Nice! Brain candy.
6
Ms Livingstone may not be aware that Beowulf despite being a 'national epic' was first studied by a Danish scholar, Thorkelin, in the nineteenth century. There is no evidence the poem was written in whatever century scholars pick on (A-S specialists can't agree on a date either) but the seventeenth century is the logical conclusion going by primary sources.
1
@Harriet
Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin was Icelandic, born in Iceland of Icelandic parents.
Every school child in Iceland learn about kenning(ar) and can read and understand 1000 years old poetry
8
Thank you for a lovely, thought-provoking read. Having read all of Canterbury Tales in Middle English long ago in college, I am now eager to take on a study of Old English in retirement.
Even though you are not trying to establish a personal connection between that time and ours, I am struck by the comments on your article - educated, thoughtful, respectful, non-confrontational. Clearly the brief encounter with Old English did something to bring your readers into the same frame of mind - a welcome experience these days. If I were cleverer I would create a kenning to describe that happy occurrence. Ancestor-meeting? Language-party?
8
A delightful and well-written article -- wouldst we could have many more of these! 'Whale-Road' = The Sea -- those will be my 'smile-words' for the week. Thanks Josephine...
10
There seems to be some confusion about what a kenning is and isn’t. It isn’t a mere compond like blackbird or wolfhound. It isn’t a portmanteau word like brunch or motel. It isn’t word play like e.e. cummings. Rather it is a circumlocution in the form of a riddle or puzzle, which may or may not be metaphorical.
Some examples: battle sweat for blood, sword din for battle, God’s bright candle for the sun, gannet’s bath for ocean, wordhoard for vocabulary/lexicon, ring breaker or ring giver for lord. An example of the more complicated kennings devised by the Icelandic skalds: Freya’s tears which solves for gold or amber. To understand what is meant by Freya’s tears one has to be well versed in the legends surrounding the goddess.
18
I loved learning OE in college, and can still say the Lord’s Prayer in OE. Thank you so much for such a thoughtful and beautifully written meditation.
4
My favorite metaphor for modern English is a car. The chassis is Germanic (a combination of Anglo-Saxon and Norse). The body is Latin (mostly French, but with plenty of Latin plus Greek, much of which is by way of Latin and/or French). And there are numerous accessories from diverse other languages.
Informed writers and orators know that Germanic words carry a special, visceral impact that words derived from French or Latin usually lack. My favorite brief example is from the Jewish prayerbook. A number of prayers begin with a preamble traditionally (and literally) translated from the Hebrew as "Our God and God of our fathers." The phrase is powerful because every one of those seven words is Germanic.
The Reform (or Liberal) branch of Judaism is egalitarian, so the well-meaning editors of the Reform prayerbook changed that preamble to "Our God and God of our ancestors." Replacing the Germanic "fathers" with the French word "ancestors" may better respect modern sensibilities and reflect the roles of women in liberal Judaism, but it's a spanner in the works that demolishes the impact and power of the original. "Mothers and fathers" would have been a better option (as would "fathers and mothers," but the former sounds better to my ear). It seems the historical nuances of English were not the primary concerns of the learned rabbis who decided on the new wording.
7
@Ted
Even better would be "forebears", which is Middle English in origin.
10
In modern German "a" with an "e" after it, though the two letters are not joined, is one way to create the umlaut as pronounced in the English word "cat." (Without them "a" is pronounced ah in German.)
The two "quotation" marks above not only "a" but also "o" and "u," most commonly but not exclusively used today, instead must have come about as a simple convenience, as early German printed books often have a miniature "e" printed directly the "a" instead.
2
The essence of kennings is their riddling nature. The riddles can be metaphorical or not (kent heiti, okent heiti). So merehengest , sea stallion/ship, is a metaphor, while leavings of hammers, the finished product left on the anvil/sword, is not.
The masters of the kenning were the Icelandic scalds. They constructed little riddles in which each constituent was multi-layered and required an indepth knowledge of mythology to solve.
I devoted my entire professional life to Old English, Middle English alliterative poetry, Germanic philology, and the History of the English language. My profound gratitude to my wonderful professor Ted Irving (Edward B. Irving, jr.), the descendant of Orkneymen. His writings on Beowulf are accessible and worth reading.
15
Sounds beautiful. I never knew.
4
Lovely article. Makes me want to learn Old English. It seems you could avoid the word-order dilemma by using two noun forms— poignance and solitude, rather than poignant and solitude. Most of the examples of kennings that you site are combinations of nouns, and short, concrete ones at that. Whaleroad is indeed poetic, as are bonehouse, lonestepper, and smokeweep.
