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Before looking at the details of our subject, first let's just remind ourselves what we are dealing with: a language with a corrupt and inefficient spelling system, replete with irregular verbs and inconsistent noun forms, and a syntactic structure so complex as to make it almost impenetrable for most beginners. Sorry - that's Modern English. Old English by contrast is a relatively straightforward inflecting language with a fairly transparent spelling system and very little in the way of syntactic difficulties.
Old English is both Old and English and that puts it in a unique position as far as we - speakers of Modern English - are concerned. On the one hand it is ancient, archaic, full of interesting strangeness; on the other hand it is still mostly in use today. When I say "on the other hand it is still mostly in use today" ten of those eleven words are direct from OE.
The typical form of OE that we read is of course West Saxon - the language of Alfred's Wessex and latterly of most official records from late Anglo-Saxon England. This is not the only form of OE though - there are at least four main dialects or linguistic regions in the country. West Saxon is the only one characterised as Saxon. There are two Anglian forms: Mercian from the Midlands and Northumbrian from the north. There is also a vague south-eastern form which is sometimes called Kentish although this is a bit of a misnomer. There are traces of other regional dialects - some characteristics of East Saxon for example can be picked up from early place-names. East Anglian left virtually no identifiable literary records, which is curious as this was a very active area culturally.
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Now I said that OE is an 'inflecting' language and that may not convey much. What it means is that many OE words show relationships to other words in the sentence by means of a set of 'endings'. An illustration of this in Modern English would be:
The daughter of the king
which I can also express as:
The king's daughter
where the ending 's on king's has the same meaning as the word 'of'. This isn't always the case - for example, I have a map of a West Midlands town which I would call 'a map of Tamworth' but not usually "Tamworth's map". In OE I have no choice but to say 'the king's daughter' ðæs cyninges dohtor because the 'of' expression seo dohtor of ðæm cyninge would not mean the same thing, if indeed it means anything at all.
OE uses this strategy of adding word endings far more than NE does. "The king" appears in dictionaries as se cyning but just above I wrote ðæs cyninges ; that's because when the word 'king' takes the -es ending, any word related to it must change in line - and the corresponding form of se is ðæs in this case. This principle of agreement applies across the board, so that "a good king's daughter" (where "good king" is the subject) will be godes cyninges dohtor and so on.
OE also conveys more information through the endings than we normally expect in NE. In OE 'I love' is ic lufie, 'you love' is ðu lufast, 'he loves' is he lufað and 'we/you or they love' is we/ge/hie lufiað. This seems unnecessarily complex but it is in fact the system we have in place with our verb 'be' I am v. thou art v. he/she/it is v. we/you/they are. The forms thou lovest and he loveth are close enough to the OE to cause no-one with an ear for language any problems.
The vocabulary of OE can appear strange at first but in fact a lot of it is quite straightforward as well. Familiar things from our homes are there: hrof, rum, flor, ofn, bæð, bedd, stol, disc, cuppe, bread, wæter, beor. (check equivalents)
Bits of us are there: hand, earm, wrist, fot, ancleow, cneow, breost, elnboga, her, muþ, cinn, nosu, eage, eare. (check equivalents)
Those we value, too: fæder, modor, sweostor, broþor, sunu, dohtor, freond (check equivalents)
But OE is not all so cosy. Bits of it are ancient. The oldest and most archaic near - relative of English is Gothic, a language recorded about 400 years before records of OE get going. It is a major language of late antiquity, and an important source of information about the prehistory of many languages: English and German, Dutch and Danish and many others. Old and archaic though it is, there are aspects of OE which are more archaic even than Gothic. The language of Beowulf is choc-full of words and constructions which are so totally out of step with what we know of everyday descriptive and narrative OE - the language of the ASC, say - that it must have taken considerable attention and skill for the audience of these works to unravel them. But then again, they were probably used to working with very 'dark' language in their poetic forms.
As an example - a small and inconsequential one maybe, but illustrative of my point - I would like to single out the phrase … him mid … in Beowulf and the early annals of the ASC. That means "with him" but him mid is 'him + with'. In normal OE, as in NE, we find mid him/ 'with him' but in verse - especially archaic verse - this reversed order is found. It is not just one man's poetic fancy though: there are parallels in the other ancient languages of Europe, such as the Latin phrase mecum which is me cum 'me + with'. Normally an OE phrase doesn't end with a preposition like mid unless it is used elliptically - for example se cyning ferde ond his biscopas mid 'the king went off and his bishops with (him).
