Exeter Book Hand — the scribe's hand as a font
Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501 · c. 970
A riddle from the Exeter Book, copied by one scribe around 970. It speaks in the first person. Guess what it is.
The black track was his. Drawn as a font, it is now anyone's — type over it.
'wordhord onleac' — he unlocked his word-hoard. Widsith, the first line of a poem in this manuscript. The font is EBH Facsimile: every form in it is attested in the book.
It comes in four styles. The other three:
The decorated initials are a font of their own, and every glyph the scribe wrote is in the set. Choose a font — the characters below are drawn live from the font file.
Some letters have more than one form — Facsimile's lowercase y comes
curved, straight-sided, and F-shaped, typed as y,
y2, and y3. The key combinations are listed
in the glyph reference PDF.
The blessing is for readers. Nine poems from the book are here, set in the hand, with a gloss under every word and a source behind every gloss.
Hwæt eom ic? — what am I?
A Gospel book. The slaughtered animal is the calf whose skin became the vellum; the riddle turns violence into a sacred object.
The whole riddle, word by word: Riddle 26, fols. 107r–107v.
The hand is free, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 — use it, modify it, redistribute it, in any project. You may not sell the fonts on their own.
Source files and issue tracker: github.com/rubywku/exeterbookhand
Questions
What is the Exeter Book?
Written around AD 970, the Exeter Book is one of the four major surviving miscellanies of Old English literature. It was donated to Exeter Cathedral by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, sometime before 1072 — described in his donation list as a mycel Englisc boc be gehwilcum þingum on leoð-wisan geworht ('a large English book about all sorts of things composed in poetry'), with texts ranging from religious narrative to didactic poems and riddles.
How do I enable ligatures?
Ligatures are on by default in most graphic design and office
applications. In Microsoft Word you must enable them manually,
on the Advanced tab of the Font
dialog box — the README in the download shows how. On the web, use
font-feature-settings: "liga" 1 in your CSS.
How do I type Old English characters?
Old English characters (þ, ð, æ, ƿ) are available on most systems: on macOS hold Option and press D for ð, and use the Character Viewer (Edit → Emoji & Symbols) for the rest. On Windows, use the Character Map or a custom keyboard layout. The specimen further up this page has buttons for the common ones.
Where do the word glosses come from?
Every gloss — on this page and in the reader — is drawn from a published scholarly source, and the reader shows which one. Most derive from Bosworth & Toller's An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary; compounds and hapax legomena are glossed from the standard editions — Gordon (1960) for The Seafarer, Dunning & Bliss (1969) for The Wanderer, Malone (1966) for Deor, Leslie (1961) for the elegies, and Krapp & Dobbie's Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records for the riddles. Word frequencies come from the Dictionary of Old English wordforms corpus. No definitions are machine-generated.
Can I see the manuscript itself?
Yes. A complete digital copy of the Exeter Book, which also features the uninked drypoint imagery in the margins, is at theexeterbook.exeter.ac.uk. To view the manuscript in situ, keep an eye on the Exeter Cathedral website for announcements.
How can I contribute or report issues?
Suggest changes by opening an issue on the GitHub repository, or write to info@exeterbookhand.com. Corrections from students and scholars are especially welcome — a wrong gloss, a broken ligature, a letterform that doesn't match the manuscript.
On the script and the book
The Exeter Book was written in English Square minuscule, the formal book hand of 10th-century England. If you want to go further than this page:
- Conner, P. W., Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge 1993).
- Dumville, D. N., 'English Square minuscule script: the background and earliest phases', Anglo-Saxon England 16 (1987): 147–79.
- Dumville, D. N., 'English Square minuscule script: the mid-century phases', Anglo-Saxon England 23 (1994): 133–64.
- Gameson, R., 'The origin of the Exeter Book of Old English poetry', Anglo-Saxon England 25 (1996): 135–85.
- Krapp, G. P., and E. V. K. Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records III (New York 1936).
- Roberts, J., Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500 (London 2005).