3
Apples and oranges. "Railroad" is like "whaleroad": noun + noun. “Poignant” and “solitude.” as you yourself note, is adjective + noun. That's why you can't make a kenning out of those two words. Note also that not every kenning consists of only two words. Cf., e.g., _the fish that swims in the sea of the body_ = "sword."
4
For further study, I highly recommend Professor Michael D. C. Drout’s Modern Scholar lecture recordings on the Anglo-Saxon World. Believe it or not, his lectures are thoroughly enjoyable, even at times like stand up comedy but also seriously interesting. The Modern Scholar: The Anglo-Saxon World https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002TIZ57Y/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_d2umCb409P8KY
He also has a whole website of his readings of Anglo-Saxon poems:
http://mdrout.webspace.wheatoncollege.edu/
5
Glorious.
3
I think your name is a kenning: Livingstone.
Thank you for this article.
9
You notice what makes this language vital is that it's concrete--it creates metaphors by naming and associating THINGS, not ideas or ideologies. Every language does this until corrupted by too much distance from nature and too many constructed excrescences from abstractions.
6
@Oriflamme I've often searched for a word in Modern English that describes how I feel when I look up at the stars. Perhaps in Old English such a word exists.
1
@Brighton: How about heofunwundor? Not sure it's actually in the OE lexicon (wordhoard) but it could be!
3
@ Oriflamme - I have to comment on your name as it is more than 5 decades since I saw that word.
It was the name of the newsletter/magazine at my high school - Saint Louis Grammar School in Northern Ireland (convent school).
1
Thank you for a nice article. It brought back pleasant memories of when I took a graduate course in OE on a lark (I am a professor of Engineering Science). Of course, portmanteau words are quite common in many IE languages such as German and Sanskrit. They are also used - in a very effective and efficient manner - in my own native language of Kannada, a Dravidian language that is about 2300 years old. I wouldn't call Beowulf 'very old' or 'ancient' though! I think it only dates back to 10th century! All the same, I would concur with the author that English needs this wonderful avenue of expression. Thanks again.
10
@C Nataraj Interesting comment! However, all languages (with the exception of creoles) are more or less equally old. For example, you say that Kannada is about 2300 years old. Now, consider the speakers of the pre-Kannada language of 2,300 years ago. What did they speak? And, how old was the historical predecessor of that language, etc.
Of course, languages go through stages of historical development, due to such factors as in- or out-migration, military invasion, etc. But, fundamentally, all languages have roots going back to the evolution of our species.
7
Thank you for this wonderful eloquent meditation on the origins of our language. As a teacher of English, I begin each new academic year with a lesson on how the language evolved into what it is today. This lovely article is going to be part of the plan from now on .
7
Kudos to the NY Times for carrying an eloquent tribute to our linguistic and literary heritage, so easily ignored in today’s humanistic education. It is unwarranted to juxtapose the kennings’ beauty and imagination to the creative use of language in later English – any language at any stage in its history can be put to inspired and imaginative use, but just drawing attention to OLD English, now sadly not even offered in most English programs, is most welcome. Thank you.
11
Loved this. Bravo!
3
“I’ve got no interest in establishing any personal connection between their culture and mine.”
An approach to education too frequently dismissed these days.
8
Kenning is in modern Norwegian known as "kjenning". Old Norse poems are full of these kjennings. If you look it up in a dictionary, the modern meaning is Acquaintance which is not too far from its original meaning. We spent many dreary hours in high school deciphering Norse poems using kjennings, much like English-speaking students are trying to understand Shakespeare. Same difference.
8
@Knut Tørklep I remember 'kennen' from German, meaning 'to know, to recognize' so I'm guessing the same root, from Frissian?
3
Modern English still has the phrase "beyond our ken": "beyond our understanding or knowing." Further, Scots uses "ken" as a close equivalent of "know":
D'ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay?
D'ye ken John Peel at the break o' day?
1
I have read that speakers of Icelandic find OE oddly familiar.
10
@Theresa This is true. As a graduate student of German and Swedish (language and linguistics), having studied Icelandic, I took Old English with mostly grad students of English. Most of them struggled with it; I did find it quite familiar!
8
My professor of OE one brought in a newspaper from Reykjavik, which we were able to read with our knowledge of OE.
6
@Theresa
I was surprised that wasn't mentioned in the article, as those two letters survive to this day in Icelandic, but were lost in the other Norse Languages over time.
Just look at the map of Reykjavik.
two street names in the old part of town.
Þórsgata, (torsgata) and Óðinsgata (odinsgata)
5
This article, along with every comment, is a joy to read.