Now perhaps the situation would be different if we had better records of Gothic to compare to our OE. What we have is mainly a partial translation of the bible and a handful of oddments. If we had the full-blown saga of King Theodoric of the Ostrogoths - Þiudans Þiudareiks Austragutane - then possibly we might see a more natural usage and have a better idea of how it all worked. But Gothic, as we know it, is a marvellous and curious business, an old-feeling language both terse (conveying much information with few words) and mellow through long years of usage.
Another way in which OE feels different from our modern tongue is in the past tense of its strong verbs. Strong verbs use internal vowel changes to show tense, while the other main sort - the weak verbs - use the '-ed' ending we know and love. We still have 'find/found' and 'sing/sang/sung' and 'ride/rode/ridden' but I must say that our system is a fairly thin and mangled version of the full OE treatment where 'clamb' is the past of 'climb' and 'healp' of 'help'. Some of these strong verbs have gone for good: 'dree' dreogan for 'endure', 'thang' þeon for 'thrive', 'swelt' sweltan for 'die'. Others are now weak verbs - 'climbed' and 'helped' are two such which started out as strong but have been brought in line with the great mass. Some strong verbs are still in the process of being converted to weak verbs now: 'strive/strove/striven' are still around but the word is so rarely used that most speakers are happy to accept 'strived'; its rhyming partner 'thrive' is in the same situation. I have even heard 'slayed' instead of 'slew' recently.
OE strong verbs commonly have two different vowels in the past tense - one for the singular I/he and one for the plural we/you/they. Examples would be ridan - ic rad/we ridon; helpan - ic healp/we hulpon. The form for þu is singular but takes the plural vowel - þu ride/ þu hulpe. Some verbs have the same vowel for both: faran, ic for, we foron 'fare, travel'.
OE insists on agreement, as I said before, and this aspect of the grammar causes some people's blood to run cold. All it means is that in a phrase like 'a good king' or 'a fast ship' the ending of the words 'good' and 'fast' changes in line with the function of the words 'king' and 'ship'.
Example:
god cyning / godne cyning / godes cyninges / godum cyninge
gode cyningas / godra cyninga /godum cyningum
The principle is easy - it's remembering all the endings that causes the problem. There are three genders of the words (the nouns) - masculine, feminine and neuter - which means that there are three possible sets of endings, but two of them are practically identical. There are five sets of endings to show relationships, called 'cases' although even so there is a lot of duplication where one set of endings can show more than one case. In all, the case system sounds complex and looks daunting, but is actually quite straightforward once the student gets to grips with it.
There is also the problem of number. We have regular plurals and irregular ones: ship/ships and gate/gates but also sheep/sheep and goose/geese and ox/oxen. OE of course has a slightly greater variety of methods for making plurals but they are confined to a few basic types and the majority of the others can be treated as oddities if the student doesn't want to penetrate the mists of why they have the forms they have. OE used to have dual number but that's all but gone in our records, except in some pronouns.
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Word order is not usually a major problem for speakers of NE, as it tends to be much like ours. We will look at the word order of verse later but generally subject precedes verb so that we find se cyning cymð 'the king comes' and se cyning siehð his dohtor 'the king sees his daughter'. In the latter sentence we also see that the object comes after the verb as well. This isn't necessarily all that strictly applied, so you can find expressions such as his dohtor siehð se cyning 'his daughter sees the king' but that's not really a major problem to a speaker of NE.
But when a phrase begins with a certain group of words relating mainly to timing, the verb can come before its subject - it isn't a hard and fast rule and it's not so very different from what NE can do that you would have a problem understanding it anyway. Examples would be 'down came the rain', or 'there goes my baby' or 'pop goes the weasel', where 'the rain', 'my baby' and 'the weasel' are the subjects of these clauses but come after 'came' and 'goes'.
It therefore doesn't take a lot of mental agility to work out the relationships between the words in any sentence in OE as long as you keep your wits about you and don't fall into the trap of assuming that the OE word order is necessarily the same as ours. Once your eye is attuned to picking out some of the more reliable clues, most of the rest is just logical deduction. If you see the words se cyning you know that the meaning is 'the king' and that it's the subject of the verb - the king is doing something. Equally if you see ðone cyning you know it's still 'the king' but he's the object of the verb and therefore something is being done to him. ðæs cyninges indicates 'of the king' while ðæm cyninge is 'to or by the king' and you then look for a different subject for the verb.
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There is a whole range of words in OE that is held together by a simple principle which is sometimes called umlaut or I-mutation. What these terms mean is that a particular vowel in the core or root of the word can be 'shifted along', to put it crudely. Low vowels are shifted higher, back vowels are shifted forward. They converge towards the highest and furthest forward vowel, which in OE is 'i'.
Generally, what has happened is that the syllable following the root originally had a 'y' or 'i' in it, and this has affected the pronunciation of the preceding syllable, to the point where the affected vowel is now identifiable as something else. Conversely, in forms of the word where the following syllable (if there was one) didn't have the 'y/i' the root vowel remains as it was.
