This is an approximation to the book I wish had existed when, more years ago than I like to remember, I embarked on the serious linguistic study of Old English. I felt a great need then for something to bridge the gap between elementary Old English grammars and the standard ‘philological’ handbooks (Campbell, Sievers-Brunner, Luick); as well as a source of background for making proper use of the etymological dictionaries like Holthausen, or even the OED. (Why is Skr lúbhyati given as a cognate for OE lufian, but Skr śaptá for seofon? Are there ‘two kinds’ of OE categories spelled <f>, and if so, why?)

The closest thing to the sort of book I wanted is still, as it was in the 1960s, the invaluable Moore & Knott, Elements of Old English (1955); this does provide a lot of the necessary background, if in an old-fashioned and ‘pre-structural’ way. It explores the major sound changes in both Germanic and Old English, and gives an overall view of the morphology – but not in enough detail to make an approach to the Big Boys very easy, and not in a sophisticated enough way to help in the transition to the ‘new’ OE scholarship: the tradition of ‘linguistic’ rather than ‘philological’, but still historically based work beginning with Stockwell and others in the 1950s, and still going on, more vigorously than ever.