22
I seem to remember reading that Koko, the gorilla, created words, names really, in just this way.
11
To know an additional language means to become an additional person.To learn an old language (style) means living that age.
14
Or as the philosopher Wittgenstein said, to know a language is to know a form of life.
7
I had the misfortune of having to study Old English and Beowulf under Professor Francis P. Magoun at Harvard. Professor Magoun was the original of the "Mr. Magoo" comic character. I do not recall him making a single notable remark during two entire terms.
3
If people adhered to the old forms of the language, the society might not have lost it's most important aspect of being civilized -- politeness and courtesy.
I am not sure if the abandonnement of long little es in print had anything to do with the decivilzing trend, but I still refuse to use the Newspeak meaning of such words as "gay" and "intercourse".
Sometimes, to rub against the grain politically correct pharisees, I close my letters with "Your humble and respectful ...".
2
@Tuvw Xyz
Do you think that the Britons who spoke Old English were more civilized than modern Americans? In what way? Not that our culture is uniformly better, but I’m very grateful not to have been a female back in their day.
7
@ Millie J.
It seems to me that you are commingling the social position of women with the cultural role of the language.
One can argue about how meaningful or meaningless are many customs and gestures, but there is no excuse for rude language.
For example, on the gestures in social encounters, I do not know if a man takes off his glove when a woman offers him her gloved hand (recently published pictures of Melania Trump in long black gloves).
The hand kiss is gone out of style, so that one needs no longer worry about making a faux pas in kissing the hand of an unmarried woman. And how would one behave with a woman in a cohabitational relationship with a man?
If you reject the modern meaning of "intercourse," your listeners must find it interesting trying to guess what you mean when you talk about "knowing" someone.
1
A lovely and thought provoking article. In fact, nothing prevents us from being more thoughtful and poetic with our language. More use of words like "whale road" could help us to be more aware of how we treat our environment, for example. The language of Black Americans is often lyrical and metaphorical.
11
Love of language is very rewarding. Although I understand the special pleasure of learning a dead or rare language, the rewards from modern foreign languages can be much greater. The imaginative word combinations you like so much can be found in abundance in German, Chinese, and Japanese as others have pointed out. For historical connection to English try a Germanic language. With the internet you can easily read and hear these languages.
2
My son took a copy of Seamus Heaney's Beowolf when he spent the summer leading teams of high schoolers building trails in remote areas. They slept onsite in tents, no electronics for miles, and he would read from the Beowolf as they settled down to bed in the wilderness. The kids ate it up.
18
Great article. If only more of us put emphasis on the intricate beauty of language, and the importance of choosing words carefully and appropriately.
5
Thanks so much for this! I always wondered what the big deal was about. My father tried to tell me about Old English and his college class that covered it, but at the time I think I was too young to understand him. By the time I got to college my mind was on other things so I never studied it and I have always wished I had an explanation for it. It seems to me this is the first satisfying explanation of Old English and its attraction that I have ever seen, and I have been around sort of a long while by now. Thank you!
7
@Kevin L - It's not too late. Find a course and take it - on line or in a lecture hall. There might even be a local club of Old English fans. Maybe they like drinking beer or mead. Adventures await.
2
Ah! "Eth" and "Thorn" and "Ohthere und Wulfstan"!
In the 1981-82 undergraduate year at the University of Toronto's Victoria College, Professor Kee introduced me and a gaggle of other language nerds to Old English. He was marvellous. I recall a fabulous alliterative poem full of the whooshing sounds of arrows.
I did two hours of homework a night to get on top of the grammar.
Thank you for reminding of that great experience!
10
Thank you for this delightful read! Sometimes you need to step back from the hustle and bustle of breaking news to appreciate the fundamental meaning of life, beginning with the words we use.
13
I love the metaphor of unlocking a stuck door in the mind. It perfectly describes my experience upon learning the Greek of antiquity when 50 years old. Thanks!
8
@Oliver Jones
Me too!
1
I think the word kennings could be used to describe many of ee cummings' descriptives. Think just-spring or mud luscious. Deluscious!
10
Puddle wonderful.
Just a thought. Didn't English, old and modern, have its roots in a multitude of other languages? In German there are many such words as in "fingerhut", our "thimble", or one of my favorites, "funklenagelneu" -- brand (spanking) new. The latter might not be a true kennington, but I love it anyway.
