An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

Vespasian Psalter, almost certainly comes from the Lichfield area, about
twenty-five miles north-east of Birmingham. Another important text,
The Rushworth Gospels, which was once thought to come from Yorkshire
(outside the traditional Mercian area) is now more plausibly placed near
Lichfield too. This is no peculiarity, since Lichfield was both the home of
the Mercian leaders and a major ecclesiastical centre. Other texts which
we have appear to come from areas perhaps just to the east of the Severn
Valley. Thus we lack any substantial evidence about the whole of the
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East Midlands, just the area we might be most interested in. The only
evidence we have for that area is from place-names and rare charters,
rather less material in all than we have for, say, Kentish.
Many of the features which distinguish this ‘Lichfield Mercian’, as it
might be called, from the other principal dialects, in particular West
Saxon, look individually to be matters of detail, but they cover all levels
of the language. In phonology there is the raising of the short vowel /æ/
to a new phoneme /
ε
/, in morphology there are distinctive inflexions,
such as -u, not -e for the 1st person present indicative singular (this is
shared with Northumbrian and, partially, Kentish), in syntax the process
of negative contraction (see §7.5) is less frequently employed.
Beyond these details, however, there is an overarching feature. This is
that, from probably a rather early date, certainly by 800 or so, a distinct
Mercian literary language was developing long before any such dialect
appeared in West Saxon. The text which best expresses this is the ninth-
century Vespasian Psalter. It continues to be found in texts written just
after the Conquest, notably a text called The Life of St Chad, a tenth-
century bishop of Lichfield.
This is of importance because there has been a strong tendency for
Late West Saxon to be viewed as a kind of Standard Old English. But
Lichfield Mercian has every right to be seen as an equal to Late West
Saxon, and that rather implies that there was no Standard Old English,
but rather at least two varieties which are best described as focussed.
That is to say, they were both varieties which speakers tended to favour,
rather than fixed standard languages to which speakers were required to
adhere, by, for example, prescribed educational standards.
Exercise
The exercise in this chapter is designed to bring together the two central
topics which I have discussed here, namely poetry and dialects. In the
first part below, therefore, I have given you a complete short poem which
you should attempt to analyse metrically, i.e. work out the stress patterns
of each half-line and also determine the alliterative pattern of each long
line. The poem I have chosen is Cædmon’s Hymn. You have already trans-
lated some aspect of the story of Cædmon, so you can now see his art.
Nu¯ sc
.
ulon herig
.
ean
heofonrı
¯
c
.
es Weard,
Meotodes meahte
ond his mo¯dg
.
e
t
anc,
weorc Wuldorfæder,
swa¯ he¯ wundra g
.
ehwæs,
e¯c
.
e Drihten
o¯r onstealde.
He¯ æ¯rest sc
.
eo¯p
eor
e
an bearnum
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heofon to¯ hro¯fe,
ha¯lig
.
Sc
.
yppend.
T
a¯ middang
.
eard
monncynnes Weard
e¯c
.
e Drihten
æfter te¯ode
fı¯rum foldan,
Fre¯a ælmihtig
.
.
Unusually, but not uniquely, there is another version of this poem
extant, which is written in the Northumbrian dialect. Indeed, there are
four Northumbrian versions, for any work that was widely admired was
often copied several, and occasionally, as with Ælfric’s work, many times;
the unusualness I refer to lies in the work appearing in markedly differ-
ent dialects. Of the Northumbrian versions, the earliest version is called
the Moore version, which was written in 737, probably fewer than
seventy-five years after Cædmon’s own death, whilst another version,
Leningrad, was written in 746, both within fifteen years of Bede’s death.
Here is the Moore version:
Nu¯ sc
.
ylun herg
.
an
hefænrı
¯
c
.
aes Uard,
Metudæs maecti
end his mo¯dg
.
idanc,
uerc Uuldurfadur,
sue¯ he¯ uundra g
.
ihuaes,
e¯c
.
i Dryctin
o¯r a¯stelidæ.
