A Short Course in Old English for 419 Students
Thomas A. Bredehoft

Old English (OE) is the general term linguists apply to the Germanic language spoken by the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain from roughly the time they conquered the island in the fifth century to the time they were themselves conquered (by the French-speaking Normans) in the eleventh century. As with all languages which are no longer spoken, Old English is known only from written sources and from what we are able to deduce about it from other languages, both related tongues like Old High German (OHG), Old Norse (ON), and Gothic (Go), and more recent descendants, such as Middle English (ME) and Modern English (ModE).

Old English is usually taught as a foreign language nowadays; it is different enough from the language we speak to be completely unintelligible, most of the time. Indeed, it is so different from Modern English that even in printed editions of Old English texts, scholars are forced to use a specialized alphabet, derived from the original alphabets used in Anglo-Saxon times. (Anglo-Saxon is the term generally used to describe the people and the culture; Old English is the name of the language.)

The specialized characters used in Old English and no longer used in modern English are the following:

---"eth" pronounced either [] or []
---"thorn" pronounced in the same ways as eth
Æ, æ---"ash" generally pronounced [æ]

The thorn is derived from the Germanic runic writing system; the others are modifications of roman letters. Old English also had no need of some of the letters we now need: ‘k,’ ‘q,’ ‘x,’ and ‘z’ rarely appear in OE texts; ‘j’ and ‘v’ were not invented until much later. (OE manuscripts also used a runic symbol for ‘w,’ but in modern printed texts, a regular ‘w’ is usually used.)

In addition to a different alphabet, there are other systematic differences between OE and Modern English. For one, where Modern English is an SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) language, Old English clauses are often structured either SVO or SOV. Also, while ModE has a syntactic system based largely upon strict rules of word order, Old English has much less rigid rules about word order--because it has a more fully developed inflectional system than does ModE. In the following sections, I will outline some of the chief characteristics of Old English syntax, morphology, and phonology. At the end of all that, I will present some fairly straightforward OE texts and some problems in OE.

It's easy enough for me to say that OE is an SVO/SOV language with a fairly complex case system; it's more troublesome to explain how these features impact the language and make it take such a different form from ModE. Although ModE does not have as complex a case system as OE, we nevertheless can see vestiges of the OE case system in places, especially in the pronouns and in irregular plurals. For most ModE nouns, there are only three (or two) possible forms (for example, "apple," "apples," and "apple's"). These are, respectively, singular, plural, and possessive. (We also tend to write "apples'" as a 'plural possesive' but as the written form indicates, it is pronounced the same as the regular possessive, and thus may or may not be considered a separate form. Indeed, if we consider only pronunciation, it is clear that there are only two forms here: [æpl] and [æplz]) For pronouns, the system is more complex: in the first person, we have at least six forms:

1st person . . . singular . . . . plural
subjective . . . I . . . . . . . . . . .we
objective . . . . me . . . . . . . . .us
possessive . . . my (mine) . . our (ours)

The possessives in parentheses here are limited to a small set of syntactic positions: namely predicate adjectives, as in "The apple is mine." Similar tables can be made for 2nd and 3rd person pronouns.Also, the irregular plurals of basic (OE-derived) words like fish, ox, sheep, man, goose, mouse, and the like suggest that the OE plural system had many other possibilities besides a final "s."

In fact, even the ModE pronoun system is less complex than the inflectional system for most OE nouns. In general, OE nouns belonged to a system in which there were four inflectional categories: nominative (corresponding to what we call in ModE subjective), genitive (corresponding roughly to possessive), and accusative and dative, both of which are now combined in our objective case. In OE, accusative roughly corresponds to a "direct object" case, while datives often correspond to indirect objects. The whole picture, of course is even more complicated because not only verbs, but various prepositions required their objects to be in the appropriate case--some prepositions demanded accusative objects, some took dative, some took genitive. Anyway, the typical declension (system of case forms) looked something like this for a typical Anglo-Saxon noun:

. . . . . . . . . . . . .singular. . . . . . . . . .plural
nominative . . cyning ('king') . . . .cyningas
genitive . . . . . cyninges . . . . . . . . .cyningas
dative . . . . . . .cyninge . . . . . . . . . .cyningum
accusative . . . cyning . . . . . . . . . . cyningas

There are a couple of things we should note here: first, the nominative and accusative forms for this word are identical (for other words in other declensions, this is not necessarily the case)--ultimately, this will lead to the ModE habit of not distinguishing between subjective and objective nouns, even though we maintain the distinction in our pronoun system. Secondly, the nominative and accusative plurals are formed by adding an "-as" suffix, which will ultimately lead to our ModE plural suffix "-s." Lastly, the genitive singular ends in "-es"; this will result in the ModE possessive ending in "-s" which we, of course, spell with an apostrophe.