6
Reading through all the comments on this lovely essay, you get a pretty broad view of our language - ours, in the sense of everyone who speaks some version of what many worry has become a linguistic juggernaut. The language still has its deepest roots in Anglo-Saxon - roots in the sense of grammar, syntax and even vocabulary, though as you point out, many other languages have moulded ours. "Fingerhut" is a very happy kenning, and is the German name for the flower digitalis as well. Our name for digitalis is "foxglove" which is also, I guess, a kenning - but I find the idea of foxes getting their little paws into one of these fingerhats less convincing than the German. Digitalis itself is Latin for "finger-like"....
4
@kaferlily English and German are both Germanic languages, along with Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic. All of them are Proto-Indo-European languages, as are Latin and its daughter languages Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, and other European languages such as Greek, Polish, Russian, and so forth. Most European languages (except for Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Basque) are cousins!
I learned very early on that language is the mask with which human nature attempts to make itself more (or less!) understood and socially acceptable.
In a changing world, the persistent inadequacies of that effort ensure the obsolescence of style and vocabulary that proceeds from current to quaint to obscure.
It can happen so quickly today(e.g., buzz words) that uncertainty is a common element in business and political communications:
" We know what he said. In time and upon further observation, we may guess what he meant... and why.
4
When I studied Old English a long, long time ago, someone asked the professor if there were any descriptions of paradise. He thought for a bit and then said there was one passage that came close. It described a place where it never snowed.
17
Another fun thought.... We do still in English make up new words by combining two (or more) as some people have demonstrated in these comments. However, because our language has been infused over the centuries with early Danish (from those Viking invaders); 12th century Norman French, which derived from Latin; Classical Latin itself during the Renaissance; vocabulary from the many peoples with whom the British Empire came in contact (think chintz, burro, etc.), when we make new words today, we draw not just fromthee Anglo-Saxon root vocabulary, but from all of those others, too (think "television" [Greek and Latin roots]. We use the same pattern of formation used in OE and German, but take our components from wherever. E.g., we don't say "star-sailor" which sounds very OE, but "astronaut."
31
@meh
Totally lovely...star sailor versus astronaut. Will move forward with this! Thank you!
I, too, took OE in college, after a year of German as it happens; so the grammar was easier. Eventually, I did my Ph.D. thesis on Beowulf. My love for and delight in Anglo-Saxon rests on my (silent) reading of it. A number of people have commented here on hearing Beowulf or the Canterbury Tales read and being moved by hearing the poetry. However, we really do not know how either Anglo-Saxon or Middle English sounded. Just listen to today's native English speakers in England--not to mention here in the US, or in NZ, or Canada, or Australia. The variety of pronounciations of a single word is incredible. If one person from each dialect in England today read either OE or ME with their own dialectical idiosyncracies, you would get as many variations as you had speakers. This is a fact of studying any of the "dead" languages. Not knowing how they actually sounded, we pronounce them according to the suppositions of certain "scholars," but really pronounce them with our own voices and accents in the quiet of our studies...meaning anybody can do that and get a feel for the power of the poetry from learning the language as a foreign language and then pronouncing it in their own voice and accent. And no one can say that your version is "wrong."
18
In Latin class during the 1960s my teacher said I read aloud like a native Latin speaker. Hmm.
3
I thoroughly enjoyed this article! As a Norwegian currently studying British literature this was a sweet side dish to my obligatory reading.
12
Beowulf and Canterbury Tales are both marvelous reads, as is anything by Shakespeare, and while smart students everywhere in America might read them, I fear that with each passing year fewer and fewer will, and will instead spend a good portion of their life immersed in social media instead. More's the pity.
12
A lovely article that brought back happy memories of doing Anglo Saxon as part of my English degree at Edinburgh more than 60 years ago. Our teacher, Dr O.K Schram, was a friend of Tolkien, and when the great man came to visit they would climb Arthur's Seat together and shout Beowulf into the wind. Or so I was told.
30
I learned Old English in a mixed Graduate/Undergraduate class. I think that the graduate students were forced to take it, while the undergraduates chose to take it. I found the language absolutely fascinating and quite beautiful. I think that we we read Beowulf in the original, but I can't be sure of that. Old English is a highly inflected, germanic language with strong inflections and weak inflections - everything that drives a modern student of German crazy. I still remember Caedmon's song (from Wikipedia - my memory is not that good):
Nū scylun hergan hefaenrīcaes Uard,
metudæs maecti end his mōdgidanc,
uerc Uuldurfadur, suē hē uundra gihwaes,
ēci dryctin ōr āstelidæ
hē ǣrist scōp aelda barnum
heben til hrōfe, hāleg scepen.
Thā middungeard moncynnæs Uard,
eci Dryctin, æfter tīadæ
firum foldu, Frēa allmectig.
