ABSTRACT
Old English used to be universally taught as a linguistics course, in which students learned not only the language, but also learned in great detail how each of its features had descended from Germanic and Indo-European originals. Hilde battle looks like the first element of an ordinary poetic compound, but its very conventionality is now enlisted in the service of poetic effect, since the new construction is modeled on such poetic words for sword as hilde-bill and hilde-me. Variation is one of the most noticeable features of Old English poetry. It is, to put it simply, the repetition in others words of an element of a sentence or clause. The unfamiliar nouns and verbs include hryther cattle, eared plowed, ar revenue and gavel tribute. Whether you had difficulty with grammar words such as mid with, them the, ma more and ac but depends on whether you have some experience with Middle English or with such languages as Dutch and German.
