Pater Noster

The Pater Noster, also known as 'The Lord's Prayer', is a Christian prayer which is found in both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke.

Many versions of this prayer have survived in Old English. For example, on f.37r of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Pater Noster is written in Latin with an above-line gloss in a Northumbrian dialect of Old English. Corpus Christi College MS 140, which contains the four gospels in Old English, preserves the prayer in the West-Saxon dialect. This makes the prayer an incredibly useful tool for analysing changes in Old English, both in space and time, and also for comparing it against other languages spoken by Christians from the same time period.

The following is a transcription from f.159v of British Library Cotton MS Tiberius C I.

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