And I also remember the two part linear stress convention, and this is 30 years later.
12
I guess the author is referring to agglutinative languages, like German, that form new words by combining simple words without changing their form. Just to add to the interesting mix and neat examples here and in the comments, it seemed Chinese, from the limited amount I know from living there several years (and struggling with) has some also. There are no verb conjugations nor noun declensions in Chinese, so any combinations would fill the bill. Example, I always loved the word for caution - "small heart," as in have a small (or careful) heart. The two characters are "small - xiao" and "heart - xin." Cool, huh?
20
I studied Old English in grad school and adored it. I got it right away, the lyrical aspect of it, the kennings, the way it foretold our own language. I remember translating one of the poems for a class and wrote, as a foreword, that I was certain it wouldn’t come anywhere near the “official” translation of the poem. My professor, glory to him, said to me, “and why wouldn’t yours be just as good? Who is to say?” Which rolled into a beautiful memory for me, like a kenning, a full moment of multiple feelings and meaning.
28
A lovely piece of writing. I wonder if someone a thousand years from now will look back and see something as beautiful in the way we speak today.
22
Takes me back 53 years to when I studied Old English as a pure elective as an undergraduate chemistry major. There wer about a dozen people on the class, all but me graduate students in German or English. Fortunately, I had studied German since high school, so OE was not too strange.
And BTW, we have many kennings in modern English -- ask any wordsmith.
26
Or something that goes haywire.
3
Thank you for a bright ray of sunshine! I had no idea how beautiful, and lyrical, a beginning there was to our current language. We seem to have lost the magic in our language in favor of a more organized way of communicating. And it may not have been the best choice. Describing the ocean as a whale road is simply brilliant in any language.
29
There’s a local ‘language’ spoken by residents of the Anderson Valley in California. The words are mostly portmanteaus or maybe kennings. Words like ‘belk,’ a creature that is crossed between a bear and an elk.
5
Is that belk related to the jackalope?
Horn of zees! That lingo there is fascinating. Read a whole book about it. Thanks for your note,
Oh, thank you!
16
One of the most poignant images in our language is the one invoked by King Edwin's counsellor in 627 A.D. when asked if it made sense to adopt the Christian faith. He compares our life on earth [þis lif manna on eorðan] to a sparrow [cume an spearwa] who flies suddenly into the mead hall out of a raging snowstorm, experiencing for a brief moment the light and warmth of the fire, the sounds of laughter and singing, then exits at the other end into the dark and the swirling snow. What comes before, and what follows [hwæt þær foregange, oððe hwæt þær æfterfylige], he says, we do not know [we ne cunnun]. If there is any chance there may be more to life than this, he says, it would be worth considering. You can hear the original read aloud at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C_IhVMzQYU
51
Thank you, Josephine, for reminding me of our ancestor-poets’ artistry and enduring wish to convey some part of the depth of our common human experience. Metaphors and kennings are so intriguing for their ability to allow shades of meaning and significance mere description fails to produce. I note that the name “Beowulf” itself is a kenning translated literally as “bee hunter” and meaning “bear” because bears like the honey produced by bees. But reflect on the depth of that conjunction for a minute and picture a powerful bear blissfully eating a honeycomb while enduring the stings of hive-guardians and one cannot help but feel a sense of connection to the bittersweet moments life gives us.
12
@Joseph Buchman
It’s bee-WOLF equals bear, no hunter.
1
I thought I would be clever in putting modern German on the table regarding the ”kennings“. But our course that had already been done.
It‘s not entirely surprising either as the Angles and Saxons were Germanic peoples.
In German, there‘s also no limit as to the number of words you can mesh together, which is how you get words like “Personennahverkehrszug”, literally person-close-traffic-train, meaning a people carrying short distance train.
More adorable are probably animal males though. Things like “Flusspferd” (river-horse) for hippo or “Nashorn” (nose-horn) for - you guessed it - rhino.
But then modern English also has some of these. Think of the hedgehog. Ironically that animal name isn’t a kenning in German where it’s simply called “Igel”.
And with that, let me make one slightly more substantial comment: I think the author is slightly over-interpreting things when she observes what these words do to her imagination. Sure, to a modern person, “bone-house” may produce vastly different mental images than simply “body”. But that doesn’t mean contemporaries would have reacted the same way. Think back to the hedgehog. When you hear that word, do you think of a female pig, living in a thicket? Probably not, you probably don’t even register the words hedge and hog as separate things. It’s merely a cypher for a small, spiky mammal. I would expect bone-house to have worked the same way.
