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21502 results in English language and linguistics: general interest

Page 366 of 1076

  • 3 - Medicinal Remedies (from Bald's Leechbook)

  • from I - Teaching and learning
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 53-57

  • Summary

    Uniquely in western Europe before 1100, Anglo-Saxon England had its own medical literature in the vernacular, and four major medical treatises in OE have survived. Much of the material in them was translated directly from Latin works and thus continued the Graeco-Roman tradition associated especially with Hippocrates and Galen (who themselves drew on traditions going back four thousand years in the Near East). It is probable that the Anglo-Saxon compilers were influenced by a ‘native’ northern European tradition as well. This may originally have been transmitted orally.

    Bald's Leechbook (now London, British Library, Royal 12 D. xvii) is one of the four treatises. It is so called because a Latin colophon (concluding statement) written by the scribe declares: ‘Bald is owner of this book, which he ordered Cild to write’. Nothing is known about Bald (or indeed about Cild himself), but this ‘leechbook’ – lǣcebōc was the Anglo-Saxons’ own term for such a book – was clearly intended for use by a professional ‘leech’ (lǣce, ‘physician’).

    It is a compendium of medical knowledge in two parts. The first has eighty-eight numbered chapters giving remedies for specific disorders, starting with those affecting the head and working systematically down the body (the method of the Greek physicians); the second is a more discursive and learned account of mainly internal disorders, with sixty-seven chapters. Extract (a) below is from item 2 in part one; extracts (b) and (c) are from items 12 and 65, respectively, in part two. A third part (known as Leechbook III), with seventy-six chapters, was added to the British Library manuscript but is from a separate source. All the material was probably put together in King Alfred's time (the end of the ninth century), though our copy of it was made around the middle of the tenth century, probably at Winchester.

    Much can be deduced about the health and habits of the Anglo-Saxons from their medical literature. The number of entries concerned with what is termed ‘dimness (or mistiness) of the eyes’, for example, as in (a), suggests that eye ailments were especially common. Although a condition such as astigmatism may have been involved in some cases, the problem was no doubt more usually the result of infection or injury. Inflammation and irritation would be exacerbated by the smoky atmosphere inside buildings without chimneys, and unsanitary conditions would encourage the spread of a wide range of diseases.

  • III - Spreading the word

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 139-141

  • Summary

    ‘What page, what word in that divine authority, the Old and the New Testament, is not a most proper standard of human life?’ So runs the rhetorical question asked in ch. 73 of the Rule of St Benedict, the guide to daily life drawn up (c. 540) by Benedict of Nursia for the monks of Monte Cassino in Italy and followed, with regional variations, in most of the monasteries of late Anglo-Saxon England. But it was not just monks and nuns for whom the Bible provided a framework for everyday existence. It had a pervasive influence on all medieval life and thought, informing not only the spiritual dimension but the political and historical too.

    For the Christian, history was not the cyclical process conceived of in the classical and heroic worlds – involving the perpetual rise and fall of people and nations under the influence of blind fate or fickle gods – but a linear progression from a known beginning to a clearly anticipated end, the whole process operating within the all-embracing knowledge and will of a single, eternal God. The prelude to human history was Creation, whose paradisal promise was wrecked by Adam's and Eve's disobedience at the prompting of Satan (whose pride, in some accounts, had earlier lost him his position as God's brightest angel). It was their fall which brought pain and struggle into the world, and human history evolved under the burden of their ‘original sin’ until the moment when a merciful God presented humankind with the gift of his son, Christ. His sacrifice on the cross would offer the possibility of redemption and salvation. The end of history, in the Christian scheme of things, will be Doomsday (OE dōmes dæg, ‘day of judgement’), when everyone will be assessed in relation to their conduct on earth, and only those found deserving will enjoy an eternity of bliss in heaven.

  • 4 - Keys to test sentences and texts

  • from Beginning Old English
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 27-28

  • Summary

    PROGRESS TEST (p. 22)

  • 1. Tomorrow we shall eat fishes and loaves.

  • 2. He asked me, ‘Why did you do that?’

  • 3. Tell me, what is the (or that) priest's name?

  • 4. The (or That) dumb child cannot speak.

