About This Website
This Introduction to Old English was conceived as a work in electronic form and offered to the Rawlinson Center for publication via the Web in February 2001. Shortly thereafter, Blackwell Publishers expressed an interest in issuing it as a conventional book. With great generosity, both the Rawlinson Center and Blackwell Publishers agreed to a dual publication: those who wish to have a conveniently printed and bound copy may purchase the book (and the author hopes that a great many will do so), while everything it contains is available to all, free of charge, via this website and the Old English Aerobics site at the University of Virginia. The author and his publishers hope that the book and websites will promote interest in Old English by making information about the language and easy-to-use texts widely available.
The author's wish for this work is that it should evolve to become as nearly as possible what its readers want it to be. To this end, he earnestly solicits readers' corrections and comments. All changes will appear first in the electronic version, along with a list of corrections for those who have purchased the book. These changes will appear in the book as the publishing schedule dictates: simple changes between printings and more substantial revisions between editions.
It remains to say a word about the technology behind this project and the technological culture in which it has grown to its present form. The time is long past when the World Wide Web was thought a serious threat to the future of the book. Now we speak of synergies between the Web and the world of conventional publishing, and a group of newly developed technical standards--linked like the lines of the pentangle on Gawain's shield--has facilitated those synergies. Such standards as XML, XHTML, CSS, XSLT and Unicode make it possible to generate web pages and printed book from a single set of files and to regulate the styles of the generated documents simply and reliably. This project aspires to rigorous conformance to applicable standards; it may also serve as a demonstration to other medievalists of the usefulness of these standards in scholarly publishing.