This article describes a tradition of early medieval cosmological thought in the prose and poetry of the Old English corpus. This Old English cosmology uses a small set of cosmological building blocks and a relatively limited vocabulary to describe and explore a variety of structural models of the Universe. In these texts – which include but are not limited to the Old English Prose Boethius, Ælfric’s De temporibus Anni, the Old English Phoenix, and The Order of the World – each structural model relies on a combination of terms for heaven, the firmament, and a cosmic-scale ocean and seafloor. These models, each distinct, appear to fall into two loose categories which may represent two schools of thought in vernacular cosmology.

本文在古英语语料库的散文和诗歌中描述了中世纪早期宇宙学思想的传统。这个古英语宇宙学使用一小组宇宙学构建块和相对有限的词汇来描述和探索宇宙的各种结构模型。在这些文本中——包括但不限于古英语散文 Boethius、Ælfric 的De temporibus Anni、古英语凤凰和世界秩序——每个结构模型都依赖于天堂、苍穹和宇宙尺度的海洋和海底。这些模型各不相同，似乎分为两个松散的类别，它们可能代表了白话宇宙学的两种思想流派。