Reddit mentions of Old English: Grammar and Reader

The thorn is for the unvoiced "th" while the eth is for the voiced "th". The way to tell the difference is to say the words "thin" and "then": the only difference between the two words is whether the "th" is voiced or not. Place your fingers on your voice box and say the two words, and you'll notice that with "then" the voice box vibrates with the "th" - that's an eth; with "thin" there is no vibration - that is the unvoiced thorn.

Edit: My source is my language mentor's user-friendly Old English Grammar: Robert E. Diamond (1920-1985), Old English Grammar and Reader (1970). The difference in use between the thorn and eth in Anglo-Saxon and in Old Norse was strictly determined by the sound of the "th"; they were not interchangeable.

I started with this, and also spend a lot of time on Wiktionary.

I need to read the actual texts some more, but I've gotten good enough to recognise when the show Merlin has gotten silly with their spells (that's ridiculously often).

I started with Old English Grammar and Reader, by Robert Diamond. I've depended a lot upon a few dictionaries I've downloaded and the wonderful thing that is Wiktionary.

Bei Altenglisch bin ich mit diesem Buch gut gefahren. Das Ziel besteht ja vermutlich darin, Literatur wie Beowulf zu verstehen. Dafuer kann man das obere Lehrbuch mit dem hier unterfuettern. Das Erste legt mehr wert auf die strukturellen Aspekte der Sprache (Grammatik, Aussprache etc.), das Zweite haelt das auf ein Minimum und wirft dich direkt in die Sprache rein. Schon praktisch, Deutsch und Englisch zu koennen.

I have A Guide to Old English, Introduction to Old English and Old English: Grammar and Reader at home and they all are pretty useful if you are interested in the language (plus Clark-Hall's dictionary). I've never tried to study it as a live language - I just wanted to read some old texts :)

There is also Complete Old English - not sure how good it is but you may want to look at it.

I originally pmed this, since I have no idea how to source it or such and it's just rambling, but OP said I should put it here anyways so everyone can gain from the rambly insight.

"I have no idea where you could specifically read, it's mostly just gleaned for being very interested in Germanic philology but... Basically, multilingualism was /very/ common and even by the Roman Silver Age people would go to schools to learn written Latin as we have today, rather speaking Vulgar Latin and when we get to the various Germanic (that is, from the Germanic tribes that invaded Rome) rulers, they would speak their language and very soon, inside of 3 generations they'd speak the language of the conquered too (getting wives and such from that population+all their servants...) and sometimes learn Latin. ...but in many cases the nobles wouldn't actually know Latin and would use scribes for that. "Literate" meant solely "literate in latin" (one of the English kings actually tried to get "universal" (that is for free men) literacy in Old English and talks about how it's on par to Latin and so on in the text) (at least in the areas they cared about that, in the east, they used other languages, like Old Church Slavonic and Greek...) when many people would have some comprehension of basic writing in their own languages. There was a wonderful... BBC(?) article on literacy in the middle ages. To that end, there was actually a fair amount of literature written in them, still nowhere near as much as that in Latin though, but... yeah.

Hopefully that was helpful, I'm not sure how to structure it better. :/ http://www.amazon.com/Old-English-Grammar-Reader-Edition/dp/0814315100/ref=cm_srch_res_rpsy_1 this mentions a lot of such things to the side and in texts, just inadvertently mentioning some guy doing this or this... It's of course a different case from what you'd end up with in France, but... Old Norse and Old English were very fluid (not that they're particularly different from another) with a large amount of the population speaking them, and in the Celtic areas Welsh or Old Irish would be thrown in too/be there instead of the Old English portion, depending on where they were. "