This is tangential, non-sequitur, etc., but in my reading of Beowulf, the Song of Roland, and the Song of the Cid it has seemed to me that the language of Beowulf is highly-developed, ornate, and "difficult", whereas those of the other two are more workmanlike story-telling languages. (What I know of Old Norse poetry fits with Beowulf.)

Anyway, if the OEH of Beowulf is, in fact, an elite cultural language, whereas Old French and Old Spanish are non-elite versions of Low Latin comparable to OEL (and contrastive to High Latin), my inuition would gain some support.

What I've read of Norse and Celtic society (including OEH as "Norse" for the sake of my argument) says that poets of more than one type were established as guilds or castes, with a formal political role and an established reward structure. Whatever comparable institutional structures the romance-speaking lands had was oriented toward High Latin. (The Anglos Saxons actually had a dual structure, but I think that the Latin was mostly priests. Alcuin grumbled about the persistence of the OE epic, but as I understand his successors were forced to shut up and tolerate it.)

Of course this means that the Old Norse (barbarian) culture was "higher" than the Old French culture, but that's fine with me. There's a sort of glitch in Medieval culture, where the priestly monopoly of literacy makes some of the productions of the secular elite seem rather "folkish".

P.S. What kind of results are people getting with the Highbeam free trial? A quick couple of searches makes me think that it's almost exclusively English-language stuff. I'll go back to it, but immediate results were not spectacular.

I did find that I personally am responsible for 7 of their 25 "Chinggis Qan" web references found (including 2-3 LH comments). Good from a self-publicizing POV, but less useful as a search that way.

Yeah, it seems pretty much English-only, and I'm not impressed with their breadth of coverage in general, which would irritate me if I were paying for it... but if I've only got a couple days to use it, it's less frustrating as is!

J. subscribed a while back and has been irritated with me for not using it more often, but I've been disappointed with the results in my particular interest areas...I'll give it another try though. Let us know what you think when the trial period is over.

I gave Highbeam a try, but got quite disappointed. They omit the tables & figures in journal articles? What good is that? I am glad I didn't have to pay.