The shape in OE looks like this:
eA : Æ stan : stænen
A : E talu : tellan
O : E fot, doð : fet, deþ
U : Y mus, fus, fu:l : mys, fysan, fy:lðo
Æ : E *hæbjan, hæft : hebban
E : I helpan : hilpð
What this means is that you can have a word like 'ful' meaning 'full' and from it is formed a verb *fuljan 'to make full'; this word's vowel is drawn forward to give OE fyllan alongside the original adjective full and which then come into NE as 'full' and 'fill' (which does of course mean 'make full'). This process also accounts for the correspondence strong/strength, man/men, goose/geese, book/beech, tale/tell.
There are a number of other sound correspondences in OE which are not based on this I-mutation but on the strong verb tense system, such as drink/drank/drunk e.g. singan 'sing' gesang 'song' or faran 'travel' for 'journey'.
So, on to the fun stuff:-
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How can you tell if a passage of OE is verse or not? It's easy in NE because we set poetry out according to certain conventions, but OE verse is always written out like prose. There are ways of detecting verse which hinge on the presence of OE metre in the text. So what does OE metre look like and how can you be sure it is present?
Probably the easiest giveaway is alliteration. Most of us know what alliteration means: it's when two words begin with the same sound. But in OE verse it doesn't mean quite that. Tolkien called it 'head-rhyme' to contrast it with the 'end-rhyme' of classical and modern verse. But even that is still wide of the mark.
The phrase 'renowned reformers of regulation' has three words which alliterate on 'r' according to the standard modern scheme, but for OE purposes they don't even come close. For our purposes, you can ignore the weakly-stressed prefixes 're-' which don't count in the metre; 'renowned' in OE metre alliterates on the first sound of its stressed syllable, so on 'n': 'renowned navigators' is an acceptable alliterative phrase, or mære mereflotan to be truer to our period.
Refinements to the alliterative scheme are really just three:
First, that all vowels alliterate with each other; this can be considered to reflect the idea that a zero or absent consonant alliterates with itself.
Second, that s- doesn't count as a full consonant. This means that s- plus another consonant can only alliterate with the s- plus the same consonant. So: ship with shovel; skip with scuttle, sip with sample, stop with stumble, and so on.
A third consideration is that words alliterating on 'g-' can have either the velar stop (g / gar) or palatal (y / gear) pronunciations and still alliterate quite happily.
It is remarkable how much modern verse allegedly written in the OE style manages to get this simple idea wrong. So: 'rapid rehearsal' is modern alliteration, 'hurried rehearsal' is OE.
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The verse line in OE is based on four stressed syllables. These are sometimes called 'lifts' in the technical language. They are the naturally loud, stressed syllables of normal speech. Around the four lifts there can be an unspecified number of 'dips' or unstressed syllables, usually one to three but occasionally many more. The four lifts are grouped in two sets of two, with a pause between them. The lifts all take part in the alliteration, but only lift 3 has to alliterate with lift 1 or lift 2 or both; lift 4 must not alliterate. What this means is that the line is bound together by a repeated initial sound on a maximum of three of its four lifts:
Oft Scyld Sceafing sceaþena þreatum has sc- for three lifts
while
We gardena in geardagum has g-/y- for just two.
The rules for positioning the lifts among all the weakly stressed syllables are quite complex and in fact a lot of the detail is still being worked on. Generally, the distribution of weak syllables around the strong syllables follows one of five main patterns:
Type A strong weak strong weak ANNa ANGry
Type B weak strong weak strong and BYRHTnoth BOLD
Type C weak strong strong weak in CRUEL CONflict
Type D strong strong weak weak DEAL DEATH to all
Type E strong weak weak strong EACH one with EDGE
There are of course many variants on this scheme, hundreds of them in fact, and scholars such as Sievers, Bliss, Falk and Magoun spent many years developing models to account for and describe the occurrence of certain types, and to explain why other, theoretically possible, types never occur. Just how useful a system can be which assigns five-character codings to two-word phrases is debatable.
Some OE texts which are designated as prose actually show signs of being influenced by verse, not to put it too strongly. It is not clear why or how this should be, but some writers just seem to like using paired expressions where really only one is necessary …
example
Now this is florid language but is it poetry? Not quite. It has some of the rhythmic qualities of OE verse - the lifts and drops - but these are present in the language anyway. It may be best just to think of this as ornate prose consciously imitating the general style of verse without actually following the metre to any degree of detail.
