History of the english language

Runic Casket, made of whalebone, and found in France near the town Clermond-Ferrand, now in the British Muscum in London. The Runic text is a short poem about whalebone( of the 9th century.)
The Franks Casket (or the Auzon Casket) is a small Anglo-Saxon whale's bone (not "whalebone" in the sense of baleen) chest from the early 8th century, now in the British Museum. The casket is densely decorated with knife-cut narrative scenes in flat two-dimensional low-relief and with inscriptions mostly in Anglo-Saxon runes. Generally reckoned to be of Northumbrian origin, it is of unique importance for the insight it gives into early Anglo-Saxon art and culture. Both identifying the images and interpreting the runic inscriptions has generated a considerable amount of scholarship.
The imagery is very diverse in its subject matter and derivations, and includes a single Christian image, the Adoration of the Magi, along with images derived from Roman history (Emperor Titus) and Roman mythology (Romulus and Remus), as well as a depiction of at least one legend indigenous to the Germanic peoples: that of Weyland the Smith. It has also been suggested that there may be an episode from the Sigurd legend, an otherwise lost episode from the life of Weyland's brother Egil, a Homeric legend involving Achilles, and perhaps even an allusion to the legendary founding of England by Hengist and Horsa.
The inscriptions "display a deliberate linguistic and alphabetic virtuosity; though they are mostly written in Old English and in runes, they shift into Latin and the Roman alphabet; then back into runes while still writing Latin". Some are written upside down or back to front.[4] It is named after a former owner, Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, who gave it to the British Museum.

After the Anglo-Saxon came into contact with the Roman culture the Runic alphabet was superseded by the Latin. Since the very earliest times there were four dialects in OE:

Nourthumbrian (1) , spoken by Angles living north of the Humber. Mercian West-Saxon(2), spoken by Angles between the Humber and Thames. The Mercian dialect: Translation of the Psalter (9 th c.) and hymns.The Runic texts of the Ruthwell Cross and Frank’s Casket (Runic), translation of the gospels, Caedmon’s Humn and Bede’s Dying Song.
Kentish, the language of the Jutes and Frisians. The West dialect is represented by the works of kind Alfred (lived 849-900), both original compositions of translations of Latin texts, also by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (till 891), works of the abbot Aelfric (10 century) and sermons of Wultstan (early 11thcentury).: Translations of Psalms L-LXX and old charters The superiority of the West - Saxon dialect both in quantity and importance of the documents using it contirms its dominating position as the literary language of the period.
The epic poems of the OE period: Beowulf, Genesis, Exodus, Judith, and poems by the monk Gynewulf: Eleng Andreas, Juliana and other were written in Anglian dialect but have been kept in West-Saxon dialect.
All over the country in the Kingdoms of England, all kinds of legal documents were written and copied. At first they were made in Latin, with English names and place names spelt by means of Latin letters, later they were also written in the local dialects.
There is a great variety of prose texts, part of them translations from the Latin. Among the prose works we should first of all note the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, (VII-IX centuries), the year book of the events in English history, starting at 787, writtenlater in West- Saxon.