Nominative and Genitive Strong Nouns

The terms nominative and genitive refer to the grammatical role or 'case' of a noun. The nominative is used for the subject of a sentence and the genitive is used to denote possession or a specific relationship. In þæs cyninges þegen - The King’s thane, the thane is the subject, and he 'belongs' to the king, so þegen is in the nominative and cyninges is in the genitive.

The ending a noun takes is not just determined by its role in a sentence, but also its number. For example, in þæs cyninges biscopas - the king’s bishops, biscop has an 'as' ending, which is different to þegen above. This is because þegen is singular while biscopas is plural.

The genitive case also has a plural form, as can be seen in þara cyninga biscopas — the kings’ bishops. In this sentence there are multiple bishops belonging to multiple kings so the endings of cyning changes to cyninga.

In many ways, Old English can be quite similar to modern English. The singular form of the nominative is the ‘plain’ form of the word, and is what you will use to look up words in dictionaries. The nominative form of strong masculine nouns such as cyning, biscop, þegen and stan all add ‘as’ to become plural, much like how (s) is added to the end of most nouns to make them plural in modern English. Similarly, the singular genitive is made by adding ‘es’, much like how (‘s) is added in English. The plural genitive is the one that differs the most, as in modern English we’d write it as (kings’), adding an apostrophe after the s, while Old English simply adds the suffix ‘a’.

This can best be visualised by use of a table or paradigm like the one below. Select biscop, þegen, or stan ('stone') to see their declensions.