Ōsweald Bera is a textbook for learning Old English – the language of Beowulf, The Wanderer, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But if I put it in those terms, it deceives you about the nature of the book.
Because Ōsweald Bera is not really a language textbook in the sense of explaining the grammar of the language and giving you useful phrases to practice. Instead, Ōsweald Bera is a story. A story about a bear, in fact. It’s told, at first, in the simplest possible Old English I could muster, using only a scant few dozen words, and gradually increases in grammatical complexity and breadth of vocabulary as the story unfolds.
It all begins in an English forest in the year AD 1000, where a bear named Ōsweald is feeling very lonely and decides to go on an adventure. His adventure will take him all over England, where he will meet a mouse with a Napoleon complex, a monk of murky loyalties, and the King of the English himself. He studies in a monastery, joins the army to fight against the Danes, gets wrapped up in political intrigue, and it all ends in an epic battle on the edge of a cliff.
In that way, it’s similar to Hans Ørberg’s well-loved Latin textbook Lingua Latina per Se Illustrata: Familia Romana, itself a reader which gradually leads you through the basics of the Latin language through a story about the adventures and misadventures of a Roman household. I’ve attempted to bring the spirit of Ørberg’s work to Old English with Ōsweald Bera, albeit with my own twist.