This Too Shall Pass

Yesterday's post told the story of Wayland Smith as told in the Völundarkviða. I mentioned the plight in which he left Böðvildr, the daughter of the king that had captured and crippled Wayland, and that she was used as an example in the poem "Deor."

"Deor" is an Old English lament from the c.10th century Exeter Book (pictured), the largest surviving collection of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The title of the poem does not exist in the manuscript; modern editors have given it that title, because the poem ends with the author naming himself.

The author (or the character created by a poet) was a poet and faithful retainer of a lord, but he has been replaced in the lord's favor with another poet. He reflects on his fate by writing about many others in the past who suffered defeats or tragedy. Each stanza ends with the stoic reflection that, since the mentioned calamity ultimately passed, his personal tragedy and sadness  may also pass. The line in Old English is þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg, which can translate simply to "that passed, this also may." If you recall that the letter þ=th, and æ=flat or short a, you could reliably pronounce the whole phrase yourself and see its connection to Modern English.

Because the poet refers to events of the past, the poem reinforces some legends we find in other sources. The opening stanzas cover Wayland and Böðvildr. Here they are, translated/interpreted by the poet Michael Burch:

Weland endured the agony of exile:
an indomitable smith wracked by grief.
He suffered countless sorrows;
indeed, such sorrows were his bosom companions
in that frozen island dungeon
where Nithad fettered him:
so many strong-but-supple sinew-bands
binding the better man.
That passed away; this also may.

Beadohild mourned her brothers' deaths,
bemoaning also her own sad state
once she discovered herself with child.
She knew nothing good could ever come of it.
That passed away; this also may.

The final stanza explains the narrator's plight:

If a man sits long enough, sorrowful and anxious,
bereft of joy, his mind constantly darkening,
soon it seems to him that his troubles are limitless.
Then he must consider that the wise Lord
often moves through the earth
granting some men honor, glory and fame,
but others only shame and hardship.
This I can say for myself:
that for awhile I was the Heodeninga's scop,
dear to my lord. My name was Deor.
For many winters I held a fine office,
faithfully serving a just king. But now Heorrenda
a man skilful in songs, has received the estate
the protector of warriors had promised me.
That passed away; this also may.

This notion of "this too shall pass" is an old one, one would think. The fact that it is found so eloquently in the Exeter Book would make you think that this is where it entered into the English language. In fact, Western Civilization got it from another part of the world, and we'll talk about that tomorrow.

How the Normans Changed Our Language

Many of you already know about the Norman Invasion of 1066 when William the Conqueror became ruler of England and the Anglo-Saxons within. The intersection of two cultures will always cause linguistic borrowing, no matter how protective one of them may be (even the French say "hot-dog"). When major changes in society take place, we can expect major changes in language.

In truth, the injection of Norman French vocabulary probably amounted to fewer than 1000 words. They were not random words, however, but words whose presence "reflect[s] the ‘superiority’ of the French culture" to use the words of one scholar. Words like noble, dame, servant, minstrel come from French, as do estate, government, duke, madam, sir.

Even outside of the upper classes, the Norman French words introduced in England are still with us in all walks of life and careers.

Thanks to the Norman influence, we gave ecclesiastical terms clergy, friar, prayer, and the word religion itself! In the legal profession, court, crime, judge and justice are used daily. The military still uses general, sergeant, army, regiment, and siege. A pupil can go to an art lesson and sit in a chair to learn about color or ornament. 

True, some of the words came through French ultimately from Latin, but we cannot know that English would have ultimately gained them otherwise. Or would they? There were two major French dialects that influenced English at different times; there was a second influx of Central French vocabulary in the 13th century, further adding to—and maybe confusing?— the English language.

For instance, Latin caballus (horse), led to Norman French cavalier, but Central French chevalier, which is why in Modern English we have not only cavalier and chevalier, but also cavalry and chivalry. Latin canalis (channel) turned into Norman French canal and Central French chanel, so now we have both canal and channel.