  • 5. Then a boy came who was badly wounded.

  • 6. I heard that the saviour came here.

  • 7. She will come to you and bless you and the children (or little ones).

  • 8. The great ship was filled with dogs and men.

  • 9. The women said, ‘We want to see him’.

  • 10. We believe in this, that the person who does not eat will be ill.

  • 11. Then they answered her and said, ‘We are telling you the truth’.

  • 12. When they heard that, (then) they came to the ship.

    • PRACTICE TEXT 3a (p. 23)

    Sign-Language in the Monastery

  • 1. The sign for honey [lit. honey's sign] is that you put [lit. set] your finger on your tongue.

  • 2. When you want to drink, lay your forefinger [lit. shooting finger] along your mouth.

  • 3. When you want to have wine, make with your two fingers as if you want to draw out the spigot from a cask. [Lit. When thou wine have will, then do thou with thy two fingers as-if thou tap from cask draw-out want.]

  • 4. The sign for beer is that you rub your (one) hand on the other.

  • 5. When you want to have a fish, move your hand as it [the fish] does its tail when it swims.

  • 6. When you want to have soap, rub your hands together.

  • 7. When you want to have a comb, stroke downwards on your hair with your fingers, as if you were combing yourself.

  • 8. The sign for underpants is that you stroke with your two hands up your thigh.

    • PRACTICE TEXT 3b (p. 25)

    Sunday Special

    Then the Lord God said: ‘It is the truth that I say to you, that I was nailed on the cross for you, and there I suffered for you’. And I arose on Sunday from death, because Sunday [lit. the Sunday] is a rest-day and a glorious day and a day of brightness, and because on Sunday the Lord created heaven and earth and all the created things that are in them.

  • Introduction

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp xvi-xxviii

  • Summary

    The period of English history which we now call ‘Anglo-Saxon’ lasted from the mid-fifth century until until the end of the eleventh, when the Normans arrived. Most surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts date from the latter part of this period and many of them are in Latin, but England was unique in early medieval Europe in having a thriving vernacular literature also. This was written in what we now call ‘Old English’ (OE), to distinguish it from the ‘Middle English’ stage of the evolving language, which culminated in the works of Chaucer and Malory. The fifty-seven reading texts which make up the major part of this book have been chosen to illustrate the range and variety of OE literature.

    Beginning Old English

    The first section of the book, ‘Beginning Old English’, is designed for those with little or no prior knowledge of OE. It is a graded introduction to the reading of the language, based on the belief that, with suitable guidance, this skill can be learned ‘on the job’. It is self-contained, with all vocabulary and translations provided, though the vocabulary from the practice sentences and practice texts is also integrated in the main Glossary. Help with pronunciation is given by means of an imitative system, despite its inevitable flaws (it cannot of course completely accommodate all the huge variety of ‘Englishes’ spoken by users of the book). Learners cannot be expected to master the international phonetic alphabet before they even begin.

    After a ‘Getting started’ section featuring short extracts from Beowulf, five groups of practice sentences follow, along with essential grammatical notes. All the sentences are taken from original OE texts, chosen for their relative simplicity and their usefulness in illustrating specific aspects of the language. Several have been edited or emended and some spellings have been adjusted. Each sentence is provided with a word-for-word literal translation, as well as an idiomatic translation and notes. A progress test follows the section of practice sentences, and then two practice texts. Keys to all the OE material are given. Finally, a ‘Beginning poetry’ section gives an introduction to the reading and understanding of OE verse.

  • THE TEXTS

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 35-36

  • Summary

    READING THE TEXTS

    All the Old Englsh texts are provided with line-numbering, to facilitate reference to specific words or phrases.

    Each of the texts is provided liberally with glosses (i.e. translations of individual words) and notes. These are signalled within the texts themselves as follows:

  • A superscript circle (°) next to an OE word shows that the word is glossed. For poems, the gloss appears on the same line, on the far right of the page; for prose texts, the gloss is in a separate register immediately beneath the text, where corresponding line-numbers are given and glosses appear in the order in which they occur in the line.

  • Superscript angle-brackets (┌ ┐) show that the words bracketed are discussed in the notes at the bottom of the page, where again they are identified by line-numbers.

