as modern English. I had the sense that if I turned the TV up loud enough listened closely enough, I could figure out what they were saying. But of course I couldn’t.</p>