CHAPTER II. THE ANGLO-SAXON OR OLD-ENGLISH
PERIOD (450-1050)inherited by them from their old heroic and conquering an-
cestors. It was on the borders of the North Sea that our fathers
halted for unnumbered centuries on their westward journey,
and slowly developed the national life and language which
we now call Anglo-Saxon.
It is this old vigorous Anglo-Saxon language which forms
the basis of our modern English. If we read a paragraph from
any good English book, and then analyze it, as we would a
flower, to see what it contains, we find two distinct classes
of words. The first class, containing simple words express-
ing the common things of life, makes up the strong frame-
work of our language. These words are like the stem and bare
branches of a mighty oak, and if we look them up in the dic-
tionary we find that almost invariably they come to us from
our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The second and larger class of
words is made up of those that give grace, variety, ornament,
to our speech. They are like the leaves and blossoms of the
same tree, and when we examine their history we find that
they come to us from the Celts, Romans, Normans, and other
peoples with whom we have been in contact in the long years
of our development. The most prominent characteristic of
our present language, therefore, is its dual character. Its best
qualities–strength, simplicity, directness–come from Anglo-
Saxon sources; its enormous added wealth of expression, its
comprehensiveness, its plastic adaptability to new conditions
and ideas, are largely the result of additions from other lan-
guages, and especially of its gradual absorption of the French
language after the Norman Conquest. It is this dual charac-
ter, this combination of native and foreign, of innate and ex-
otic elements, which accounts for the wealth of our English
language and literature. To see it in concrete form, we should
read in successionBeowulf andParadise Lost, the two great
epics which show the root and the flower of our literary de-
velopment.