An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

infinitives, and the important point to note is that they always occur with
the preposition to¯. Thus we find:
(71) … 
t
æt
t
e is riht to¯ habbenne
that this is right to have
The to¯ + inflected infinitive construction is very common, and it is
used to express meanings of, for example, necessity, purpose and
completion. It can also be used as either the subject or the complement
of a clause. Because of your knowledge of present-day English, the
examples you will come across will stand out and will not cause you any
great difficulty.
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Exercise
In this exercise I present you, for the first time, with a reasonably self-
contained piece of Old English, and I no longer give you any help with
glossing. You should, instead, use the glossary at the end of the book. The
extract I have chosen is one of the most famous texts in Old English,
namely the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, written in 1014 by Wulfstan, Archbishop
of York. At this time the question of whether Anglo-Saxon England
was to be ruled by English kings or by Danish kings was critical to the
country, and, as we know, Cnut (Canute) was indeed shortly to gain
power.
The full text shows the power of Wulfstan’s rhetoric, but even the
extract I present here, from the start of the sermon, is impressive in itself.
You might like to imagine yourself as an Anglo-Saxon listening to even
the very first sentence. Many of Wulfstan’s rhetorical devices are an echo
of the poetic forms of the time, and I shall return to that in Chapter 9.
Le¯ofan men, g
.
ecna¯wa
e t
æt so¯
e
is:
e
e¯os worold is on ofste, and hit
ne¯alæ¯c
.
e t
a¯m ende; and 
t
y hit is on worolde, aa swa¯ leng, swa¯ wyrse,
and swa¯ hit sc
.
eal nyde for folc
.
es synnan æ¯r Antecrı¯stes to¯cyme yfelian
swy
t
e; and hu¯ru hit wyr
e t
ænne eg
.
eslic
.
and grimlic
.
wı¯de on worolde.
Understanda
e
e¯ac g
.
eorne 
t
æt de¯ofol
t
a¯s
t
e¯ode nu¯ fela ge¯ara dwelode
to¯ swy
t
e, and
t
æt lytle g
.
etre¯ow
t
a wæ¯ran mid mannum, 
t
e¯ah hy wel
spæ¯can, and unrihta to¯ fela ricsode on lande; and næs a¯ fela manna
t
e sme¯ade ymbe 
t
a¯ bo¯te swa¯ g
.
eorne swa¯ man sc
.
olde, ac dæg
.
hwa¯mlı¯c
.
e
man ı¯hte yfel æfter o¯
e
rum and unriht ræ¯rde and unlaga maneg
.
e ealles
to¯ wı¯de g
.
ynd ealle 
t
a¯s
t
e¯ode.
NOUN PHRASES AND VERB PHRASES
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7
Clauses
7.1 Word order
One of the most obvious contrasts between Old English and present-day
English is word order. This term, however, can be approached from
many different angles, such as, on the one hand, the order in which the
subject, verb and object or complement are found and, on the other, the
order in which modifiers of the noun are presented. These various word
orders are often inter-related, as I shall occasionally discuss in the course
of this chapter.
However, it is probably best to start with the most salient of these
features, namely subject-verb-object word order, in other words the rela-
tive placing of the principal phrases within any clause. Within this topic
the best place to start is with present-day English. There we find what is
sometimes described as fixed word order. That is to say, there appears to
be a prescribed sequence such that the subject precedes the verb which
in turn precedes the object (if there is one). Thus:
(1) The dog [
] bit [] the man []
Such a structure will seem obvious to the point of tedium. But there
are exceptions. One type of exception is, crudely speaking, stylistic.
Here, for example, we find examples such as (2):
(2) Cheese [
] I like, tomatoes [] I hate
where the two objects of the two clauses have been placed in front of
their subjects and verbs in order to achieve a special effect. That type of
stylistic device is available in Old English too. But there is also another
type of exception, which can be seen in:
(3) Along came [
] Jones [].
This is not a matter of stylistics; rather it is alternative structural (as
opposed to stylistic) word order. It may be uncommon, but for our
purposes the most important point is that it exists.
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The dominance of one fixed word order in present-day English can
invite monolingual speakers of the language, or those who only know
French or Spanish in addition, to assume that this is the normal situation
amongst the languages of the world. Indeed, what we can call for the
moment SVO word order is very common. Other languages have, how-
ever, different orders. Welsh, for example, has VSO word order, so not
even in Britain do all the languages share the same word order.
What does all this have to do with Old English? If we turn (1) above
into Old English, it would be something like:
(4) Se docga ba¯t 
t
one guman
Clearly the word order is the same as in present-day English. And it is
true that structures like this are commonplace in Old English. However,
it is not the only possible type of order. In terms of basic word order Old
English reflects a changing pattern which, as (3) above in one respect
demonstrates, has never been completely stabilised.
It appears that in Old English there were two competing word orders:
there was an SVO order as in the present-day language, but there was
also an SOV word order, as occurs, for example, in Latin. This may seem
confusing, but similar facts hold, albeit in somewhat different ways,
in present-day Germanic languages such as German and Dutch. This
should, by now, be a familiar feature, namely that Old English often
looks as much like German or Dutch as English. It is a recurring pattern
and simply emphasises the Germanic origins of English.
7.2 Verb-second order
However, rather than talking about SVO and SOV word order, it is rather
more enlightening, I think, to talk of verb-second and verb-final word
order. In other words, the critical point is whether the verb comes second
or last in its clause. I shall start to explain what this means immediately,
but if you look back at (4) you will see that the verb ba¯t does indeed come
second in its clause, with the subject noun phrase in first position.