He¯ a¯e¯rist sc
.
o¯p
aelda barnum
heben til hro¯fe,
ha¯leg
.
Sc
.
epen.
Tha¯ middung
.
eard
moncynnaes Uard,
e¯c
.
i Dryctin
æfter tı
¯
adæ
fı¯rum foldu
Fre¯a allmectig
.
.
At this stage you do not, of course, have sufficient knowledge to
attempt a detailed dialectal comparison. But it should be possible for you
to attempt to compare the two texts in other ways. For example, are there
any major contrasts between them? What differences can be explained
solely because there are differences in spelling-systems? If you assume,
correctly, that unstressed front vowels fall together as /e/ in the later
text, can you find examples to demonstrate that? One important point
to note here is that as well as geographical distinction, there can also be
distinctions of date. The West Saxon text belongs to the first half of the
tenth century. Given the questions I pose above, might some of the above
contrasts be due to a difference of approximately 200 years between the
two versions?
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10
The future
10.1 Introduction
But first the past. In the preceding chapters I have attempted to give
you an overview of the principal characteristics of Old English. In doing
this the concentration has been on the areas of morphology, syntax and
vocabulary. By now you should have a good grasp of the fundamental
issues in these areas. Although I have occasionally touched on phono-
logical issues, I have tried to avoid these as much as possible, believing
that they are best tackled later. If you wish to study Old English in more
detail, that will be one of your first tasks.
In morphology, you have learned about the structure of nouns, adjec-
tives and verbs. In nouns you have seen the major declensional classes
and the features of these classes which are, to a greater or lesser extent,
no longer present in English, in particular the concepts of case and
grammatical gender. In adjectives perhaps the most surprising feature
was the syntactically determined ‘declension’ of adjectives, a feature
entirely absent from the present-day language. Two features, perhaps,
stand out in respect of verbs. First of all we explored the basic differ-
ences between weak and strong verbs and introduced the concept of
Ablaut, which, although it remains as a relic today, is no longer syn-
chronically active. Secondly we explored the variations in tense and
mood which are rather different in Old English from those usages today.
In syntax, of course, it was necessary to start with a discussion of
how some of the morphological patterns were realised in practice. This
meant that we had to discuss, for example, how case was employed and
for what purposes it was used. And the same is true for other features,
too, such as, once more, tense and mood. But you were also able to
understand several other important differences between Old English
and present-day English. Probably the most important of these is the
issue of word-order, for what you saw was that the basic word system of
Old English involved two rival orders. In main clauses the verb usually
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occupied second position in the clause, whereas in subordinate clauses
the verb usually occupied final position. Both of these, in different ways,
contrast with the strict SVO word order today. You also saw that there
were other features which were quite noticeably different from anything
today, such as the use of negation and impersonal verbs. Relative clauses,
too, had their own distinctive traits.
The feeling that ‘older’ languages must be somehow more primitive
than languages today is one that has a quite general currency, even if not
amongst linguists. This feeling can even be exaggerated by the history
of English where, over the last 1000 years, there has been an enormous
growth in vocabulary, and in particular in the huge number of loan
words from an almost incredible range of languages. In Old English, as
you have seen, there were very few loan words, and the majority were
taken from Latin, no doubt partly due to the conversion of the English
to Christianity, but also partly because so many of our texts are derived
from the work of monastic writers fluent in Latin. But the measurement
of a language’s vitality is not adequately measured by the degree to
which it is indebted to other languages! And what you have seen is that
Old English had a wealth of internal resources of its own with which to
create new vocabulary. The most obvious resource was compounding, as
exemplified above all by the poetry, but there was also a very frequent
and widespread use of affixation.
10.2 The past
In understanding Old English, as you have seen, it is essential to have
some knowledge of what happened before Old English. One of the very
first points made in Chapter 1 was that Old English ultimately derives
from Indo-European, a hypothetical language which perhaps existed
about 10,000 years ago. And, less distantly, Old English derived from
Germanic, itself a hypothetical descendant from Indo-European which
existed in the centuries before and after the time of Christ. I introduced
these languages because they explain so much about why Old English
looks as it does.
