An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

g
.
éong in g
.
éardum
t
one Gód sénde
child in years
that God sent
c
.
éasterbúendum
cénra g
.
ehwy´lcum
fortress-dwellers
brave ones every
At first sight it might not be obvious that there is a problem in these two
lines. Closer examination, however, shows that the alliteration between
/j/ (.
>) and /g/ () is between two different phonemes, which are
by definition non-identical. One possibility is that we are dealing with
eye-alliteration, that is to say, the alliteration is only graphic, a matter of
how the alliteration is presented on paper (or, rather, on vellum manu-
script). But that is scarcely possible, both in terms of literacy and the
fundamentally oral nature of Old English poetry. It is far more probable
that it reflects an earlier historical state when distinctive palatal
phonemes did not exist.
9.5 Dialect
The final issue I want to discuss concerns dialects. So far all the texts
we have considered, with one special exception which I shall raise
shortly, are from one form or another of West Saxon, as I mentioned in
Chapter 1. This is unavoidable in a work such as this, especially given
that perhaps as much as ninety per cent of the textual material from the
VARIETY
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period has come down to us in such a form. Even, and this is the excep-
tion I mentioned above, the poetry is virtually all contained in four West
Saxon-based manuscripts, although there is a great deal of internal
evidence that much of it was originally composed in a more northerly
dialect. This certainly true of Beowulf. But there are pressing reasons why,
even in an introductory work such as this, the other dialects cannot be
ignored.
One reason is not really to do with Old English as such but is instead
a matter of understanding the development of the history of English
as a whole. For after the Norman Conquest and the disappearance of
English from sight, it of course remained the language of all but an
aristocratic elite. And when it re-emerged, the political centres of power
had shifted, in the language as elsewhere. West Saxon was no longer a
cultural dominance. Rather, it was other dialects, especially those around
London and the East Midlands, which were to have the strongest
influence on what forms of English were to prevail in later centuries.
It is, therefore, important to have some understanding of where the other
Old English dialects fit into the overall scheme of things.
There are, as I suggested in Chapter 1, considerable difficulties in
assessing the dialect situation in Old English. The standard view has
been that there were four dialect areas: West Saxon, Kentish, Mercian
and Northumbrian. West Saxon, of course, had its centre in Winchester
and the surrounding Thames Valley area. However, especially after the
establishment of the Danelaw to the north and east, the efforts of Alfred
the Great to create a unified kingdom, and the eventual success of
Alfred’s efforts, the influence of West Saxon gradually spread, both to the
south-east, including London, and across to the Severn Valley.
The most immediate effect was on Kentish, with its major monasteries,
especially, but not only, at Canterbury. Thus, whilst we have a number of
valuable texts from Kentish, only those written up to about 900 demon-
strate a form of the language that is more or less distinctively Kentish.
From then on we find either texts which are most West Saxon-like or
which show a mixture of Kentish and other more general southern, and
West Saxon, traces. For a clearer picture of the south-east we have to
wait until the evidence from Middle English begins to arrive, around
1200.
I want next to consider Northumbrian, which is perhaps the simplest
of all the dialects to contextualise. Although Northumbria itself covers a
huge area, from about Edinburgh down to the Humber and from Carlisle
down to the Mersey, the texts we have all come from a tiny area centring
on the major ecclesiastical centre at Durham. This must be remembered.
There is some evidence that a few texts display a slightly more southerly
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origin, but if this is so we cannot tell exactly where that might be, even
if our suspicions focus on York.
Northumbrian is of particular interest because the majority of texts,
of which the best known is The Lindisfarne Gospels, a perfectly beautiful
manuscript only spoiled, luckily for us, by a scratched Old English gloss
written above the lines of the original Latin text, show the first signs of
both Viking influence and the disappearance of several features, particu-
larly morphological, which belong to Old English but which are to be
lost in the later development of the language.
For example, where most more southerly texts, especially West Saxon,
use the form synd ‘are’ or variants of that, Northumbrian frequently uses
aron, the source of the present-day form. In the noun, Northumbrian
often shows a falling together of various determiner forms which has
sometimes led to the belief that the system of grammatical gender (most
obviously supplied by unambiguous determiners) was being lost. This is
probably not true, or at least over-presumptive, but rather there is a new
development occurring which will dynamically interact with the loss
of gender on other grounds, including the frequent interchangeability of
all unstressed vowels in these texts. It is the conjunction of all these
different effects which eventually lead to the loss of grammatical gender
in Middle English.
But it is Mercian which causes the greatest number of difficulties in
terms of dialect. This, of course, is unfortunate, since from the point of
view of later developments it would be nice if we could draw a straight
line from Old English down to, say 1400, the time of Chaucer. No such
line, however, is available. Moreover, although there is a tendency to see
Mercian as the dialect of the area between the Mersey and the Humber
in the north and the Thames in the south, this is quite misleading, for at
least two reasons.
Firstly, it ignores the fact that we have no useful material from East
Anglia, which plays a critical role in later developments. And, secondly,
it ignores the geographical distribution of the material we do have. For
given the area which Mercia might be held to cover, the actual texts
we have come from a rather restricted area. The best-known text, The