An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

.
eort ‘short’, whilst lang ‘long’ and strang ‘strong’ differ only
in having e as the mutation vowel, e.g. lengra, although if you refer back
to the previous section you will see that that is to be expected, whilst
g
.
eong ‘young’ has g
.
ingra, g
.
ing
.
est. Two further adjectives, bra¯da ‘broad’ and
he¯ah ‘high’, have both mutated forms and the normal comparison as in
blinda, whilst ne¯ah ‘near’ has an unmutated comparative and a mutated
superlative.
The type of variation seen in those last three words quite probably
indicate that these i-mutated forms were always in competition with the
unmutated regular variety, and this suggestion is supported by the fact
that in present-day English they have all lost their mutated forms with
the exception of elder, eldest alongside older, oldest. But even then the
mutated forms are of restricted usage.
The second group is smaller, but contains items of the highest
frequency. I have not mentioned these previously because their shared
feature is suppletion. There are only four words here, which split into
two semantic groups. The first of these comprises the words go¯d ‘good’
and yfel ‘evil, bad’; the second consists of lytel ‘little’ and mic
.
el ‘large’. The
paradigm each is as follows:
go¯d
betra ~ se¯lra
betst ~ se¯lest
yfel
wyrsa
wyrst
lytel
læ¯ssa
læ¯st
mic
.
el
ma¯ra
mæ¯st
Note that in the case of go¯d there is not one set of suppletive forms but
two. There is no distinction to be made between them. When the equiv-
alent adverbs, well, yfle, lyt and mic
.
le, are used they also have suppletive
forms.
Exercise
The following passage is taken from Bede’s account of Cædmon, often
called the first English poet. Bede was a monk writing at the beginning
of the eighth century and based in northern County Durham. His
greatest work was the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum or ‘The
Ecclesiastical History of the English People’. Bede has the best claim
to be the first systematic historian of Britain and, without chauvinism, it
can be claimed that in the first half of the eighth century Northumbria
was the intellectual centre of Western Europe.
VERB FORMS
51
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It is often claimed, on the basis of Bede’s History, that Cædmon was the
first poet of English, although such a claim has nothing like the substance
we can attach to Bede himself. Cædmon was an apparently illiterate
farm-worker attached to the Abbey of Whitby during the abbacy of
Hilda between 650 and 679. The story tells of how this farm-worker was
inspired by a divine dream to compose a religious poem, a commonplace
theme in medieval literature. At least as interesting as this is the point
that Hilda was Abbess of a ‘double’ house, i.e. one containing both monks
and nuns.
I have chosen the following passage, which follows the discovery of
Cædmon’s songwriting skills, not because of its literary interest, but
more prosaically: because it contains quite a number of weak verbs! You
will also observe that the linguistic forms in this text sometimes differ
slightly from those seen either in the paradigms I have presented or
those you have seen in the texts extracted from Ælfric. The original
Bede manuscript was written in Latin, of course, but it was later trans-
lated into Old English, the most reliable manuscript (Tanner 10,
Bodleian Library) being of the second half of the tenth century, but
containing various forms which are dialectally distinct from those used
by Ælfric. This may seem a nuisance, but it is a good idea to begin the
confrontation with variant forms as early as possible. As before, I have
glossed most of the words you will find unfamiliar.
E
a¯ ongan se¯o abbudisse clyppan ond lufig
.
ean
t
a Godes