This need to look at the past is one which you too should now be
able to recognise. For example, the word order system of Old English is
not only shared with other Germanic languages of the time, but is also
discernibly related to other older Indo-European languages, such as
Latin. The system of declension and the allied markers of gender and
case can be traced back to a system which must have operated in Indo-
European. The strong verb system and the whole Ablaut phenomenon
is also something which has its origins in Indo-European, although it was
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drastically re-organised in the evolution of Germanic, so that the strong
verbs now look a basically Germanic feature. These latter features, the
development of strong and weak verbs and the radical restructuring of
Ablaut, also contribute greatly, although it is often difficult to see, to the
creation of Old English vocabulary.
There are other, perhaps less expected, features which owe their
origins to a much earlier state. This is the case with, for example, Old
English poetry. It is known, for instance, that there is continental poetry,
especially from Old Saxon, which shares the distinctive features of Old
English poetry. We also know that Scandinavian poetry not only had
some of these features too but also used particular processes of com-
pounding which help to explain the so-frequent use of compounds
in Old English poetry. And this must be a shared inheritance, given
the antiquity of both traditions. Furthermore, given that in origin Old
English poetry is likely to have been oral in nature (see again the story
of Cædmon), it should also be noted that oral poetry of this kind can be
found in, for example, many areas of the Balkans and Greece (recall here
the poetry of Homer), where it may even still survive. That looks like
a common, if much altered, feature which may have been widespread
amongst the speakers of many of the Indo-European languages.
10.3 Towards Middle English and beyond
I have already pointed out signs that the structures of Old English were
open to change. In Chapter 9 you saw some evidence for that in the brief
discussion of verb morphology and gender. But that is scarcely even the
tip of the iceberg. And there is always the question of how it can be that
there is so great a disjunction between the structures of Old English and
those of the present-day language. Certainly there is no inevitability
about it. This can quite easily be seen by comparing any of the stages
of English with those of, say, German. In comparative terms, German
has hardly changed at all; it remains a clearly Germanic (as opposed to
a German!) language, retaining many of the features which it shared
with and which you have seen in Old English. This puzzle of the huge
changes in English means that one question which sensibly can be, and
has been, asked is whether present-day English is really a Germanic
language at all.
Some of the issues here lie more properly in the scope of the com-
panion book on Middle English in the same series as this. Nevertheless
it is useful to take a look at these issues from the Old English perspective
rather than merely to look back. That can have the danger of turning Old
English into an outsider, as not really an integral part of the cultural as
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well as the linguistic story of the English-speaking world. It is only by
examining the structural and cultural history of Old English that we can
hope to see how it fits into the history of English as a whole. In addition
this will help us to understand more about present-day English and how
English has come to be as it is.
Many of the problems are falsely explained as the result of the
Norman Conquest. This is not to deny the cultural importance of the
Norman Conquest, but linguistically its effects began to loom large
only in the later parts of the thirteenth century and even then they were
dominant only in the area of vocabulary. The Viking invasions almost
certainly had a more widespread influence over many areas of the
language, and we have seen some of this already. But even Viking
influence was restricted, this time geographically, to the north and east.
More important than either of these influences were the inherent long-
term structural issues. It is to these that we must now look, for if they
had not already existed, then the effects of both the Viking invasions and
the coming of the Normans would both have fallen on stony ground.
Nevertheless I shall return to these issues of language contact shortly.
I have already mentioned, in Chapter 9, one relevant point, namely
the falling together of the unstressed vowels. But this falling together,
which itself was to herald their widespread loss, is not enough to explain
the upsets which occurred in, for example, the declensional systems. 
To see what might happen, however, let us take another look at noun
declensions. In Old English there were, as I first discussed in Chapter 2,
three major declensions, alongside a variety of minor declensions. These
were the General Masculine, the General Feminine and the N-declen-
sions. I know this ignores the General Neuter, but I have already shown
that this is close in structure to the general masculines and therefore I
shall silently include it there. Typical examples of each declension are
repeated below for ease, where I have changed the typical noun for the