Another telling set of Anglo-Saxon vs. Norman French terms comes when we look at livestock. Anglo-Saxon peasants (peasant is French, but from the 15th century) raised cattle and pigs, but when those animals become food and are served at a table, they are dined on by Norman masters as beef and pork.

But these were more subtle changes than some deliberate actions taken by the Normans to show superiority. I'll talk about Norman culture tomorrow, and what they did to "show off."

Modern Old English

There's an episode of The West Wing in which Bartlett asks a retired English teacher if she made her students "read Chaucer in the original Old English."

Sigh.

Paralleling the theme of yesterday's post, Chaucer's Middle English is practically "Early Modern English." Middle English on the page would be recognizable to many, although if they hear it pronounced it would probably be difficult to discern, and Chaucer gave us many familiar words.

Old English presents more difficulty, but our connection to it is very strong. Also known as Anglo-Saxon , it can be called Old English because it is recognizable, if you look carefully. In the opening lines of Beowulf, for instance, you can discern that:

Dena = Danes
dagum = days
cyning = king
threatum = threat
thas/that = that
him = him
gōd = good

The Lord's Prayer begins:

Fæder ūre þū þe eart on heofonum

Father our you who art in Heaven

Obviously there has been evolution, but there are many nouns that have changed little in 1000+ years:

God, mann, heaofon, eorðe, weorold, lif, lufu, word, weorc, dæg, hand, cynn
God, man, heaven, earth, world, life, love, word, work, day, hand, kin

There are also many everyday verbs that have changed little in 1000+ years:

sittan, secan, healdan, beran, giefan, cuman

sit, seek, hold/held, bear, give, come

Of the 1000 most commonly used words in day-to-day Modern English, 83% come to use from Old English. Much of the rest of our vocabulary is also from Old English. In the historical development of the English language, Old English is con sided to be used from about 500CE to about 1100, and Middle English from 1100 to about 1500. Instead of a slow evolution from Old to Middle, however, there was one linguistically catastrophic event that pushed Anglo-Saxon "over the edge" and forced it to change. That's a story for next time.

Fastitocalon

Fastitocalon is the name given to a sea creature in an Old English poem called "The Whale."

This time I will with poetic art rehearse, by means of words and wit, a poem about a kind of fish, the great sea-monster which is often unwillingly met, terrible and cruel-hearted to seafarers, yea, to every man; this swimmer of the ocean-streams is known as the asp-turtle.

His appearance is like that of a rough boulder, as if there were tossing by the shore a great ocean-reedbank begirt with sand-dunes, so that seamen imagine they are gazing upon an island, and moor their high-prowed ships with cables to that false land, make fast the ocean-coursers at the sea's end, and, bold of heart, climb up on that island; the vessels stand by the beach, enringed by the flood.

The weary-hearted sailors then encamp, dreaming not of peril.
On the island they start a fire, kindle a mounting flame. The dispirited
heroes, eager for repose, are flushed with joy. Now when the cunning
plotter feels that the seamen are firmly established upon him, and have
settled down to enjoy the weather, the guest of ocean sinks without
warning into the salt wave with his prey (?), and makes for the bottom,
thus whelming ships and men in that abode of death.

Such is the way of demons, the wont of devils:

The poem then shares a moral, comparing the experience of Fastitocalon with the Devil, who entices men with a promise of safety and security before turning and "sinking" them into their own destruction.

The poem continues, explaining another trait of the monster: when it is hungry, it opens its enormous maw, from which a "perfume" emanates that draws a host of fish inside, when it then snaps its jaws shut. This suggests that sailors may have actually seen a whale opening its mouth to feed.