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Another pointer to verse is vocabulary. The demands of alliteration dictate that there have to be a lot of variant and interchangeable terms for common themes. Verse normally deals with the life and concerns of the well-born, with religion, with warfare and with great events. It therefore follows that the more words for sword, shield, hero, ship, hall and treasure you have, the easier it will be to compose verse.
There are two ways of achieving this aim. The first is to keep alive words which have fallen out of normal language - words such as mece for sword or hos for young man which are never found outside verse in OE. Another is to combine words - for example, a normal word for 'garment' is serce in OE and a poet looking for a way of incorporating this idea into his poem could combine it with beado 'battle' to produce 'battle-shirt' = mailcoat, armour. That way, a normal, everday term can be given a richer flavour just by adding the florid, poetic nuances of beado to it. Taking this on a stage further, it eventually became fashionable to extend the metaphor of 'battle-shirt' into new areas so that godes condel 'God's candle' denotes the sun or hronrad 'whale-way' the sea.
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OE verse preserves some odd and intrusive turns of phrase, many of which can be presumed to be quite ancient even in terms of the language as we have it - as in the following from Beowulf:
Næs him hreoh sefa
Not-was to-him cruel mind i.e. he did not have a cruel mind.,
or
ne bið þe wilna gæd
not will-be to-thee of-desires lack i.e. you will have no lack of what you want.
This construction is parallel to a Gothic usage:
Ni was im barne
Not was to-them of-children i.e. they had no children
The fact is that these expressions avoid the verb habban 'have' and use a construction where the subject, the haver, is in the dative case. This kind of thing can be parallelled from Latin and other Indo-European languages and also is the norm in some other language groups spoken in Central and southern Asia, of a type known as 'ergative'. These languages operate a case system (like the IE languages), but they assign the cases differently. There are other echoes of an ergative structure in the earliest records of some IE languages, which may tell us something about the background to the group as a whole.
The most confusing thing for the beginner, who has just started reading OE and fancies exploring the verse tradition, is the convoluted syntax employed. Normal rules for word-order and placement seem to mean nothing. In fact, all is not as hopeless as it may seem, but the verse must have been difficult to follow unless the audience listened to it closely. They had the advantage of knowing what to expect; we have to pick our way through it all, line by line, word by word, to try to make sense.
As an example of the syntactic muddle which the verse may present, here is a revision the opening lines of Beowulf:
Hwæt!
we gardena in geardagum
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon
We gefrunon gardena þeodcyninga þrym in geardagum
(or in more normal OE, in geardagum gefrunon We þrym þeodcyninga gardena)
"in olden days heard we of the might of the folk-kings of the Spear-Danes"
Clearly what we are looking at is a mixed up version of normal speech. If the standard word order (numbered 1-7) is used then the verse sequence runs 1 - 3 - 6 - 7 - 4 - 5 - 2.
It isn't mixed up randomly though - one of the principles of early Germanic verse is that it should displace the verb to the end of the sentence, so that 'gefrunon' 'we heard' comes just where we would predict. This isn't accidental, it is actually just a retained feature from a very early stage of the language when the verb normally came at the end of the sentence. Originally, the Indo-European proto-language was an SOV language where the order was subject/object/verb (the king - his daughter - sees). This developed gradually into SVO in modern English and many other modern languages, but the older construction can still be found: "and all the air a solemn stillness holds" for example, has the verb at the end just like the OE. Not all OE verse follows this pattern rigidly, but it is still a tendency even in quite late works like the Battle of Maldon which realistically can't have been written before 991 AD (the year the battle took place).
So, that's it really.
I hope you will agree with me that OE is an interesting language in itself, it has a lot to offer the linguistic novice who is determined not to be put off by weird spelling and strange letters. Not much in the basic language need cause any of us any concern.
For those who want to delve a little deeper there is enough ancient and mysterious stuff lurking in the shadows to keep us all entertained for a very long time to come.
If you would like to learn more about the old english language or old english verse, a number of publications by Stephen Pollington can be seen here.
Abbreviations
OE - Old English ASC - Anglo-Saxon Chronicle IE - Indo-European
(1)hrof, rum, flor, ofn, bæð, bedd, stol, disc, cuppe, bread, wæter, beor. roof, room, floor, oven, bath, bed, stool, dish, cup, bread, water, beer.
(2)hand, earm, wrist, fot, ancleow, cneow, breost, elnboga, her, muþ, cinn, nosu, eage, eare. hand, arm, wrist, foot, ankle, knee, breast, elbow, hair, mouth, chin, nose, eye, ear.
(3)fæder, modor, sweostor, broþor, sunu, dohtor, freond father, mother, sister, brother, son, daughter, friend.
Dual refers to two of something. the vestigfial form we have is the word 'both' (one man alone ..., two men both ..., three men all ...).
(C) Stephen Pollington 2003. All rights reserved.
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