About

About the book and conversion
About those links
Side-by-side versions
Beowulf line numbers
TODO list
Credits

This is an HTML conversion of Henry Sweet's book First Steps in Anglo-Saxon (PDF).

About the book and the conversion

Sweet's First Steps is a great introductory text for Old English. It starts with a short grammar (only "what is necessary to enable the beginner to recognize the grammatical forms which occur in the texts he is about to read.") But the real value of this book is in the enjoyable and accessible readings. The readings include short, normalized versions of some real Old English texts by Bede and Ælfric, and a simplified retelling of the first two parts of Bēowulf.

In addition, instead of a glossary, Sweet provides extensive notes that define terms and clarify grammar, like these:

However, these notes mean that the reader must constantly flip back and forth between the text and the notes. Moreover, Sweet sometimes points to a note that just references another note.

This HTML conversion tries to make the lookup process a bit easier by using links for all of the references to notes, from notes to text, and from notes to other notes.

About those links

Sweet's strategy for notes and note cross-references can be a bit confusing. I've tried to sort it out by making sure the links go to the right place and by using colors. (reds = grammar, blues = text) Here's a summary of how the links (that is, the various references) work in this conversion.

In text paragraphs:

Each paragraph is numbered. If the text paragraph has a note (not all do), the blue paragraph number is a link to that note. For example, text paragraph 22 has a note, but text paragraph 23 does not:

In text notes:

Each text note is numbered. The number links back to the corresponding text paragraph.
Numbers in the text that are red and followed by "g" are links to grammar paragraphs.
Numbers in the text that are blue are links to other text notes.

In grammar paragraphs:

Each grammar paragraph is numbered. If the grammar paragraph has a note (not all do), the red paragraph number is a link to that note. For example, grammar paragraph 22 does not have a note, but grammar paragraph 23 does:
Numbers in the text that are red are links to grammar paragraphs. (This is different from the text notes, where links to grammar sections are followed by "g" — this is Sweet's convenion.)

In grammar notes:

Each grammar note is numbered. The number links back to the corresponding grammar paragraph. Note that grammar note identifiers have a "g" suffix.
Numbers in the text that are red are links to grammar paragraphs.

Side-by-side versions

Because one of my goals was to make it easier to work with the text and notes together, I've implemented a toggle that lets users switch between linear and side-by-side versions. For the side-by-side version of the text page, the text and notes are literally side by side. If you click a text paragraph, the corresponding note is displayed in the right-hand pane.

For the grammar page, I put the text at the top and the notes at the bottom. I did this because the grammar section has tables in it that I thought needed the full width of the page. As with the text section, clicking a grammar paragraph link shows the corresponding note.

These SxS pages are still experimental, so they're a little hidden. If you click the Grammar menu item, you see a SxS link that gets you to the SxS version. Same for texts — click the Texts menu item, then click the SxS link.

I'm still learning the joys of flex and grid layouts in web pages (among many other things), so I consider these efforts to be supplemental to the "real" pages for now. For example, I'm still fooling around with getting the scroll mechanism to work better when you click a link. Let me know if you have feedback.

Implementation note

The layouts are triggered/controlled by the value ?sxs in the query string. For example, to see a side-by-side versions of the text and grammar pages, you use these URLs:

https://www.mikepope.com/old-english/first-steps-in-oe/first-steps-in-OE-text.html?sxs

https://www.mikepope.com/old-english/first-steps-in-oe/first-steps-in-OE-grammar.html?sxs

To see the pages in linear layout, remove ?sxs from the URL.

Beowulf line numbers

For the paragraphs under Bēowulfes sīþ (paragraphs 91–247), I've added small numbers. These indicate how Sweet's paragraph matches up to the poem. For example, Sweet's paragraph 173 aligns more or less with the section in "Bēowulf" that starts at line 867.

These numbers aren't super precise, but they will help get you to the right section of the poem if you want to see what the original says vis-à-vis Sweet.

In a few instances (such as in paragraphs 91–94), Sweet's retelling is very free, and the paragraphs don't align directly with lines in the poem. In those cases I didn't include line numbers.

TODO list

This is version 1 of the conversion. I have a list of possible improvements:

Display notes in popup windows instead/in addition?

Credits

This conversion is brought to you be me (Mike Pope) and by Michael Broschat. Broschat did all the tedious work of scanning a hardcopy version of Sweet's book and doing the OCR magic. I converted the resulting Word files to HTML, etc.

A shoutout also to Colin Campbell, who sent me detailed lists of conversion errors that he'd found, which I was happy to fix!

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me at mike(dot)pope at the Gmail place.