I thought it would be interesting to share a discussion on what the oldest books are that we have read. Of course, I imagine the Bible would be the oldest for must of us if we think of how long ago the manuscripts were written, but what about the oldest, untranslated work you've ever read, English or otherwise?

I've read Epic of Gilgamesh and scraps of Iliad, but those are also translated. I think, other than the King James Bible of 1611, the oldest books I've read is The Pilgrim's Progress. I have a book of church history that quotes other documents and writings from before that time, but that would be my oldest so far.

What about you? What do you think of the oldest books you've read? Can you recommend anything that is older?

I'm not sure of the dates of everything I've read, but I've read several of Shakespeare's plays, much of Spenser's Faerie Queene, and a bunch of other old-modern-English works (in the same History of British Literature I course that introduced me to the Faerie Queene). Oh, and Le Morte D'arthur. In translation (and probably somewhat abridged), I've read numerous early Church Fathers, Reformers, and sources in between; the last month or so I've finally gotten around to reading Calvin's Institutes. In "translations" that were more like retellings, the Norse and Welsh myths (as well as the fairy tales collected by Andrew Lang) formed much of my favorite reading material as a child.

I forgot all about the Bard. I've read a few plays. I can't remember if I've properly read anything by Calvin yet. I'm reading Isaac Newton's Commentary on the Prophecy of Daniel and the Apocalypse of Saint John, but that wasn't published until the seventeen thirties, so it doesn't quite count. He quotes a lot of scholars who wrote in Latin, and he didn't see any reason to translate it. That's pretty fun.

With my three semesters of Latin (over a decade ago now), and a program I found that can both identify and define the "stem" of any given word and "parse" its inflected ending, I can generally muddle through a passage of Latin. (Though I don't bother with the footnotes in Calvin's Institutes, which are almost always just an explanation of how the French or Latin text of some edition differs from whichever the translator is following.) What I find tricky is where an author (even Charles Williams, writing in the first half of the 20th century, and I think Lewis once or twice in The Allegory of Love) uses a word or quotes a passage in Greek without explanation, since I might be able to guess once I know what the word sounds like but I only know about a third of the letters by sight (Hebrew is, of course, impenetrable, but fortunately comes up without translation or at least transliteration much less often.)

Back when I was studying at Calvin College (which is Calvin University as of July) and either back home for break or just graduated, I pulled my parents' copy of the Institutes off the shelf (or, rather, the first volume), intending to read them, and didn't get past the first five pages of the dedicatory preface. Now that I'm far from home, when I got to the end of my virtual stack of fanfics I had downloaded to decide whether to keep them in my ebook library, I downloaded the Institutes from CCEL and got about 15% of the way through so far. And while he (or perhaps just the translator) is often wordy and uses unnecessarily long and complicated sentence structure, it feels like almost every other paragraph I come upon at least one sentence that I feel is an absolute gem.

I like it also when writers throw in bits and pieces of other languages into their work. It adds a sort of style I really like, although it is certainly easier when a translation is included! If not, I don't always take the time to look up what I don't understand...

The oldest I've read, other than the Bible, is probably Herodotus' Histories, but I'm pretty sure that's translated... Of books that haven't been translated, probably some of Shakespeare's plays. I read a lot of old books for school, such as Epic of Gilgamesh, Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Inferno, and various others, but pretty much all of them are translated

It's hard to go back past the Reformation without needing translation. I think it would be really cool to be able to read Beowulf in its original.