There are several different declensions for Old English nouns (at least 5). Some, as you might suspect, form plurals in ways different from how "cyning" does--indeed, some nominative plurals are formed by adding "-an," some form plurals by changing the vowel within the root, and some plurals are identical to the singulars. These respectively result in ModE plurals like "oxen," "feet," and "sheep."

Changing vowels in the roots of words is also a very common feature of OE verbs, leading directly to many ModE words which do the same thing (i.e. sing, sang, sung). In OE, verbs which do this are called "strong verbs" and they are much more common and "regular" in OE than in ModE. There are 8 separate classes of strong verbs in OE; what they all have in common, though, is that they change root vowels, especially in their past tense and past participle forms (as in sing, sang, sung). Modern descendents of the various strong verb classes often still have differing series of vowels from verb to verb. For example:

pres., past, past participle
sing, sang, sung
dive, dove, dove (not all ModE dialects allow these--some use dived)
drive, drove, driven
wake, woke, woken (likewise, "waked" is becoming more common)
shoot, shot, shot
choose, chose, chosen

and so on. Not all verbs in OE however, formed their past tense this way--there are also a number of so-called "weak verbs" which form their past tense by adding a "dental suffix" (that is, a suffix including a [t] or [d] sound). In addition, as we know from archaic Middle English forms still in circulation, the OE verb system had a more developed system of endings than ModE, just as the noun system did. Consider the following portion of the verb paradigm for OE lufian ("to love")

lufian

. . . sing. . . . . . present pl. present sing. past pl. past
1st ic lufie . . . we lufia . . ic lufode . . . .we lufodon
2nd u lufast .ge lufia . . .u lufodest . .ge lufodon
3rd he lufa . .hi lufia . . .he lufode . . . hi lufodon

From this we can see the origins of the forms which will carry at least into early Modern English (eModE): "I love, thou lovest, he loveth." We can also see from this paradigm something of what the OE nominative pronouns look like; notice in particular that "ge" (eModE "ye") is specifically a second person plural. In ModE, of course, we do not have separate pronouns for singular and plural second person. Ultimately, the OE "weak" verbs will carry the day, becoming the only regular system in ModE, while the "strong" verbs eventually become irregular and anomalous. Some strong verbs lose their strong character entirely. The OE verb helpan ("to help") was a strong verb and had vowel changes in the root, but over time, verbs like this one ended up taking on the form of weak verbs and now the past forms of help are formed with an "-ed" suffix just like most regular ModE verbs.

The last group of verbs we need to mention are the truly irregular OE verbs, which are the ancestors of the ModE verbs like "to be," "to have," and "to do." These are quite irregular in OE; in fact the forms of our ModE verb "to be" appear to come from three separate Indo-European roots, all of which naturally have descendent forms in OE as well--thus, we get some forms which begin with vowels (am, is, are), those which begin with "b" (be, being, been), and those that begin with "w" (was, were). On the whole, these verbs look much the same in OE as they do in ModE, although there are some changes (i.e., they sometimes have the same sorts of endings as regular OE verbs ("beo")). Also, other OE verbs which are the predecessors of our ModE "helping verbs" (can, may, will, shall, do) all were stand-alone verbs in OE, with very clear meanings (i.e. "to know how", "to be able", "to wish", "to have to" "to perform").

