Hail Mary only achieved its present form in the 16^th century, half a millenium after the end of the Old English period. This prayer is therefore not found in the corpus of this language. However, the antiphon that forms its first part (the salutation to the Holy Virgin) was in use much earlier. Its wording derives from the Gospel of Luke, and associates the words of the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation (Luke 1,28) with the words of Elisabeth at the Visitation (Luke 1,42), supplemented with the names of Mary and Jesus. Since translations of the Gospels into Old English have come down to us, it is possible to reconstruct an Old English form of the antiphon. We used the Wessex Gospels in the West Saxon dialect of the late 10^th century, as edited in 1842 by Benjamin Thorpe. The words that are not in the Gospel text are in brackets.

The translation is the English version of the prayer.

The text is transcribed in Anglo-Saxon runes, also called Futhorc, used in England from the 5^th to the 11^th century, and exemplified by J. R. R. Tolkien in the foreword of The Hobbit. We made use of Robert Pfeffer’s typeface Pfeffer Mediæval.  Open this mode in Glaemscribe