Jun 24, 2010
In the spring of 1998, as part of my studies for my master’s degree in English, I signed up for a course called “Middle English Alliterative Verse.” When I saw the syllabus, it shocked me: We were to translate thousands of lines of medieval English into the modern.
Geoffrey Chaucer was one thing; he lived in London, and his language is closer to our own. Unlike modern English, Middle English was highly dialectal, and thus the poems from medieval writers just a hundred miles away could read like this: “Sithen the sege and the assaut watz sesed at Troye” … Excuse me?
That’s the first line