14
@Tom May
I was of course trying to write: ”More adorable are probably animal names though“
4
@Tom May You may have a point about speakers of Old English taking words like “banhus/bone house” etc for granted and not focusing on the individual elements, but that makes it no less interesting/striking to note that - at some point - some individual coined that combination to signify what we call “body”. When it was coined, the combination was as novel and striking (and indicative of the coiner’s thought processes) as it is to us now. That’s what makes it so fascinating. Separate point: I’ve always found it charming that the German Flusspferd and Nashorn are direct translations of the Greek terms that make up the English words hippopotamus and rhinoceros.
11
@Tom May With all due respect to your observations, Tom, I think the author is offering a very insightful, non-chronologically-dependent articulation of "why" the Anglo-Saxons would have bothered to coin "whale-road" when they knew/used "sea" routinely. "Whale-road" conjures up much more than the literal; are we to suppose that is an accident on the poet's part, just because we may not have similar, "professional," oratorial facility in Present Day English? Afterall, it is we, not the coiners of "hedgehog," who have lost the lost the figurative possibilities of the word. Why shouldn't "hedgehog" also conjure up the prickly, dense "hedge" that the "hog" carries on its back, as well as the shrubbery. And the symbolism of the "bone-house" of Beowulf (as the best of the best of heroic culture) crackling and disintegrating in a fire (ultimately connected to and driven by both the pride and gold lust of the Dragon and of Anglo-Saxon warrior culture) as a metaphor for the ruptures and inadequacy of the heroic code is stunningly insightful. We would be thinking backward, I believe, to assume the Anglo-Saxon poets had a poor or awkward or accidental facility with their rich, agile, beautiful, evocative language - a language to which Present Day English can scarcely do justice. Thank you, Ms. Livingston, for your ability to convey the power of Old English to audiences here. Blessings.
19
Our language is still alive: earworm, clickbait, money pit, dumpster fire. . . .
18
Though I haven't seen Old English in a very long time (maybe 50+ years?) I still remember the first sentence of the Lord's Prayer that I was expected to memorize (along with the first section of Canterbury Tales, and a host of other gems). Good old liberal arts Catholic education...
Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;
Si þin nama gehalgod
to becume þin rice
gewurþe ðin willa
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.
(Credit to Google as I didn't remember the alphabet.)
Thanks for the fine article...
10
@Jon
And from Genesis:
"On anginne gesceop God heofenan and eorðan. See eorðe soðlice wæs ydel and æmtig and þeostra wæron ofer þære aiwelnisse and Godes gast wæs geferod ofer wæteru."
1
@Jon
And from Genesis:
On anginne gesceop God heofenan and eorðan. Seo eorðe soðlice wæs ydel and æmtig and þeostra wæron ofer þære alwwelnisse bradnisse and Godes gast wæs geferod ofer wæteru.
Reminds me of the brilliant essay on "Las kenningar" (1933) by Borges.
7
@Diego Yes! Borges had a wonderful "relationship" with Old English.
@JB
I had a wonderful conversation with Borges about Old English.
Borges' book on ancient Germanic poetry has been translated into English for the first time. Published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
1
I so much enjoyed Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, with the old and modern English texts side by side. “So that’s how they said that!”
21
My long-ago undergraduate introduction to Old English and its bards' kennings awoke in me the recognition that some insights can only be fully-expressed in the language in which they first arose. Often these insights are untranslatable. We lose spoken languages with every passing decade all across our planet, as minority tongues with shrinking populations of speakers succumb to the global spread of English.
Don't misunderstand: I love my cradle-tongue. At the same time, I mourn the likely loss of truths and locutions which, like the languages which produce them, get thrown onto imperial linguistic pyres along with banhus and hronrad.
18
I appreciate (love!) Old English more than most native Anglophones--I can still recite some of its poetry from memory--but this piece leaves the impression that Britain was more linguistically homogenous back in the Golden Age when Most of Us Spoke Old English.
No fewer than four tongues are natively spoken on the Isle of Britain: English, Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Cornish.
If we were to expand the scope to the British Isles, we would have to add Irish and Manx, but the author spoke of Britain, not the British Isles, so we won't.
I might mention that at the time of the Anglo-Saxon migration, there were also Pictish speakers, though their language would not survive much longer.
The original speakers of Old English were immigrants who slowly established political and military supremacy in the regions into which they expanded. Even in the early mediaeval period the language was divided (Old West Saxon, Kentish, Northumbrian and Mercian).
Barely had their dominance (which is different from being a majority) been established in Britain than the Danelaw was created, handing nearly half the island to Norse speakers. To be fair, the similarities between Old Norse and the various dialects of Old English are profound: but they aren't the same by any stretch of the imagination.
