Old English Bible translations

The Old English Bible translations are the partial translations of the Bible prepared in medieval England into the Old English language.

Many of these translations were in fact Bible glosses, prepared to assist clerics whose grasp of Latin was imperfect and circulated in connection with the Vulgate Latin Bible that was standard in Western Christianity at the time. Old English was one of very few early medieval vernacular languages the Bible was translated into, and featured a number of incomplete Bible translations, some of which were meant, like the Paris Psalter or Ælfric's Hexateuch, to be circulated.

Information about translations is limited before the Synod of Whitby in 664. Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne and Abbot of Malmesbury (639–709) is thought to have written an Old English translation of the Psalms, although this is disputed.

Cædmon (~657–684) is mentioned by Bede as one who sang poems in Old English based on the Bible stories, but he was not involved in translation per se.

Bede (c. 672–735) produced a translation of the Gospel of John into Old English, which he is said to have prepared shortly before his death. This translation is lost; we know of its existence from Cuthbert of Jarrow's account of Bede's death.

The Vespasian Psalter (~850–875) is an interlinear gloss of the Book of Psalms in the Mercian dialect. Eleven other Anglo-Saxon (and two later) psalters with Old English glosses are known. The earliest are probably the early-9th-century red glosses of the Blickling Psalter (Pierpont Morgan Library, M.776). The latest Old English gloss is contained in the 12th-century Eadwine Psalter. The Old English material in the Tiberius Psalter of around 1050 includes a continuous interlinear gloss of the psalms.

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