Although modern English 'sibling' comes directly from sibling (with the same root as sib-lufu), the Old English word means kin in general, not brothers and sisters specifically. Sib-lufu describes God's love for the angels, who are his children and therefore kin. But few siblings today are likely to describe each other as angels.

Near the end of [Beowulf], a dragon experiences lyft-wynn (air-joy), the pleasantness of the air or the joy experienced when flying: 'At times during the night it possessed air-joys (lyftwynne).'

Lēod-wynn (people-joy) is what you feel when you're with your people, a joy that comes from a sense of community. The hapax appears in a prayer for patience and humility in the poem Resignation . A solitary being, says the poem, cannot live long without 'people-joy (leodwynna), without friends.

Symbel-gāl (feast-lustful) is when you are so overwhelmed by the pleasures of food and drink that you are unable to focus on what's important. The word is a hapax in a Judgement Day poem, which tells about a man who spends too much time thinking about the pleasures of worldly life. The man forgets to pay attention to the fate of his soul: 'Little d

A limit of three nights for a host receiving a guest is actually specified in the law codes of two seventh-century Kentish kings. ... During the twelfth century (in the Middle English period) a similar rule appears in the law code attributed to Edward the Confessor but with more detail: a guest is only a guest for the first three days; after that,

Learning itself is a 'craft' in Old English, for cræft is a wonderfully versatile word; it can mean 'power', 'strength', 'art', 'skill', 'trade', 'cunning, knowledge' or 'virtue'. Leornung-cræft (learning-craft) is thus 'education' or 'erudition'. 'Craft' survives in modern English, but unfortunately we have lost some compound words like tungol-cræ

The dæg is youngest at üht. Üht is just past night's end, the time right before daybreak. It is followed by dag-red (day-red), when the day reddens with the first light of dawn, or dæg-rima (day-rim or day-border), the narrow space of time between night and day, when the sun just peeps over the horizon. Dæg-rēd and dæg-rima are followed by ar-morge

Although black was the most common colour for writing (as it still is today), red-orange ink was the base pigment for illustrations. Red-orange was used to outline illustrations before adding all the other colours on top. Illustrations in medieval manuscripts are often called 'miniatures', which is rather confusing; after all, some are large, full-

Most languages undergo semantic narrowing, usually because a particular definition for a word begins to be used more frequently than others. In the case of 'meat', people must have used the word specifically for animal flesh more and more frequently until a point in time when 'meat' sounded strange when used for any other sense. So although the wor