This helps us to understand what verb-second means: it means that
the verb is placed after the first important element in the clause. In
present-day English this first element has become virtually equated
with the subject, hence the identity of (1) and (4). But there was no such
equation in Old English. The question arises, therefore, of what a first
element might be if it can be something other than a subject. Probably
the most frequent cases involve an adverbial. Thus the following is
usual:
CLAUSES
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(5)
T
a¯ beco¯m he¯ to¯ Westseaxan
Then came he to the West Saxons
But the modern order can also be found:
(6) Oswold 
t
a¯ aræ¯rde a¯ne ro¯de
Oswald then erected a cross
Such variation can be confusing, but it arises out of two related features.
Firstly, the modern order may have been chosen in examples like (6) for
reasons of text structure, here to focus attention on the fact that Oswald
did something. Secondly, the older word order is beginning to be lost,
a process which will accelerate during the early Middle English period.
The two features may well have interacted.
Ê
a¯ is by no means the only adverbial which acts in this way, and,
furthermore, the same word order is also frequently seen with adverbial
phrases:
(7) On 
t
a¯m ylc
.
an tı¯man co¯m e¯ac sum bisc
.
eop fram Ro¯mebyrig
.
At the same time came also a bishop from Rome
Here too it is probable that the adverbial phrase is the first element in
order to express the discourse feature of focus.
Ê
a¯ is extremely frequent, but there is another adverbial of similar
frequency which both displays verb-second order and is also very
important indeed. This is ne ‘not’, the principal means for expressing
negation. This too prefers verb-second word order, as in:
(8) Ne co¯m se here
Not came the army
but since I want to look at negation later in this chapter I shall forego
further discussion here. In questions, too, the verb occupies second
position after an interrogative pronoun:
(9) Hwæt eart 
t
u¯?
Who are you?
but the same also happens even when there is no interrogative:
(10) Gehyrst 
t
u¯, sæ¯lida, hwæt 
t
is folc seg
.
e
e
?
Hearest thou, sailor, what these people say?
The similarity of this construction to that in present-day English is
only obscured by the use of the dummy auxiliary verb do which is now
regular:
(11) Do you hear, sailor, what these people are saying?
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It is worth noting as more than an aside that Old English never had such
a dummy auxiliary verb. The similarities between the Old English and
present-day English constructions can be very clearly seen in examples
involving modal auxiliaries. Compare, therefore, the following pair:
(12) Canst 
t
u¯ temian hı¯g
.
?
(13) Can you tame them?
All the above examples share the characteristic that the first element
in the clause is something other than a subject noun phrase, but the most
usual situation is in (4), where the first element is the subject. Typical
examples are the following:
(14) Se messepre¯ost leofode be hla¯fe and be wætere
The mass-priest lived on bread and water
(15) Drihten sæ¯de
t
is big
.
spel his leorningcnihtum
The Lord told this story to his disciples
which are clearly parallel to present-day structures.
One structure which shows an overt verb-subject structure but 
which is quite different from the interrogative structure shown in (11) is
exemplified by many sentences of type in (16):
(16) Wæs he¯ se mon in weoruldha¯de g
.
eseted …
was he a man settled in the secular life …
Such sentences have a presentative structure, which is rather similar to
the present-day structure seen in sentences such as:
(17) There rose in his imagination grand visions of a world empire
Compare with (17):
(18) Grand visions of a world empire rose in his imagination
The flexibility accorded to Old English by means of the role of inflec-
tions makes the possibility of presentative structures less clumsy there
than they are today.
As I move towards a discussion of verb-final word order, we need
firstly to look at a structure which, on the surface, appears to show verb-
final word order. It can be exemplified by (19):
(19) Ond he¯o [
] hine []
t
a¯ monade [
]
And she him then encouraged
This is, however, in fact a verb-second construction, even although the
verb comes after not merely the subject, but also the object. Let me now
explain how this might be so, contrary to immediate impressions.
CLAUSES
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The explanation for this leads us to a further distinctive feature of Old
English. This is that there is a distinction made which concerns the
weight of syntactic phrases. There was a clear preference in Old English
to place light elements, that is to say, elements with only minimal phono-
logical content, towards the beginning of clauses, and, conversely, to
place elements with a great deal of phonological content at the end of
clauses. And the placement of object pronouns before their verbs, as
in (19), is the clearest example of this weight principle. You may find it
useful to compare this type of construction with the placement of object
pronouns with the same placement that occurs in a language such as
French, for example Il les aime, which corresponds to English He likes them.
It is important to note that when the clause has a first element
other than a subject, then an object pronoun will still precede the verb,
provided that the subject is not a pronoun itself. Thus we find:
(20) Fela spella [
] him [] sæ¯don
t
a¯ Beormas [
]
Many stories to him told the Beormas
but if the subject is also a pronoun and there is a non-subject first
element, then both pronouns follow the verb:
(21)
t
a¯ sæ¯de he [
] him []
t
is big
.
spel [
]
then told he them this story
The interaction of weight features and the, as it were, ‘ordinary’ word
order is complex, or certainly seems so to anyone, such as a speaker of
present-day English, whose own language pays much less attention to
weight.
7.3 Verb-final order
It might be thought that given all the variations I have already discussed,
you would be forgiven for thinking that verb-final order was relatively
insignificant in Old English. Far from it! It is, indeed, very common, and
historically, too, it is very important. The reason for its historical import-
ance is that, as far as we can judge, verb-final order is much older than
verb-second order. This is an issue I touched upon towards the end of