The OE Book Buyer's Guide

[Wynmill]

The Old English Book Buyer's Guide

V 1.1

                                                                 **Preface:**

Behold! This guide was composed by Wyngifu the OE enthusiast for anyone interested in compiling a physical hoard of OE books.
I will happily take all manner of suggestions for improving the formatting of this work, listing additional
quality sources of OE books or other tips and ideas. My main objective in setting out on this task is to make accessible,
many works of OE literature that remain highly elusive to the average OE enthusiast. I hope this work may prove useful
in achieving this goal.

                                                                **The guide:**

From my experience collecting OE texts, the two best sources for OE books are these 2 publishers:

Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library: http://domedieval.org/volumes/old-english/

The DOME is the newer and less obscure of the two publishers. All their works in OE are clearly listed on their site and
come with good introductions to the text as well as many notes at the back. All DOME books are hardcover and are 35$ U.S
in most, if not all, cases. They also come with their own sewn in bookmarks. My only critique is that the page quality
seems somewhat poor; thus I encourage you to exercise caution when handling DOME books.

Early English Text Society: https://users.ox.ac.uk/~eets/
List of their publications: https://users.ox.ac.uk/~eets/EETS%20-%20list-of-all-publications-2020.pdf
Where you can buy/search EETS books: https://global.oup.com/academic/?lang=en&cc=lu

Far more the obscure publisher of the two, the Early English Text Society offers a vast array of OE and Middle English
books in both soft and hardcover editions. They can print most of their books on demand for you. The cost ranges from
around 35 U.S to 80 U.S dollars. Their texts often come with an extensive body of scholarly notes and they specifically
focus on obscure works. It is just about only through them that you can get texts such as:

Aelfric's OE Gospel translation: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-old-english-version-of-the-gospels-9780859917902?prevNumResPerPage=20&prevSortField=9&sortField=9&resultsPerPage=60&lang=en&cc=lu

Aelfric's OE Old Testament translation: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-old-english-heptateuch-and-lfrics-libellus-de-veteri-testamento-et-novo-9780199561438?lang=en&cc=lu

The biggest downsides with the EETS would doubtlessly have to be the scrambled nature of their works. There is no concise
list of OE texts from the EETS, rather, it is a jumbled mess of OE and ME texts with no rhyme or reason. I must also stress that their works do NOT come with modern English translations, so keep that in mind. Even with these issues,
The EETS has many obscure works that can not readily be found elsewhere such as OE homilies, bible translations, etc.

                                                            **In conclusion:**

There are no doubt many other people that have published, singular, or even a few OE texts such as the popular Beowulf
or other OE works, but it is impossible for me to attest to the quality of many of those "one-off" publishers so I've
decided to keep the scope to serious, long-running publishers of OE texts, namely DOME and EETS. I hope this guide
may unlock the beautiful word-horde of OE texts to the aspiring book collector.

-ᚹᚷ