So far I've discussed, in at least some small detail, nouns, verbs, and pronouns. That pretty much leaves adjectives and adverbs to cover the major syntactic categories. Like those of most Indo-European languages (ModE is somewhat of an exception), OE adjectives are also inflected. In other words there are sets of endings which get attached to OE adjectives to ensure that each adjective agrees in case, number, and gender with the noun it modifies. (Among the OE noun declensions, there are distinctions between classes that are traditionally known as gender-classes: masculine, feminine, and neuter. More than anything, these labels are simply conveniences, as words of masculine or neuter gender (for example) may not really have any inherent masculine or neuter qualities. From another perspective, of course, there seems to be some justification for the labels, because "feminine" nouns and female proper names both tend to get replaced by the same set of "feminine" pronouns. Thus the labels remain in use, even though sometimes somewhat misleading.) A common method of making a noun into an adjective is to tack on an "-ig" suffix: making, for example, "is" ("ice") into "isig" ("icy"). The "-ig" comes down to ModE as the adjective-making "-y" suffix. There are also comparative and superlative forms in OE; not surprisingly, they are reminiscent of our modern comparative and superlative:

OE . . . . . . . ModE
heard . . . . .hard
heardra . . .harder
heardost . .hardest

Similar comparatives and superlatives are seen on OE adverbs, as:

OE . . . .ModE
oft . . . . often
oftor . . more often
oftost . .most often

In general, OE abverbs are somewhat hard to identify while reading. Often they are only marked by a final "-e" morpheme (often corresponding to a dative or instrumental (i.e. "with X") usage of an adjective or noun). Some OE adverbs, however, are made easier to spot because they end in "-lice": an example is "bealdlice," "boldly." Notice the final "-e" here, too. This ending, of course means "-like" and is the ancestor of our modern "-ly" adverbial ending. (Note: final "-lic"--without the final "-e"--can also be used as an adjective-forming suffix, also meaning "like").

Ultimately, as I think you can see from the preceding paragraphs, OE syntax is largely a matter of making sure the right things in your sentence agree with each other. In ModE, this is pretty much limited to subject-verb number agreement (i.e. singular or plural—only 3rd person singular is different from the rest), and pronoun-antecedent agreement. In OE, there is subject-verb agreement in number and person, and noun-adjective agreement in case, number and gender. In other words, there are a lot of inflectional suffix morphemes in OE, all of which are important syntactically for the meanings of sentences. Since so much of the syntax is carried in word endings, word-order tends to be less rigid in OE than in ModE. Nevertheless, there are some general rules which usually apply. The most basic is, as I noted before, that OE is in general an SVO/SOV language. In addition, most adjectives tend to precede their nouns (as in ModE), while OE adverbs can float around pretty freely (again, as in ModE).

Old English Morphology.

Apart from the various inflectional morphemes in the noun, verb, and adjective paradigms, Old English morphology isn't really much different form ModE morphology. As I discussed in the last section, we still use some of the same derivational morphemes as the Anglo-Saxons did (although they have gone through some minor changes). A number of other Old English derivational morphemes should look relatively familiar to people:

OE Example Function/meaning
un- "unlytel" (large) not-
a- "abidan" (abide) intensifier, or no meaning
-nes "beorhtnes" (brightness) nominalizer
-ful(l) "synnfull" (sinful) adjectivizer
-leas "recceleas" (reckless) without-
-erne "suerne" (southern) adjectival
-isc "englisc" (English) adjectival
ut- "utlaga" (outlaw) "out-" (we might well
consider this word to be a compound; see below)

Of course there are others that are less familiar, but this continuous use of some of these morphemes, and the fact that they continue to be productive (i.e. they can often still be used to form brand-new words) indicates just how useful and functional such derivational morphemes can be.

Perhaps the most common morpheme in OE is the "ge-" prefix, which is often found attached to verbs, and sometimes to other parts of speech such as adjectives or nouns. Unfortunately, this morpheme is so common and is used on such a variety of words that it is nearly impossible to determine what sort of meaning it may have carried. Here, a parallel with German should be noted: in German, the "ge-" prefix is still used, but mostly to mark past participles. As such, the German "ge-" morpheme can't really help us determine the meaning of the OE morpheme, since in German, it is now essentially an inflectional morpheme, with no separate semantic meaning. Ultimately, it seems as if in most cases, the semantic value of the "ge-" prefix was close to nil in the OE period, although sometimes, it nevertheless does appear to be used meaningfully. It's a morpheme that can cause students a bit of trouble when first studying OE.

In addition to these sorts of morphemic activity, OE was also characterized by an even greater ability to form compounds than ModE. As with most (but not all) ModE compounds, OE compounds tend to become inflected according to their second elements (that is, if a compound made of two nouns is used as a direct object, the accusative suffix is applied only to the second half of the compound). This is like ModE compounds such as "blackboard" but different from such compounds as "mother-in-law" which gets pluralized as "mothers-in-law." A special category of OE compounds consists of words called "kennings." Kennings are compounds that function as little mini-riddles, and are used most frequently in OE poetry, and they frequently have a powerful imagistic effect. For example the sea might be called in a poem "swan-rad" ("swan-road"), or "hron-rad" ("whale-road"), while a ship might be indicated by "mere-hengest" ("sea-stallion").