    • All the vocabulary of the texts will be found in the Glossary at the back of the book. Every instance of use is listed, and identified by text- and line-number (e.g. 2/17 = Text 2, line 17), except in the case of very common words, where only a few representative instances are listed. In the texts, space usually only allows for a single gloss to be given; alternative words are often possible and will be found in the Glossary.

  • VI - Reflection and lament

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 341-343

  • Summary

    The making of wise observations on life, derived from experience and modified by reflection on that experience, and the formal (often formulaic) expression of these in song or poem, were part of the oral inheritance of the Anglo-Saxons and continued to have an essential place in their literature. Even the eponymous hero of Beowulf must find time for reflection before he performs his great deeds: ‘fate proceeds always as it must’, he announces before fighting Grendel, and ‘it's better that a man avenge his friend than mourn much’, before taking on Grendel's mother. Such sayings, whether we call them ‘maxims’ (the term usually applied to sayings with an ethical dimension) or ‘gnomes’ (more descriptive sayings) or ‘aphorisms’ (any wise or sententious sayings), pervade much of OE literature.

    There are two poems – known rather drearily as Maxims I and Maxims II – which are built entirely of such material; the second of the two begins this section (Text 33). Social regulation seems to be at least part of the purpose of such poems. They make sage and incisive comments on the world and its people, using the ordinary and the obvious to impart to their audience a sense of the necessary order of things. Closely related to maxims in their form are so-called ‘proverbs’, but they take a more robustly independent view of the world and express their truths through metaphor. As the OE collection known as the Durham Proverbs shows (Text 34), this is a more cunning and more subversive, and often humorous, method.

    Humour is a natural ingredient also, though not the only one, in many of the OE Riddles. Riddling is an active process of reflection, in which the mind is forced to participate in liberating dislocations of imagined experience; like maxims and proverbs, riddles direct us towards social and existential truths, but they do so with forensic intensity, erecting elaborate structures of double meaning and exploiting paradox as they scrutinise the things of the world and the creatures (including us) which inhabit it. A selection of five riddles is given below (Text 35).

  • V - Telling tales

  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 267-268

  • Summary

    The telling of tales is one of the world's oldest professions. In pre-literate societies it was the bard, minstrel, poet or (to use an OE term) scop on whom the roles not only of entertainer but also of historian fell. The oral poet was the keeper of the collective memory and transmitter of the narratives which recreated a nation's or tribe's past and the achievements of its heroes, and thereby forged its present sense of identity. The OE poem known as Widsith, which is a sort of catalogue of the professional poet's repertoire, shows this well, and so does Deor, given below in section VI (Text 36).

    The poet of Beowulf, too, never misses the chance to promote his own craft within his story. After Beowulf's defeat of Grendel, the monster's blood is hardly dry on the ground before a bard among the Danish king's thegns is produced to commemorate the hero's exploit in song (Text 31a). Then, that same evening, a minstrel performs at a celebratory feast, applying a timely check on the triumphalism of the occasion by telling the sad tale of the Danish princess Hildeburh's ill-fated marriage to Finn of the Frisians (Text 31b). It is a reminder to the Danes of how sorrow invariably seems to follow joy, and the allusive way in which this tale is told shows that the Beowulf-poet's audience were thoroughly familiar with it. Indeed, they may have known it from a version of another OE poem which has come down to us, though only in a fragment – The Fight at Finnsburh (Text 32). The surviving lines present a blow-by-blow account of an encounter between Danes and Frisians which is only lightly sketched in the longer poem. In Beowulf, the arrival of Grendel's mother to avenge her son after the Danish celebrations proves the minstrel's point about changing fortunes. The details of Beowulf's subsequent tracking down and killing of this she-monster suggest how close in character monsters and heroes may be (Text 31c). They illustrate, too, with the inclusion of an episode of divine intervention to enable the hero to complete his task, how Christianity can be used to colour a tale of the Germanic pagan world without diminishing it.