Fastitocalon is the name given to the creature, but that is the Old English version of the original. The poem (and two others) is found in a Bestiary called the Old English Physiologus, part of the Exeter Book. In the Latin version, the creature is called aspidochelone, combining Greek aspis (shield) and chelone (turtle). The Old English version has become more popular (and familiar) thanks to Tolkien writing a poem of that name in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

Where did the story of this giant sea-creature-as-island originate? There is a Greek Alexander Romance written in the first few centuries CE that contains a whale-island anecdote in a letter from Alexander to Aristotle. The first voyage of Sinbad (composed c.8th-9th centuries CE) tells a similar tale. Pliny the Elder talks about enormous fish as well. The Babylonian Talmud and Inuit of Greenland folklore both contains legends of a fish so large that it resembled an island and inspired sailors to land on its back. There are many more examples from different parts of the world.

Even St. Brendan encountered it, and gave it a name that has since been used by the Magic: The Gathering card game. I'll share more tomorrow.

Birth of a Medievalist

This is a slightly different tack for DailyMedieval, but many fans of his fiction are unaware of his career as a medievalist.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 January 1892 - 2 September 1973) graduated college with a specialty in Old Norse before he went not fight in World War I. After the war, his first job was working for the Oxford English Dictionary, reviewing the history and etymology of Germanic words. He became an expert in Old Norse, Old English, Middle English, Old Icelandic, Gothic, and Medieval Welsh. He also taught himself some Finnish.

Later, at the University of Leeds, he produced A Middle English Vocabulary and a translation of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that is still in print.

One of his most significant additions to medieval studies was his long essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Delivered as a lecture in 1936, it argued for the beauty of the poem as Early English literature. Up to this point, Beowulf had been used largely as a primer on the language of Old English/Anglo-Saxon, and picked apart for its references to places and names that could be matched to historical facts.

He describes the attitude toward the poem with a parable:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material.

His essay created an atmosphere in which Beowulf could be seen as a poem worthy of being treated as a poem, not as an old document to be studied simply for clues to language and criticized as a dish-mosh of paganism and Christianity, mingled stories of heroism and monsters, history and myth.

King of the Broken Kingdom

The various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms

Poor Æthelbert! All the attention this blog gives him is in regard to wergild. He deserves attention for more than putting a price on murder and dislodged teeth. But not today. Today we get side-tracked by the title given to him.

According to Bede, Æthelbert (c. 560 – 24 February 616) was the third of eight kings to be a bretwalda. In context, it is clear that it refers to a ruler who holds sway over various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The term is used by various authors, but is spelled differently. Remember that, at the time, there would be no universal education that would ensure "standard spelling" among all Anglo-Saxon writers. So some manuscripts describing the same status use Bryten-wealda or Breten-anweald.

Because we are talking about Britain, the reader who knows no Anglo-Saxon might hazard a guess that the bret/bryt- root refers to "Britain" and weald might have something to do with "wield" as in "to wield power." This would be an excellent guess, and satisfied scholars for a long time.

One king however, Æthelstan, was referred to as brytenwealda ealles ðyses ealondes, which is best translated as "ruler of all these islands." If brytenwealda already meant "Britain-ruler" there would be no need for the rest of the phrase referring to "all these islands."

The likeliest source of the bret/bryt- root is now thought to the verb breotan which means "to break" or "to disperse." The origin of the phrase used to describe the kings who rule over more than their local kingdom therefore refers to their rule over the "broken" or widely dispersed territories of the Anglo-Saxons. The resemblance to the word "Brit" is coincidental.

A step closer to a true King of all Britains would wait until the late 9th century with King Alfred the Great.

Wassail!

We don't talk enough about Anglo-Saxon, but the Yule season and Christmas traditions evoke Old English images and customs (at least, in the Western Hemisphere) rather than Latin/Roman culture. So let's talk about wassail.