Old English Phonology

To a large extent, what students need to learn about Old English phonology comes under two headings: first, how Old English is pronounced; and second, how Old English sounds correspond to modern English sounds. On the whole, Old English pronunciation is fairly straightforward, especially in comparison to ModE pronunciation (at least as it relates to our spelling system). As with most early languages, our primary information about OE pronunciation, in fact, comes from the spelling of words (although ModE pronunciation sometimes corroborates judgments made about OE phonological rules). In order to discuss OE pronunciation, it is worthwhile to look at the consonants separately from the vowels.

First, though, it is equally important to note that when pronouncing OE words, it is important to pronounce every letter; there are no "silent letters" as there are in ModE. This tends to cause some students difficulties occasionally, as when a word appears with a final "e". In ModE, such final "e"s are rarely pronounced, but they were always pronounced in OE (in Chaucer's time, such final vowels were beginning to be seen as optional). To take another case, final "g" must be pronounced in "-ing" words, and other "silent" letters, like the initial "c" in "cniht" must also be pronounced. Also, when an OE word has a double consonant, both must be pronounced: in ModE, this issue rarely arises, although the words "beekeeper" and "bookkeeper" (for many speakers) constitute a near-minimal pair which illustrates the difference between a single and double consonant.

OE Vowels

For the most part, OE vowels are generally given a value fairly close to the value the equivalent symbol carries in the phonetic alphabet: this includes such vowels as OE "y" which gets pronounced as [y]--a rounded high front vowel. (In most transcriptions, two exceptions to this arise: a short 'e' is transcribed as [e], and a short 'i' is transcribed as [I].) In general, however, the correspondence is fairly straightforward, with only two major complications. The first of these are the OE diphthongs, which are quite distinct from those in ModE, consisting of "ea," "eo," "ie" and (sometimes) "io." The best way to think about these is that they each are pronounced as a single syllable (never two syllables) and are pronounced approximately as if your tongue moves from the position of one vowel to the other in the process of producing the vowel. A name like "Beowulf" is pronounced as two syllables [beo wUlf], not as three *[be o wUlf]. In many ways, we are quite accustomed to producing monosyllabic diphthongs, but just not these particular ones; that's why it's sometimes a little difficult to pronounce them.

The second major complication in the OE vowel system is the fact that OE makes a phonemic distinction between "long" and "short" vowels. In OE, this distinction is indeed primarily one of duration--a long vowel lasts longer than a short one. In OE manuscripts, the distinction between long and short vowels is not always regularly indicated, leaving readers with the problem of deciding whether a particular vowel was long or not (the diphthongs, too, could be long or short). For example, the OE word for 'good' was "god" with a long "o"; the OE word for 'God' was "god," with a short "o." Occasionally in OE texts (and more regularly in the ME period) length was indicated by doubling the vowel in question; thus our ModE spelling of "good."

OE Consonants

In some ways, the consonants are easier than the vowels, although they are not without their own idiosyncrasies. Most of the time, OE consonants are pronounced identically to the corresponding ModE consonants, with g, c, and h as notable exceptions (the thorn and eth, I described above). Like modern English, however, certain phonological rules applied more or less automatically during this period: for example, although the fricatives s, f, and (or ) were generally unvoiced at the beginning and ends of words, they were often voiced in medial positions (i.e. for fricatives, an intervocalic voicing rule was quite regular in OE). As I have probably mentioned in class, this rule leads to familiar spelling (and pronunciation) alterations in singular/plural pairs like "knife"/"knives," "calf"/"calves," and so on. We often apply this same intervocalic voicing rule in ModE, but not nearly to the extent it operated in OE.

OE 'h,' when at the beginning of a word, was apparently pronounced much as it is today; but in medial positions, it seems to have stood for a voiceless velar fricative [x]. This results in Middle English spellings which often feature "gh--this consonant later (ModE) became silent. Thus, OE niht ("night") leads to ModE "night," while OE cniht ("boy") leads directly to ModE "knight." In the process, the velar fricative disappeared entirely from English. In different words, the original OE 'h' sometimes ended up being pronounced differently; thus the profusion of Modern pronunciations for words which still contain the "gh" cluster in their written forms.