Then along came the Normans in short order, bringing Norman French with them.
Modern Britain is far more linguistically homogenous than Pre-Conquest Britain ever was.
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@Josh Lepsy An interesting, and not-entirely objective or accurate, assessment of a linguistic complexity which the author of the essay in no way raises or diminishes. Why would a brief discussion focusing on Old English, Beowulf, and the Anglo-Saxon poets be expected to address other contemporary linguistic and literary cultures?
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During a medieval history study at my daughter's elementary school, I offered to give a little talk about the history of the English language. I will never forget a group of fourth graders listening raptly to the sounds of "The Dream of the Rood," their German-born teacher smiling at the words which felt familiar to her. We ended by learning "Sumer is icumen in" the kids joyfully chanting it together. I wasn't sure that children would catch my enthusiasm for the beauty of Old and Middle English, but they were right there with me. A very happy memory.
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Old English Lives! in
ƿikipædia, seo freo ƿisdomboc!
I happened to notice "ænglisc" in the language list in Wikipedia one morning, then cheerfully lost the rest of the day rooting around in help files and random article links. Among other delights, an article on Sasha Cohen, the ice skater, and some trace - I can't recall details - of a number-of-entries challenge between Old English and Sanscrit for King of the Dead Languages.
What fun!
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"Learning Old English was a wonderful experience in graduate school. While reading about the goings-on in King Hrothgar's mead hall (it was a cold winter in Princeton, then) our professor, Maurice Kelley, suggested that on my next trip to Manhattan I pick up a few bottles of Shapiro's Kosher Mead for the seminar to share. It was easily available, and I only wished that the label on each bottle might read "Beowulf says 'Drink Shapiro's Kosher Mead!'" Fermented honey certainly went down easily while reading "Beowulf" as the snow fell outside the classroom windows.
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I studied Beowulf and its neighbors, the Old Irish sagas, for many years and appreciate that this essay re-raises awareness of the old foundation of modern English. I did not find OE grammar "easy" however (it is inflected -- modern English is not -- so it seemed quite 'foreign' to me") although certainly easier than Old Irish.
Two points: (1) probably many and even most languages use techniques of metaphor as did OE. Modern German is still supreme at making new words through compounding, and etc. (2) these ancient languages and the stories encoded in them record worldviews of peoples long gone, and so offer glimpses into 'other worlds' not of fantasy but of other ways of human thinking and living. As such they reward study and dare I say offer useful benefits of comparison in our very complicated world. I am so happy that some readers report being exposed to Beowulf in high school!
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I was fortunate to study Old English and then Middle English a zillion years ago with the brilliant Professor Jess Bessinger. On the very first day of Old English class, he made it a point to de-mystify Old English, to make it un-exotic to his students.
He said, basically, that this is the precursor to the language we are speaking in this room right now, so nothing to be scared by.
And to *prove* to the students that we should NOT be intimidated by it, he read us a short Bible passage in Old English (without identifying it first) - we all got the gist of it on first hearing. (It was the story of the man who built his house on sand versus the one who built his house on stone, and the words still echo in my head these many, many years later.)
Old English is very much worth studying. It has enriched my experience of literature enormously.
And reading (or hearing!) Beowulf in the original is like reading Chaucer in the original - there are so many nuances that simply cannot be translated!
I've been fortunate to hear Benjamin Bagby perform Beowulf live on several occasions; to me it's like a form of time-travel: you are sitting there hanging on his ever utterance, even though you know how the story ends.
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As a high school English (aka "Language Arts") teacher, I too taught Beowulf. My students loved it and later in the semester, were delighted to find out how much easier it was to understand Middle English then Old English when we came to Chaucer.
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I too taught the history of English and I will always remember my students’ exclamations when they first encountered Old English! My hope was that the course would lead to a lifelong love of language. I can’t imagine anything more fascinating.
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As someone who has taught the history of English -- from the Old English period through Chaucer to the present -- I certainly share this writer's passion and enthusiasm for the evocative beauty of Old English kennings. And she didn't even get around to the riddles!
But I would differ just slightly about modern English -- we still possess the ability to form descriptive compounds -- look at the multiplayer game Warcraft for one good example, along with the re-emergence of the word "homeland" -- and we can use kennings too, though more often to soften or parody than to elevate, as with "people mover," "problem solver," or "bean counter."
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Good piece but Scots did not speak old English. Rather they spoke Scots or Gaelic
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@Brodie Paterson
And, of course, the Welsh did then, and many still, speak Cymraeg.
