Aberdeen University Press has published a revised multimedia edition of O. D. Macrae-Gibson's 'Learning Old English'.
Learning Old English was originally designed by the late Dr O. D. (Duncan) Macrae-Gibson, who taught the language at the University of Oxford, and then for many years at the University of Aberdeen. The course is designed for directed classroom learning and/or for independent study
This revised edition by Aideen O'Leary and Zhangfeng Xu includes lessons (which include text in Old English, idiom and pronunciation practice), the cassette recordings (now in digitised form), written exercises, a list of grammatical terms and an index. References to Old English grammar books and readers (which you will find from Lesson 4 onwards) have been expanded and updated. The accompanying audio-visual CD, which is found at the back of this book, contains the original sound recordings; to these visual prompts have been added to aid effective learning. The CD follows the book’s structure and includes a variety of sound recordings (e.g. readings of the texts, explanations of grammar, practice exercises and grammar drills) along with the visual cues. Together, the book and the CD provide for a fully active learning experience in Old English.
This book with CD is available to purchase for £15 from the University of Aberdeen online store. Please click here.
The editors
Dr Aideen M. O’Leary (BA, MLitt University of Dublin, Trinity College; PhD University of Cambridge) is Director of the Centre for Celtic & Anglo-Saxon Studies at the University of Aberdeen, where she also directs the degrees in Celtic & Anglo-Saxon Studies. Her research interests lie in the interactions between Latin literature and the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon worlds. Publications include Trials and Translations: the Latin Origins of the Irish Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, 2 volumes (Aberdeen, 2013) and ‘Contested Consecrations and the Pursuit of Ecclesiastical Independence in Scotland and Ireland in the Early 1120s’, North American Journal of Celtic Studies 2.2 (2018), 155-78. She is currently preparing a new edition of Eadmer’s Historia Nouorum in Anglia.
Dr Zhangfeng Xu received her PhD from the University of Aberdeen in 2018, for her dissertation The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, AD 1017-1066, which she is preparing for publication. She was awarded a Lynne Grundy Memorial Trust grant to develop the Learning Old English CD, and a Swedish Institute Scholarship for advanced study of the Swedish language. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow on the project The Political Vicissitudes of Late Anglo-Saxon England at Sun Yat-sen University, China.