OE 'g' also occasionally stood for a velar fricative, although the 'g' seems to have represented the voiced versio. This sound often turns into a [w] sound in ME (or, more precisely, I should say that it often corresponds to a "w" spelling in ModE; the [w] pronunciation was a feature of ME). Thus, OE "boga" is the direct ancestor of ModE "bow." 'G' could also have the familiar [g] sound, and even could take on the [j] sound, as in OE "twegen" ("two") the ancestor of the somewhat archaic ModE "twain," or "gyldan," ("to yield"). The letter 'c' is almost as troublesome, standing for [k] in words such as "col" ("cool") or [t∫] in words such as "ceosan" ("to choose"). The combination 'cg' seems to have been pronounced [d3], as in "ecg" ("edge"); while 'sc' was sounded [∫] in words like "scip" ("ship") and "æsc" ("ash").

Like Germanic languages in general, OE words are stressed on the root syllable--that is the first syllable of a word, not including any prefix. This is one of the central features which distinguishes the Germanic language family from the rest of the Indo-European languages, which usually stress a syllable depending on how far it is from the end of the word. Ultimately this leads to OE (and early Germanic) poetry's habit of operating on an alliterative basis, rather than a syllable-counting basis as in Latin and Greek poetry for example. (ME and early ModE poetry tended to be syllable-counting poetry, except for poetry of the "Alliterative Revival" of the 14th century; many modern poets avoid rigid metrical systems altogether).

OE Texts

At this point I think it's just as well if we look at some actual OE texts, in order to begin to get a feel for the language. The texts we will examine in this section attempt to represent the limited variety of sources for OE texts in general: inscriptional texts and manuscript texts. And in general, these texts are arranged in order of increasing difficulty. Explanatory notes and commentary accompany each text. Punctuation and capitalization have been shamelessly modernized; be aware that this step transforms the texts somewhat.

Text 1: The Lancashire Ring

This text is inscribed around the circumference of a golden finger ring usually dated to the ninth century.

The letters used are a curious combination of runes and roman letters not clearly paralleled elsewhere:

Ædred mec ah; Eanred mec agrof.

"Ædred" and "Eanred" here are personal names; the word "mec" is the accusative singular first person pronoun. The verbs, "ah" and "agrof," are the present and past tense forms, respectively, of the OE verbs "agan" ("to own") and "agrafan" ("to engrave"). The text, translated, means "Ædred owns me; Eanred engraved me." "Agrafan" is clearly a strong verb, with the change in vowel identifying this as a past tense form. In addition, we can see that the root in "agrafan" and that in "engrave" are identical, only the preferred prefix has changed. Based on my comments in the phonology section, this text would probably be pronounced as follows:

[ædred met∫ ax eanred met∫ agrof].

This brief text, by the way, is generally considered to be one of the shortest pieces of Old English poetry--only a single line long. But within it, we can clearly see the principles upon which OE poetry is built. First, each line of poetry is split into halves, which are linked by alliteration, and each of which has two stressed syllables. (Since all vowels alliterate with each other, the "æ" in "Ædred," the "a" in "ah," and the "ea" in "Eanred" are considered to alliterate.) The alliteration can fall on either or both of the stressed syllables in the first half-line and must occur only once (on the first stress) of the second half-line. Here, the alliterating sounds are present in all three positions; "agrof," in the position of the fourth stressed syllable of the line, does not alliterate, as its root begins with "g," and hence it can only alliterate with other 'g' words.

Text 2: From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

The following is the entry under the year one from the oldest manuscript of the historical document known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a manuscript written very near to this book's composition in the last decade of the ninth century:

An .i. Octauianus ricsode .lxvi. wintra ond on am .lxii. geare his rices Crist wæs acenned.

An almost word-for-word gloss of this would be:

An .i. Latin abbreviation for "anno .i.": "In the year one"
Octauianus Emperor Octavius Caesar (-us: Latin nominative ending)
ricsode p.t. of ricsian, "to rule"
.lxvi. 66
wintra genitive plural: "of winters"
ond and
on am .lxii. geare in the 62nd year (am geare: dative singular)
his rices genitive singular: "of his rule"; cf ricsian, above
Crist Christ; nominative
wæs acenned was born.