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Back when I was an English teacher and taught Beowulf, my class would write poems using kennings. The young men kind of got a kick out of being able to describe sporting events and worked at creating kennings like "pigthrower" for quarterback and "heaven's gate" for the goal posts.
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It has been a struggle to remove all Latinate phrases from my prose. Old English and Norse words have much more substance.
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This piece reminded me of something I'd read years ago about the sign language using chimps that scientists Roger Founts took into his home. The chimps were enjoyed holiday celebrations and around Thanksgiving, began to sign "candy-tree" -- an innovation that was their way of expressing Christmas. A kenning!
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If you teach your infants sign language they not only acquire a higher intelligence, but they quickly combine signs to express nuances that are delightful and insightful.
At 2 am in line at the Old Atlanta’s Underground, for a hour we all watched entranced as a deaf woman signed and combined with great humor and sorrow.
Maybe we need to revert a bit to old English and sign.
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One of my fondest college memories is of being asked to choose any twenty-five lines from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” in Middle English, memorize them, and recite them before the class. There was something ineffably musical and magical about the rhythms and inflections of the original, ancient language that made this one-of-a-kind experience transporting, as if traveling back Centuries through time. Since I repeated this passage from the General Prologue literally hundreds of times in preparation, as I listened to a tape of a Chaucerian scholar and actor reciting them, much of it lingers, stays with me, and takes me back decades to what, for me, was a mystical exercise.
He moot reherce as neigh as ever he can,
Everich a word, if it be in his charge....
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And this is exactly why I have always been so fascinated by languages and etymology: the “aha“, mind-opening moments of encountering terms like “hronrad“ or “banhus“ and suddenly experiencing something familiar from a whole new perspective.
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Thank you for leaving this old Swede with a smile on my face! The longing for everyday Swedish with words like these intertwined on a daily basis is powerful. The poetry in the old English is beautiful and so sefte. A lovely piece of writing!
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Love this article. I had a course in OE when I was in grad school zillions of years ago. I disagree that the grammar is simple--but loved the review of kennings and vocab--not to mention discussion of the culture. May prompt me to go back to some of those writings that gave me such trouble so long ago.
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Excellent meditation on the allure of OE. I think this is why the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins still resonates for poetry lovers and language lovers today. He was a student of OE, both as an academic and a Jesuit, and his work is suffused with kennings. Reading Hopkins today, his kennings do not seem pretentious or precious. Rather, they feel otherworldly, or drawn from some ancient furnace where language is forged. Hopkins’s kennings connect the reader to those glorious and inspired moments (as described by author of this essay) when the act of putting words together seems to unleash their power.
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Josephine Livingstone seems to have touched a chord in many of us that has been silent a long time - it certainly brought back my teacher of OE, George Johnston, himself a poet and student of Icelandic Sagas. I still have Sweet's Primer and his Anglo-Saxon Reader on my shelf, full of almost illegible annotation. Your connection with Hopkins touches other chords, especially your own image of the furnace and forging. "Felix Randal" begins with death and ends with a kind of explosion of life - the resurrected farrier at his "random grim forge", where he ... "Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!" If "bright and battering sandal" isn't strictly a kenning, it is still throws the horseshoe into another world. Gets my vote for the best sonnet in the English language.
5
@David S. "Dapple-dawn-drawn falcon," anyone?
1
Josephine, thank you for sharing this piece. It reminds me of the same joy I find in discovering how different elements of Japanese characters (kanji) form into words, especially when the words themselves are a kenning of sorts (flower & fire together are fireworks, for example).
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The description of kennings brings immediately to mind modern German, which constructs many nouns by combining others. For example, "Handschuh" (hand shoe) is glove.
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@John I love your remark! I laughed out loud, I think because your recollection exposes the kernel of joy that inheres in deploying language - any language - skillfully and creatively. I don't speak German, but I'll remember Panzerfrosch!
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@netchemist
Hondscio is also the name of the unfortunateeaten by Grendel.
1
Thank you for this lovely meditation on language and linguistic change.
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Some wonderful kennings from modern German...augenblick, meaning "soon". Literally "eye blink.".
"wahrscheinlich", meaning "probably." Literally "wahr" = true.
"scheinlich" seems (ly). Thus--" seems to be true".
14
Such a lovely piece. Thank you for writing it, and thank you for publishing it, Times.
In a season (I am being hopeful here) when the value of words and the power of words and the beauty of words spoken with heartfull integrity is vanishing in the public sphere, your essay, Ms. Livingstone, is a balm, even to this descendant of immigrants, some of whom never mastered it at all.
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