The Lord's Prayer in Old English

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;	[59k] Father our thou that art in heavens
Si þin nama gehalgod	[44k] be thy name hallowed
to becume þin rice	[37k] come thy kingdom
gewurþe ðin willa	[43k] be-done thy will
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.	[53k] on earth as in heavens
urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg	[68k] our daily bread give us today
and forgyf us ure gyltas	[55k] and forgive us our sins
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum	[65k] as we forgive those-who-have-sinned-against-us
and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge	[57k] and not lead thou us into temptation
ac alys us of yfele soþlice	[69k] but deliver us from evil. truly.

A continuous recording: LP-all.wav (518k)

This version of the Lord's Prayer is from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 140 [WSCp], a translation of the Gospels written in Bath in the first half of the 11th century; edited by Liuzza (1994). Read by Cathy Ball (Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University) for Edward Vanetten's Sunday School class.

The pronunciation is based on [my understanding of] Lass's (1994) reconstruction of Old English phonology and grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences. I am grateful to Edwin Duncan, Karl Hagen and Paul Acker of ANSAX-L for thoughts on stress assignment in gedæghwamlican ('daily').

References

Lass, Roger. 1994. Old English: A Historical Linguistic Companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Liuzza, R. M., ed. 1994. The Old English Version of the Gospels. EETS 304. Oxford: Oxford University Press.