One obvious feature of this is the ease in which Latin and OE texts often coexisted; in the Chronicle, every entry begins with this Latin abbreviation for "In the year...." But also, this text shows some typical features of OE, especially the use of the genitive for constructions other than the possessive, which is the most familiar function of genitive forms in ModE. This text also provides some more illustrations of obvious cognates, as well as of �am, one of the inflected forms of the demonstrative article ("the").

Text 3: from the Prose Solomon and Saturn

The Prose Solomon and Saturn is a series of questions and answers written in Old English, apparently designed as a wisdom-challenge between the wise Solomon and the pagan diety Saturn. Most of the questions, like the one below, have to do with knowledge of Christian ideas.

Saga me hwilc wyrt ys betst and selust.
Ic e secge lilige hatte seo wyrt for on e heo getacna Crist.

A translation of this would be: "Tell me which plant is best and most blessed; I tell you the plant is called 'lily' because it betokens Christ."

Most of the OE words here are direct ancestors of the ModE words, although they may not always look like it. "Saga" and "secge" are the imperative and first person singular present forms of the verb "secgan" ("to say"); Icelandic "sagas" are so-named from a closely related ON verb because they are "sayings." "Wyrt" (meaning "plant") is the ancestor of "wort," a rarely used form that nevertheless survives in some plant names. "Betst" obviously becomes ModE "best"; "selust" is a near synonym. "Hatte" is the form for "is called" from the OE verb "hatan" ("to call, or order"). "For on e" is an OE periphrasis (i.e. a phrase for what we use a single word for) for "because." "Wyrt" is feminine, as is shown by the feminine demonstrative "seo"; when replaced by a pronoun, "wyrt" is replaced by the direct ancestor of ModE "she": "heo."

Text 4: from Wulfstan's Sermon to the English.

Archbishop Wulfstan wrote his Sermon to the English in about 1014, as the invading Danes were in the process of conquering the island, and accused the English in this sermon of having brought the pagan invasion upon themselves by failing to uphold proper Christian observances and practices. The sermon begins with the following line, one of my favorite bits of OE prose.

Leofan men, gecnawa æt so is: eos worold is on ofste and hit nealæc am end.

Dear men, know that [this] is truth: this world is in haste, and it nears the end

There are some interesting things to note here: first, the adjective "leofan" has a plural "-an" suffix, so that it is in agreement with the noun it modifies, "men." Secondly, the verb "nealæc" is formed from OE "neah" ("nigh"); its comparative form leads to our ModE "near" (by addition of the comparative "-ra" suffix mentioned above). "Hit" for "it" still occurs in some ModE dialects; for example it is relatively common in Appalachian English even today--as we can see here, it has its roots in OE. OE "so" leads to ModE "sooth", as in "soothsayer" (i.e. "truth-sayer").

Text 5: Poetic proverbs (from "Latin-English Proverbs")

Two manuscripts contain a very short poem consisting of brief Latin proverbs translated into OE poetry. The OE versions are given here:

Hat acola, hwit asola,
leof alaa, leoht aystra.
Æghwæt forealda æs e ece ne by .

As a bit of OE poetry, we can again see alliteration at work--here the first line alliterates on "h", the second on "l" and the third on the vowels "æ", "ea", and "e." The "a"s in line one do not alliterate, since they are prefixes--the same applies to "for-" in line 3. A fairly free translation of this poem would go something like this:

Heat cools, white soils,
A dear one grows loathly, light darkens.
Everything grows old which is not eternal.

As much as possible, I've relied upon cognates for this translation. "Hat" in line one really becomes ModE "hot," not "heat," but the other cognates (‘cool,’ ‘white,’ ‘soiled,’ ‘loath,’ ‘light,’ ‘old’) are all valid. "Æghwæt" is one member of a complex of related OE words pretty much resembling ModE words like "whatever, somewhat, however, somehow" etc. "æs e" is a normal OE relative pronoun, "ece" means "eternal," and "by" is the appropriate form of the verb "wesan" ("to be"). "Ne" is a negator.

comely, angrily,
ugly, sweetly,
homely, noisily,
gnarly, fiercely,
princely, greedily,
worldly, wholly

Forst sceal freosan, fyr wudu meltan,
eore growan, is brycgian.