In OE two alphabets were used: the Runic and the Latin. A few Runic documents have come down to us.
1. The Ruthwell Cross – a religious poem engraved on a tall stone near the village of Ruthwell in South-East Scotland.
2. The Runic Casket (Frank’s Casket), made whalebone, and found in France near the town of Clermont-Ferrand, now in the British Museum in London. The Runic text is a short poem about whalebone.
Both these texts are probably of the 9th century. The oldest English documents available belong to the end of the 7th century.
3. The epic poems of the OE period: Beowulf, Genesis, Exodus, Judith, and poems by the monk Gynewulf: Elene, Andreas, Juliana and others, cannot in the shape they have come down to us be said to belong to any definite dialect.
There were four dialects:
- Northumbrian (the Runic Texts)
- Mercian (Translation of the Psalter (9th century) and hymns)
- West-Saxon (king Alfred 849 – 900, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 891, works of the abbot Ælfric (10 century)
- Kentish (Translation of Psalms L – LXX and old charters)
The work usually called King Alfred’s Orosius is alond text based on the Historia adversus paganos (A History against the Heathens by Spanish monk Paulus Orosius, 5th century)
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (672 – 735)
The Pastoral Care (Cure Pastoralis) by Pope Gregory 1.
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