Sweet Henry. Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer

Ninth edition, revised by Norman Davis. — Oxford University Press, 1974. — 135 p.Sweet’s Primer first appeared in 1882, and was last revised for the eighth edition of 1905. It is not surprising that in the interval methods of presentation should have changed. The Primer, though designed as an introduction to Sweet’s Reader, has tended to fall out of use, but nothing has replaced it ; and the Reader itself has often been used as a beginner’s book, for which it was never intended.
In the belief that an elementary introduction on the lines of the Primer is essential, I have tried in the present revision to preserve the policy and the scale of Sweet’s work, while rearranging it very considerably in detail. In the grammar— especially in treating the verb, where Sweet’s classification has failed to find acceptance—I have sought to present the facts, with as few technical terms as possible, in the same groups as students will find when they come to more advanced books. The bare outlines of relevant phonology have been rearranged with the same object, though I fear that so concise a statement cannot be readily intelligible. Under the paradigms the lists of similarly inflected words have been much increased, and the section on syntax, especially on word-order, has been expanded. In so limited a space the grammar could not aim at anything like completeness. It sets out to cover the texts in this book, and all examples are drawn from them; but I hope that it will serve also as a working elementary grammar for wider use.