“There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. ”

“I have lain awake in the darkness many nightsThinking of poems, going to sleep on poems,Finally,with the darkness closing onThe bright remembered words. I have thought of the darknessClosing on the world, the words of the poems forgotten,All the great beautiful words of the poemsFading from the mind of the world, let goSlowly, unknowingly, as from the mindOf one diseased the light of man's endeavorFades to the idiot darkness and is lost.Part of the darkness, I have lain awakeWatching the poems of the world fade out like stars.”

“listen, pal. I came here because I knew how worried you must be. But if you're going to talk to me like that, I'll fuck off home." The word racist brightened a little: the Anglo- Saxon was striking back against the Roman invader.”

“But that’s the part that’s so unfair. I have nothing else on my mind. How come I have to be the one sitting around analyzing him in like microscopic detail, and he gets to be the one with other things on his mind?”

“What curious attitudes he goes into!' (For the messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)'Not at all,' said the King. 'He's an Anglo-Saxon Messenger-and those are Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He only does them when he's happy.”

“Many historians regard him [Offa] as the most powerful Anglo-Saxon king before Alfred the Great. In the 780s he extended his power over most of Southern England. One of the most remarkable extantfrom King Offa's reign is a gold coin that is kept in the British Museum. On one side, it carries the inscription Offa Rex (Offa the King). But, turn it over and you are in for a surprise, for in badly copied Arabic are the words La Illaha Illa Allah ('There is no god but Allah alone'). This coin is a copy of an Abbasid dinarfrom the reign of Al-Mansur, dating to 773, and was most probably used by Anglo-Saxon traders. It would have been known even in Anglo-Saxon England that Islamic gold dinars were the most important coinage in the world at that time and Offa's coin looked enough like the original that it would have been readily accepted abroad.”