  • 24 - On False Gods (Wulfstan's De falsis deis)

  • from IV - Example and exhortation
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 239-244

  • Summary

    Little is known about Wulfstan before he was appointed bishop of London in 996, though he seems to have had family connections in the East Midlands, around Peterborough or Ely. Thereafter, however, he became a prominent and influential figure in church and state, being involved among other things in the drawing up of lawcodes for two kings, Æthelred and Cnut. In 1002, he was appointed bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York and held the two sees in plurality until 1016, after which he retained York until his death in 1023.

    Four sermons in Latin and twenty-two in OE have been identified as Wulfstan's, though the number of the latter should certainly be put higher, in view of several fragments which show his highly distinctive style (discussed below). Their subjects are often eschatological – dealing, that is, with ‘end things’: death, judgement, heaven and hell – or they offer guidance on specific aspects of faith, such as baptism. Among Wulfstan's other known works are the Institutes of Polity, which sets out the distribution of authority among members of church and state, and the Canons of Edgar, a handbook of instruction for the secular clergy.

    The sermon De falsis deis is preserved in a single copy in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113, a two-volume homiliary (a collection of homilies) compiled at Worcester between 1064 and 1083 for the presiding bishop (another Wulfstan); it contains several items by Ælfric, as well as most of Wulfstan's sermons. De falsis deis is in fact an expansion of part of one of Ælfric's homilies (not one of the main collection of Sermones catholicae), which in turn drew on the work of a sixth-century continental writer, Martin of Braga. Pagan practices had survived into Christian times in England and Wulfstan denounced them regularly in his works; each of the lawcodes with which he was involved includes injunctions against such practices. With his archiepiscopal see at York, in a strongly Scandinavian area, he may have been particularly aware of the problem.

    The equation of Germanic deities with classical counterparts was well established in the early medieval period, with consequences still visible today in the names of the days of the week in Germanic and Romance languages.

  • 3 - Practice texts

  • from Beginning Old English
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 23-26

  • Summary

    Sign-Language in the Monastery

    Anglo-Saxon monasteries were organised according to the Rule of St Benedict (see p. 139). This demanded silence from monks at table and at night time, and so systems of signing had been developed in continental monasteries to provide a non-verbal means of communication. A guide to 127 signs in OE, from which the following examples are taken, survives in a single, mid-eleventh-century copy. Nothing is known of the extent to which signs were actually used. Originally, the instructions would have been in Latin. The eight signs selected here are numbered for convenience but there is no numbering in the manuscript. New vocabulary is given below, after the text, but you might prefer to try reading it first without help, as most of the words are guessable. The signs are taken from Monasteriales Indicia: the Anglo-Saxon Monastic Sign Language, ed. and trans. D. Banham (Pinner, 1991).

    Language Note. The instructions for signing tend to be formulaic. One pattern is a simple statement: ‘The sign (tācen) of [the thing wanted] is …’. Another pattern uses a ‘correlative’ structure: ‘When you want to have [a thing], then you [make the following sign]’. In OE, ‘when’ and ‘then’ (adverb and conjunction) are expressed by the same word, þonne, making a correlative pair. In idiomatic ModE, the second þonne may be better left untranslated. Most of the verbs are in the subjunctive mood (þū sette rather than þū settest, wille rather than wilt, etc). This is because hypothesis is involved, but it makes no difference to our interpretation. Dō, gnīd and strīċ are imperative forms (i.e. they convey an order).

  • 1. Huniġes tācen is þæt þū sette þīnne finger on þīne tungan.

  • 2. Ðonne þū drincan wylle, þonne leġe þū þīnne scyte-finger andlang þīnes mūðes.

  • 3. Ðonne þū wīn habban wille, þonne dō þū mid þīnum twām fingrum, swilċe þū tæppan of tunnan ontēon wille.

  • 4. Bēores tācen is þæt þū gnīde þīne hand on þā ōþre.

  • 5. Ðonne þū fisc habban wylle, þonne weġe þū þīne hand, swilċe hē dēþ his tæġl þonne hē swymð

  • 6. Ðonne þū sāpan habban wille, þonne gnīd þū þīne handa tōgædere.

  • 7. Ðonne þū camb habban wylle, þonne strīċ þū mid þīnum fingrum on þīn feax nyþerweard, swilċe þū cembe þē.