Wassail was originally spelled Wæs hæl ("Be hale/healthy!" [pronounced with short a, to rhyme with lass gal]). The "modern" spelling became current in the late 12th/early 13th century. It is not only an imperative to be well, but also the drink used to toast each other's health in the bleak midwinter. Ralph Holinshed (1529-1580) in his Chronicles quotes a story from Geoffrey of Monmouth's (c.1100-c.1155) Historia Regum Britanniæ (History of the Kings of Britain):

A great supper therefore was prepared by Hengist at the which it pleased the king [Vortigern] to be present, and he [Hengist] appointed his daughter [Rowen], when every man began to be somewhat merry with drink, to bring in a cup of gold full of good and pleasant wine, and to present it to the king saying; “Wassail.” Which she did in such comely and decent manner, as she that knew how to do it well enough, so as the king [Vortigern] marveled greatly thereat, and not understanding what she meant by that salutation, demanded what it signified. To whom it was answered by Hengist, that she wished him well and the meaning of it was, that he should drink after her,...

Currently, many who make wassail start with red wine, but originally it was based on heated cider or ale with spices and fruit thrown in. Ale or cider mixed with sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg was common. The hot concoction would have toasted bread tossed on it to sop up the liquid for easy consumption. A traditional carol alludes to this:

Wassail! wassail! all over the town,
Our bread it is white and our ale it is brown;
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;
With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink to thee.

 If you are interested, there are countless recipes online for wassail. For a modern take on old recipes, Alton Brown is always reliable. A recipe that sticks more to its roots can be found at Nourished Kitchen. For an inauthentic recipe that attempts to make wassail easy for the modern cook, you could do worse than Gode Cookery.

Wæs hæl!

The English Bible

John Wycliffe (c.1320-1384) was politically active and a reformer whose brilliance as a theologian was originally admired widely. Eventually, as some of his ideas began to be put into practice, he became labeled a heretic. One of his greatest (and, in the church's opinion, most heretical) acts was to produce a complete translation of The Bible into English, because "it helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ’s sentence."*

"In ye bigynyng iwas ye word", Wycliffe Bible.

We are pretty sure that Wycliffe didn't do the whole book himself. Nor was he the first: the Bible had been translated into Old English centuries before Wycliffe, but manuscripts were rare and piecemeal. The Venerable Bede (c.673-735) and Aldhelm (c.639-709) had each translated parts of the Bible into Old English. The oldest existing manuscript we have is the Lindisfarne Gospels, a 10th century Latin text of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John with Old English translation inserted between the Latin.

Many so-called Middle English Bibles were in fact paraphrases or commentary rather than strict translations.

For Wycliffe, the Bible held more truth than the church hierarchy, and he wanted people to be able to directly study the word of God. When the church objected—the traditional approach was that the clergy were best suited to explain the Bible to the people—Wycliffe replied “Christ and his apostles taught the people in that tongue that was best known to them. Why should men not do so now?”

So he set about making a careful translation with his friend, Nicholas of Hereford. Although using familiar English words, they stuck to Latin syntax, and so a sentence that we know as "And God said, Let there be light, and there was light." which is a fairly sensible translation of the Latin, came out (following Latin word order) as "And God said, Be made light, and made is light." In the years after Wycliffe's death in 1384, a follower of his (probably John Purvey) revised it, changing the word order to "And God said, Light be made, and light was made."

The Bible was popular—over 250 copies exist—but the church objected to it and to Wycliffe's increasing influence on the common people, especially after the Peasants' Revolt and the increasingly vocal and active Lollard movement. The early 1400s saw some extremely strict censorship laws put into place to prevent any more unauthorized translations. The problem was that, since the Wycliffe Bible had been translated from the Latin (whether carefully or not) without editorializing, it was not easily distinguishable from "authorized" translations. This may be why so many copies survived. Of course, 1453 and Gutenberg were just a couple generations away, which meant that the production of "unauthorized" texts was about to become frighteningly easy.

*N.B.: "sentence" in the Middle Ages did not mean just a collection of words expressing a complete thought. From the Latin sententia, it signified concepts such as "meaning" or "thought" or "opinion."