The walking-weaver and the word-writer

I recently read Hana Videen's lovely book The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English. Old English is special to me: it's the second foreign language I studied, the first I learned as an adult, and my first inflected language, a phrase I always think should describe something rather more poetic than it actually does. My teacher, Geoffrey Russom, taught the language with infectious delight and a philologist's deep curiosity about the way a language works. At the end of the semester, possibly inspired by his retirement, our class threw him a party where several students performed a memorable heavy metal rendition of Caedmon's hymn. The experience left me with a great fondness for Old English and it was a pleasure to revisit it. 

As a beginner in the language, I struggled with grammar and vocabulary, puzzling out heroic verse line by line. The great fun of returning to Old English through its words was the way this makes visible the intersections between language and culture. The Old English word for pen, wrīting-feþer, literally translates to a writing-feather (p 64). Of course--what a logical, yet unexpected name for a quill pen. I found myself fascinated by other compound words for ordinary things: gongel-wæfre, the word for a spider literally translates to walking-weaver (173); hrēaðe-mūs, a bat, is an 'adorned mouse' (177-8). 

Ordinary objects and small creatures are not what early medieval English culture is most famous for: one of the major themes of surviving Old English literature is warriors and their deeds, the most well-known of these being the story of the monster-slaying hero Beowulf. The violence of heroic culture is suggested by the language itself: in Old English, the body is the bone-house (bān-hūs) or bone-vessel (bān-fæt) or bone locker (bān-loca), which is also a word for muscles (p 141). There is a specific word, wæl-mist, which is supposed to have covered those who are slain in battle (p 149). It translates literally to slaughter-mist. Our surviving Old English texts where written centuries after the end of the heroic age of legends, but these ideas lingered in their language: a wyrd-writere, which literally translates to word-writer (or more literary, the fate-writer), which we would now call a historian (p. 248). Morþor-hūs, murder house or torment house, is the world used to describe Hell (p. 191). If the word morþor looks familiar, Videen tells us, it is because  of its similarity to the place-name Mordor, a similarity intended by its creator, J.R.R. Tolkein, a noted scholar of Old English.

Hana Videen, The Word Hoard: Daily Life in Old English (London, 2021)

Old English was a culture with a rich tradition of storytelling and wordplay. For the people of early medieval England--guests and ghosts could be closely linked. Gyst (guest or stranger) and gāst (ghost or demon) can both be spelled the same way: gæst (p 87). Happy Halloween! The full meaning of some of their wordplay, beautiful in its literal translation, is now lost to time. What, for instance, is a mere-candel? It literally translates as sea candle, and could be just another poetic word for the sun, but scholars don't know for certain (p 151). Nor is the definition of a wulfhēafod-trēow, a wolf's-head tree, entirely clear. The word appears once in an Old English riddle of the tenth century (159-160); for which scholars have proposed various solutions, none of which seem to have been entirely accepted.

Some words I learned from Videen's book are simply lovely. Ūht, predawn, is followed by dæg-rēd (day-red), the word for when the first light of day comes into the sky. To describe the transition from light to darkness, a person might also speak of the dæg-rima (day-rim or day-border), the space between day and night (p 44). From a modern perspective, this seems like an abundance of words for a time of day and type of light I rarely see. But the abundance of words for dawn and its colours suggests the importance of the coming of the light in a world before electricity, and the difference between Old English of rhythms of daily life and mine.

Further Reading 

Hana Videen (2022). 'Why I Hoard Words'. Princeton University Press. [blog] 9 June. https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/why-i-hoard-words [accessed 12 October 2022].

 

The Word Hord grew out of Dr Videen's work sharing an Old English word every day on Twitter (@OEWordhord). For those who don't do social media, she also posts her daily word on her website: https://oldenglishwordhord.com/, where if you have you can also find details of an app to bring the daily delights Old English to your computer or phone. How cool is that!