THE English alphabet used to have extra letters that have been lost as centuries went by. While today our alphabet consists of 26 letters, the people of Middle Age Britain had an additional six ...

I went to college a little bit later than most. Excited but nervous to plunge into a degree — in English literature — that demands all students learn Old English, I asked a friend what studying the ...

For hilarity, no book intended for English learners will ever match English As She Is Spoke, the unintentional viral hit of the 1880s, written by a non-English speaking Portuguese man armed only with ...

IN the epic of Beowulf, our first great English epic, with almost countless references to the winter season, the sweet, antithetical season of summer is not once mentioned. This fact is significant, ...

The earliest fragments of English reveal how interconnected Europe has been for centuries. As an exhibition in London brings together treasures from Anglo-Saxon England, Cameron Laux traces a history ...

The eminent Anglo-Saxonist Bruce Mitchell delighted in appearing to be a slightly old-fashioned scholar resistant to new developments, and defended his position rigorously and without apology, though ...

When I asked the celebrated British novelist Jim Crace to tell me about a favorite line from literature, he was reluctant to choose something bound between the covers of a book. This is a writer, ...