Martin Lehnert (1910–1992)

The first part of this book is an introduction to the historical background of Old English and I found this very interesting. It's very concise, but it covered many things that interested me - Old English texts/manuscripts preserved until today and where they are kept, the history of Great Britain in the period of time this language was used, the influences and developments of it (Celts, Romans, Vikings, Normans), the role of Alfred the Great etc. The second part is a grammar part that I just skipped through (as I said I am not intent on actually learning the language thoroughly), followed by some excerpts from Beowulf and other texts in Old English and German translation. The last part is a short dictionary.
I found the introduction very interesting and easy to understand. It included many aspects and I underlined a lot of it because it put together many pieces of the puzzle, that is, many things I had heard about before or had a vague knowledge of. It was a bit too concise for my liking, though.
The grammar part was, even if I had wanted to learn Old English, much, much too confusing and too high standard for a beginner.

A note on the author: My edition just says ‘10th edition from 1990’ but the academic style seemed quite ancient to me, so I wanted to check when this book was first published. I was shocked to see that the first edition is from 1939. I then spent a couple of hours doing research on Martin Lehnert and it seems that he is a respected scholar and his books are still in print (I even own a Beowulf translation by him from widely used publishers Reclam, which I just noticed when I checked him on LT). However, he started his academic career under the Nazi regime. He managed to be “cleared” during denazification because he proved that he had acted in an antifascist manner. In the beginning of the 1960s he apparently saved the field of English Studies in the GDR when it was about to be wiped out, by declaring the importance of it in an open and rather brave statement.
It seems that he managed to be quite unpolitical during the times working under the Nazis and the Communists, although there is still ongoing research on the role of academics like him in the Third Reich. Today, there is an academic prize named after him that is given to students contributing to Shakespearean studies in Germany (apparently Lehnert is most famous for his work on Shakespeare).
Thus, I decided to keep the book, but it was quite a shock when I first found out about the date and I would never have bought it had I known this.… (mais)