[Old English] An Anglo-Saxon Reader/Beowulf

[ekaitz]

Does anybody know how to pronounce Old English? If they do it would be really cool to get some stuff up in it...so I could learn good pronunciation...

And if it has survived this long it really is classic literature...

[TheoD]

The way I found out about Librivox was by searching for a Beowulf audio recordings. I got really excited when I found it, read by the great readers of Librivox and then I was sort of let down that it wasn't in Old English like I hoped.

Beowulf, at least to me, is so important a text that I think it should one day be available in the spoken form in the public domain, and I know no other place where this can become possible than here.

I'm going to try to put more information here and hopefully draw a bit of interest in this potential project.
I prefer the text available at Wikisource, which is basically the corrected form of the Gutenberg version:

->Wikisource<-
->Gutenberg<-

I figured the chance of someone here able to read Old English is minimal, so I might even decide to attempt to read it myself when I can't stand it any longer. (I hope not, I have had no exposure to Old English in any form until two months ago.)
If there are any people like me, who don't know Old English, but might want to learn it (it's easy, almost ), this is what I used:

http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/pronunciation.html

It's a bit long, but the table at the end of the page is what it's all about.

The chapters in Beowulf are thankfully short such that it wouldn't be too daunting to record the chapters thus much at a time as compared to the normal length of a contemporary novel chapter.

[hefyd]

All that the most dedicated Beowulf-lover could possibly want, and more besides, can be found at
http://www.heorot.dk/beo-links.html
including selected readings in the original
http://faculty.virginia.edu/OldEnglish/Beowulf.Readings/Beowulf.Readings.htm
though it would still be nice for us to have our very own reading on Librivox.
hefyd