There are enormous differences between the two in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, and a monolingual speaker of one cannot understand the other at all. Yet modern English and German have many points in common, and if we go back to the earliest texts available in the two languages, the similarities are even more notable.How do we account for these similarities? The generally accepted explanation is that English and German are divergent continuations of a common ancestor, a Germanic language now lost. This book surveys the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of the earliest kown Germanic languages, members of what has traditionally been known as the English family tree: Gothic, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Low Franconian, and Old High German.For each language, the author provides a brief history of the people who spoke it, an overview of the important texts in the language, sample passages with full glossary and word-by-word translations, a section on orthography and grammar, and discussion of linguistic or philological topics relevant to all the early Germanic languaes but best exemplified by the particular language under consideration. These topics inclued the pronunciation of older languages; the runic inscriptions; Germanic alliterative pietry; historical syntax, borrowing, analogy, and drift; textual transmission; and dialect variation.

    The fifteen pieces collected here range from the history of the Salman Rushdie affair to the dream of Atlantis, from the turf wars among ethnographic filmmakers to the unlikely romance between poetry and espionage, from the pilgrims in Plymouth to the students in Tiananmen Square. Above all, Weinberger's concern is poetry––whether written in medieval Baghdad or by Mexicans in Japan––and the perennially underground yet global network through which it travels. With his modernist sensibility and internationalist perspective, Weinberger's inventive prose transports old myths and texts to the strange realities of contemporary life.

    This book tackles the problems of transition from Roman Britain to England through all the relevant academic disciplines, with a greater emphasis given to landscape evidence than has been done before and offers an alternative view based on acculturation, by which Anglo-Saxon England was largely peopled by communities whose ethnic origins were Celtic but who adopted the culture and language of the warrior aristocracy who had evicted the British landowners.

    

    Second edition published 1992, reprinted in 2002 and 2011. In this book Professor Tylecote presents a unique introduction to the history of metallurgy from the earliest times to the present. The development of metallurgy skills and techniques of different civilisations, and the connection between them, are carefully chartered. This volume is concerned with such important topics as the rise of metallurgy in the Near East and the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe."

    No specialist knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon period or language is needed, and many people will find it fascinating for the views it gives of an important aspect of Anglo-Saxon life and culture.