  • 8. Breċena tācen is þæt þū strīċe mid þīnum twām handum up on þīn þēoh.

  • 13 - After the Flood (from the Old English Hexateuch: Gen 8.6–18 and 9.8–13)

  • from III - Spreading the word
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 142-145

  • Summary

    According to the story told in chs. 6–9 of the Book of Genesis, God became so exasperated when he saw the corruption that had overcome the world he had created that he decided to destroy everything in it with a great flood. There was, however, one righteous man left – Noah. He was commanded by God to build an ark, into which he was to take his own family and representatives of all living animals. It rained for forty days and forty nights and the sinful world was drowned, but Noah and his companions survived in the ark. When God finally allowed the waters to recede, Noah began to send out birds. This was common practice among ancient navigators to see whether any dry land was near; if a bird did not return, it meant that it had found somewhere to land. After some delay, eventually Noah and his companions emerged from the ark and a new era for humankind began. God made a covenant with them that he would never again destroy the earth, and he established a special sign as confirmation of this, a rainbow (a natural phenomenon which features in the mythologies of many religions).

    For Christian writers, the story of Noah's flood reveals key aspects of the relationship between God and the human race, especially the concepts of judgement (for humankind's sins) and salvation (for those, like Noah, who put their trust in God). The ark itself symbolised the Christian church, with its promise of hope for the faithful, who live according to God's will while on their ‘pilgrimage’ in this earthly world; they are the citizens of the ‘City of God’, described by Augustine in his great work, De ciuitate Dei (‘On the City of God’; see bk. 15, ch. 26).

    Genesis is the first of the crucial opening books of the OT which were translated, in large part, into OE. The translations are preserved in two main manuscripts, which bring together contributions from Ælfric (see 16/headnote) and from other, unnamed, translators. One manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Claudius B. iv) is known as a ‘Hexateuch’, because it includes the first six books of the OT (Genesis to Judges), the other (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud. Misc. 509) as a ‘Heptateuch’, because it has the first seven (Genesis to Joshua).

  • 14 - The Crucifixion (from the Old English Gospels: Mt 27.11–54)

  • from III - Spreading the word
  • Richard Marsden, University of Nottingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Old English Reader
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    02 April 2015, pp 146-151

  • Summary

    The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John provide a narrative of the career of Christ, culminating in his crucifixion and resurrection. Our word ‘gospel’ derives from OE gōdspel, ‘good news’, a translation of Latin euangelium, which was itself a borrowing of the Greek euangelion; this meant originally a ‘reward for good news’ and then came to mean the ‘good news’ itself. The Old English Gospels (formerly known as the West Saxon Gospels) represent the earliest complete rendering of the gospels in English, made from the Latin Vulgate, probably in the second half of the tenth century. Six complete manuscript copies survive, along with fragments of two others. All were made in the eleventh or twelfth centuries. It is unlikely that the OE version was intended to give the common people access to scripture, as were the much later Middle English translations associated with the reformer Wyclif. The context of both its production and its use was probably the monastery. The addition of Latin annotations to some of the manuscripts may have been to allow cross-referencing with the Vulgate, which remained the official Bible of the church; and no doubt they would have been a help for monks learning Latin, too.

    The extract given here covers the last hours of Christ's life as a man: his arrest by the Roman authorities, his ‘trial’ before Pilate and his execution, followed by his resurrection from the tomb. One of the central aims of the gospel-writers was to show Jesus to be the Messiah of the Jews, whose coming had been prophesied in the OT, and this idea of fulfilment is repeatedly emphasised by quotations from OT books. In the extract, for example (lines 40–2, translating Mt 27.35), we are told that the sharing out of Christ's clothes by his executioners fulfils the words of a prophet (see 41–2n).

    The language of the preserved copies of the Old English Gospels is late WS. The eleventh-century manuscript used here (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 140) was written by four different scribes with their own idiosyncrasies; the one who wrote the latter part of Matthew preferred the ‘late’ form heom to him for the dative plural third-person pronoun (17, 18, etc) but also wrote hym (25), another late form, and he preferred hyne to hine for the third-person accusative singular masculine pronoun.

Page 366 of 1076