For those interested in Old English or Anglo-Saxon culture, a fantastic resource has just been released: the Woruldhord Project. There is a lot of interesting stuff there, especially if you're teaching Old English. I found the Oxford English Faculty Exam papers particularly interesting. They illustrate the rigorous philological focus that once was the norm in the field but which now has been supplanted by other concerns.

For my birthday, I received Don Ringe's From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic and I've been reading it while taking the train in to work.

I find that even though I'm not in academia any more it's refreshing to spend some time perusing hard-core historical linguistic geekery, particularly since I've never really delved into PIE with the depth that I should have. I suspect that many Anglo-Saxonists tend to skimp on their study of the linguistic pre-history of English, especially the earliest stages.

Note to the College Board: the correct transliteration for 'þ' is 'th', not 'p'. I've finally started to go back to analyzing the SAT writing material to infer the College Board's views on grammar, and while flipping through the January 2008 SAT, my eye came upon this bit from a passage in a reading section about Ezra Pound's translation of the Old English poem "The Seafarer":

Moreover, there are unfortunately some mistakes, as when Pound misreads purh ("through") as pruh ("coffin").

A cute review of Beowulf in verse at Slate. It would have been more impressive if the writer had tried to do it in alliterative verse. In fact, that's one of the things that bugged me about the bawdy songs that are sung in the hall in the movie. They're in ordinary rhyming song meter with nary an alliterating half-line to be found.