Duke University, Brown University, Washington University, Wellesley College

I flipped open a copy of Beowulf to the first page. On the left lay the original, Old English version and, on the right, the translated, modern English version. Curious, I scanned the Old English. Amid lines filled with strange symbols and unknown words, I found unexpected familiarity, not with the few words I could recognize, but with the ge- prefix that littered the pages. A sudden realization: the same ge- prefix that I used daily to form past-tense verbs in German was used to denote the past-tense in Old English. Suddenly, the peculiar Old English verbs “gefrunon” or “gewyrcean” had…