"The Future of Old English: A Personal Essay."
Paper · 1993 · Peter Jackson
Summary
This is a personal essay by Peter Jackson (Emmanuel College, Cambridge), not an NLP study. It recounts the 1991–92 public dispute over whether Old English should remain a compulsory part of the Oxford English degree. Valentine Cunningham opened the attack in the Oxford Magazine, and the argument then spread to the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator, the London Review of Books and BBC Newsnight. Jackson sets out Cunningham's case: Old English is a cultural dead end with no real kinship to later English writing, and its privileged place feeds a narrow Germanic origin myth. He then summarizes the defenders' replies, starting with linguistic continuity. A numbered bibliography of 44 press items supports the account. A later note adds that Oxford polled staff and students on syllabus options, and that removing Old English entirely ranked last in both polls. Jackson argues that the two camps shared more than they admitted, especially a canon organized by historical period. He warns that the harder fight lies in syllabi rebuilt around theory.
Key points
- The essay first appeared in Old English Newsletter vol. 25 no. 3 (1992). It was reprinted with a new note in SELIM 3 (1993), not 2019 as the library metadata says.
- At Oxford, Old English was compulsory for all students only in year one: two of the six first-year papers.
- Ten of the eleven TLS letters supported Old English. The one exception came from Cunningham himself.
- Digital resources raised in the debate were the Old English Thesaurus, the Toronto Dictionary and Patrick Conner's "Beowulf Workstation".
- Oxford's Syllabus Reform Committee polled teachers and undergraduates separately. Full removal came bottom with both groups. The remaining options were one compulsory paper instead of two, or no change. Nothing had changed by 1993–94.
Interesting ideas
- I1. Jackson tallies the published letters by stance (10 pro, 1 contra, the contra from the instigator) rather than relying on how loud each side was, and notes who the lone dissenter is.
- I2. The reform options were polled separately among two populations (teachers and students), and agreement between both groups made the result more convincing.
- I3. In his note, Jackson finds that the apparent opponents share a hidden premise: both treat the canon as built by historical period and argue in terms of sources and influences.
- I4. Every claim in the essay points to a numbered bibliography item, so each statement traces back to a specific press source.
- I5. Jackson explains that he quotes one opponent at length only because few others argued that side in print. In other words, he flags imbalance in the evidence instead of hiding it.
For Mova
How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:
- I1 (learn): When aggregating witness parsers for silver data, report the vote split and flag when one dissenting witness is the same source that produced the item.
- I2 (learn): Evaluate repair rules or LLM-teacher tiers on separate populations (e.g., fables vs. school tests) and trust a change only when it wins in both.
- I3 (frames): In argumentative texts, extract presuppositions common to both speakers' claims, not just their opposing assertions, to model what the dispute actually takes for granted.
- I4 (world): Attach source-item IDs to every entity state and event in the text world, so each answer can cite the exact sentence that supports it.
- I5 (answer): When a QA answer rests on one-sided evidence from the text, have the reader state that the other position is thinly attested.
📚 Shelves 3 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Classics · 67 works
🧭 Topics 2 English · 1,373 works Historical linguistics & language change · 159 works
Cite
Cite as Peter Jackson. 1993. "The Future of Old English: A Personal Essay.". SELIM 3.
@inproceedings{jackson1993future,
title = {{"The Future of Old English: A Personal Essay."}},
author = {Peter Jackson},
booktitle = {SELIM 3},
year = {1993},
doi = {10.17811/selim.3.1993.154-167},
url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.3.1993.154-167}
}References
- 1.— Cunningham, Valentine. “Reading English.” Oxford Magazine Fourth Week, Trinity Term, 1991, 5-6. 2.— Barnett, A. W. “Soldiering On.” Oxford Magazine Noughth Week, Michaelmas Term, 1991, 10.3.— de Jongh, Nicholas. “The Beowulf at Oxford’s Door.” Guardian 18 July 1991, 23. [Reprinted, with additions, as “English Past and Present: Beowulf at the Door.” Guardian Weekly 4 August 1991, 25.] 4.— “The Beowulf Battlers.” Guardian 19 July 1991, 18. 5.— Hogg, Richard M. “Lit Crit.” Guardian 20 July 1991, 22. [Reprinted in Guardian Weekly 11 August 1991, 3.] 6-8.— Harris, James A., Mike Fynch, and Sarah Foot. “Incipient Revolution in an Anglo-Saxon Ivory Tower.” Guardian 22 July 1991, 18. [Harris’s letter was reprinted in Guardian Weekly 11 August 1991, 3.] 9.— Hindle, Alan. “Heart and Soul of English.” Guardian 24 July 1991, 18. find
