Is that Middle or Old English?

Hi, Selena.
It is modern English, published as recently as 1885, but written by an English classicist and Latin scholar, J.W. Mackail, in this poetic and deliberately archaic style of prose to help convey some of the feeling of the Roman poet Virgil, whom he is translating. He obviously has an excellent command of the English language, and makes good use of literary figures of speech and now-obsolete meanings of words, some of which are still in common use today but no longer with the same meanings. On the whole, though, he is easier for a speaker of modern English to understand than, say, 16th- and 17th-century speakers of English.

You can find more of the text, from which this sentence is extracted, here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/...htm#BOOK_FIRST

Old English is quite another "kettle of fish." I have read a little Old English poetry, like Beowulf, and I find that my limited knowledge of Norwegian and Danish partially helps me understand it, but I really would not be able to get the full meaning without having access to the parallel modern-English translation helpfully provided on the facing pages. To really understand Old English texts without the parallel modern translation, one needs to study it almost as a foreign language.

Hi, Erik,
Thanks for the explanation. I remember someone told me he was able to understand Beowulf well being fluent in German. I myself explored some Old English sentences here on Tatoeba, and I found much similarity to German.

May I ask why Mackail used "haply" instead of "happily"? Does it sound more archaic?