The sound of Old English poetry is something very dear to Alaric. He also likes to read it out when he gets the chance, and a few people have enquired about it now. So this page is a nascent development of some resources on the subject which Alaric will hopefully develop for his teaching in autumn 2006.
Although it is inevitable that we cannot know precisely how medieval languages sounded, by combining various sources of evidence we can get a pretty good idea about the sounds of Old English. Some scholars of Old English know this material. Unfortunately, most British and American people are as rubbish at pronouncing Old English as they are at pronouncing other foreign languages. (Old English vowels were quite similar to Finnish ones, so any Finns reading will have a pretty good idea of how depressing this can get...) On the other hand, working really hard to get Old English sounds right means that people who can pronounce them sometimes produce plodding, ponderous readings. Tricky.
Alaric totally respects the recordings of R. D. Fulk at the Norton Anthology of English Literature website (Seamus Heaney's readings from his translation of Beowulf there are nice too). Richard Dance has done a useful page too. Just in a kind of experimental sort of way, Alaric's put up a few mp3 sound files which he recorded on his laptop. The sound-quality is kind of rubbish, but hopefully the recordings strike a reasonably good balance between accuracy and feeling. Neither is perfect though! Let Alaric know what you think...
Wið færstice
Text and translation available in Alaric's Ph.D. thesis, pp. 10-11. A slightly tricky text because the manuscript mixes later and earlier spellings. Not all of these directly represent changes in pronunciation, so Alaric has tended to normalise towards an earlier pronunciation. This more familiar to folks working on Old English, but does lead to some divergences from the manuscript spellings.
The Battle of Brunanburh
A version of the text very similar to the one which Alaric used (there are several different manuscripts, with a few differences between them) and a translation is available at this anonymous site.