- [Reprinted in Guardian Weekly 11 August 1991, 3; and extract was reprinted in “D. S.,” “NB,” Times Literary Supplement 30 August 1991, 12. 1 I am grateful to several colleagues and friends for advice and assistance: Valentine Cunningham, Malcolm Godden, Richard Marsden, Andy Orchard, Gary Percival, James Simpson and Jeremy Smith. 10.— Bennett, Catherine. “A Cry from the Citadel” (Interview with Terry Eagleton). Guardian 15 August 1991, 21-22. 11-12.— Cunningham, Valentine, and J. A. Burrow. “The Future of Old English.” Times Literary Supplement 30 August 1991, 11-12. 13-14.— Wilson, Edward, and Helen Cooper. “The Future of Old English.” Times Literary Supplement 6 September 1991, 15. 15.— Medcalf, Steven. “The Future of Old English.” Times Literary Supplement 13 September 1991, 15. 16-17.— Brewer, Derek, and Malcolm Godden. “The Future of Old English.” Times Literary Suplement 6 September 1991, 15. 18-20.— Simpson, James, Thomas H. Maren, and Hanneke Wirtjes. “The Future of Old English.” Times Literary Supplement 18 October 1991, 15. 23.— Smith, Wade. “Old English.” Times Literary Supplement 25 October 1991, 15. 24.— King, Geoff. “Dons Want to Drop Beowulf.” The Times 31 August 1991, 2. 25.— Clare, John. “Hwæt! Beowulf is under Siege.” Daily Telegraph 31 find
- August 1991, 1. 26.— Millington, W. G. “Astonishing Anglo-Saxon Attitude.” Daily Telegraph 4 September 1991, 14. 27.— Armstead, Guendolen. “Lovely Language.” Daily Telegraph 5 find
- September 1991, 16. 28-29.— Barsley, Michael, and Sam Newton. “Lines in Defence of Anglo-Saxon.” Daily Telegraph 9 September 1991, 16. 30.— Valentin, Deric. “Betjeman’s Welsh.” Daily Telegraph 9 September 1991, 16. 31.— Johnson, Paul. “Is your Journey Really Necessary, Professor?” Spectator 7 September 1991, 21. 32.— “Don Battles to Drop Beowulf.” Oxford Times 3 September 1991, 3. 33.— Burroughs, Andrew. Newsnight. BBC2 TV. 17 September 1991. 34.— Theroux, Louis. “Oxford Factory’s Degrees of Fiction.” Guardian 24 find
- September 1991, 21. 35.— North, Richard. “Grendel Gongan.” London Review of Books 10 October 1991, 17-18. 36.— Cunningham, Valentine. “Good Old English.” London Review of Books 7 November 1991, 4. 37.— Goldsworthy, Sophie. “Bye Bye Beowulf.” Cherwell 10 October 1991, 2. 38.— Stocker, Margarita. “The Future of English.” Oxford Magazine. find
- Second Week, Michaelmas Term, 1991, 3, 5. 39.— Deegan, Marilyn, and Jeremy Smith. “Beowulf in a Time Warp.” Higher: Times Higher Education Supplement 1 November 1991, 26. 40.— Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, and Jeremy Smith. “New Accents in Old English Studies.” CUE News: The Newsletter of the Council for University English 4.1 (Autumn 1991), 11-13. 41.— Godden, Malcolm. “In Defence of Anglo-Saxon.” Babel Hilary Term 1992, 14. 42.— Simpson, James. “The Enjoyment and Teaching of Old and Middle English: The Current State of Play.” CUE News: The Newsletter of the Council for University English 4.2 (Spring 1992), 3-5. 43.— Griffiths, Sian. “Beleaguered Beowulf Finds New Allies.” Higher: Times Higher Education Supplement 1 May 1992, 2. 44.— Heller, Zoë. “Defender of the Suburbs” (Interview with John Carey). find
- Independent on Sunday 28 June 1992, 23. find
- ADDITIONAL NOTE This article was first published in Old English Newsletter for Spring 1992. find
- I am very grateful to Antonio Bravo not only for offering it a second home in SELIM, but also for giving me the opportunity to make a few revisions and corrections to the original and to bring the story up to date for a new readership. In particular, I am able to amplify the necessarily rather vague remarks in my last paragraph. By the time my article appeared in print, the English Faculty at Oxford had already set up a ‘Syllabus Reform Committee’, part of whose brief was to consider the position of Old English within the curriculum, especially in the first year of the degree course, where its position has always been strong. University English teachers and undergraduates were polled separately on several options. The most radical of these -from the Anglo-Saxonist’s point of view- which removed Old English altogether, came bottom of both polls. Three other alternatives are now under considera tion, two allowing for one compulsory Old English paper in the first year (as against the present two), and a third, which proposes to make no change at all. Academic committees, however, move slowly, and so far nothing more has been done, so that the syllabus, and the position of Old English within it, remain the same for the current academic year (1993-94) as they were when my article was written. find
- One point I might have made more of was how much the disputants on both sides had in common, for all their apparent disagreements. Valentine Cunningham’s perceptions of the canon of English literature, with its view that some early texts must be jettisoned if they are ‘marginal historically’, or in other words do not ‘lead on’ to later ones, are -as he frankly admits- if anything more conservative than those of his opponents. Both sides talked of sources and influences, of continuities and blind alleys, though Cunningham would wish to stress Romance and Christian influences rather than Germanic and pagan. Moreover, if some arguments had the ring of familiarity, perhaps that is because the matter had been debated at least twice before -in the 1930s and the 1960s- in the same forums and often in the same terms. And after all, both sides were wedded to a notion of a literary canon constructed by historical period that has come increasingly under threat elsewhere. find
- For this reason, many teachers of Old English outside Oxford may still envy the lot of their colleagues there, for on the present showing, no proposal to remove the subject from the curriculum has any chance of success. But at the same time, many of them, especially those in the British Isles and in North America, must face a more urgent question: the survival of Old English in a really revised syllabus, whether deconstructionist, new historicist, feminist, psychoanalytical, or other. That battle has still to be won. Peter Jackson Emmanuel College, Cambridge November 1993 * * * find
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