The Wordhord

Daily Life in Old English

Hana Videen

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780691237183
  9780691232744
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691232751
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

An entertaining and illuminating collection of weird, wonderful, and downright baffling words from the origins of English—and what they reveal about the lives of the earliest English speakers

Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer's Middle English, Old English—the language of Beowulf—defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of Britain more than a thousand years ago, it is rich with words that haven't changed (like word), others that are unrecognizable (such as neorxnawang, or paradise), and some that are mystifying even in translation (gafol-fisc, or tax-fish). In this delightful book, Hana Videen gathers a glorious trove of these gems and uses them to illuminate the lives of the earliest English speakers. We discover a world where choking on a bit of bread might prove your guilt, where fiend-ship was as likely as friendship, and where you might grow up to be a laughter-smith.

The Wordhord takes readers on a journey through Old English words and customs related to practical daily activities (eating, drinking, learning, working); relationships and entertainment; health and the body, mind, and soul; the natural world (animals, plants, and weather); locations and travel (the source of some of the most evocative words in Old English); mortality, religion, and fate; and the imagination and storytelling. Each chapter ends with its own "wordhord"—a list of its Old English terms, with definitions and pronunciations.

Entertaining and enlightening, The Wordhord reveals the magical roots of the language you're reading right now: you'll never look at—or speak—English in the same way again.

1

The Language You Thought You Knew

Ye Olde English?

WANDER DOWN A SMALL alley off London’s Fleet Street and you’ll find a pub with a crooked, creaky charm. Its black and white sign says ‘Rebuilt 1667’, the year after the Great Fire gutted England’s largest city. Go inside for a pint in its wood-panelled dining room, where literary greats like Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain ate their fill. This may not be London’s oldest pub, but it sure looks the part, with atmospheric vaulted cellars that supposedly date back to medieval times. And if you harbour any doubts concerning the pub’s antiquity, its name sets you straight: ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’.

It’s nearly impossible to spend time in London without seeing a number of traditional ‘ye olde’ English pubs: ‘Ye Olde Mitre’, ‘Ye Olde Watling’ and the curiously named ‘Ye Olde Cock Tavern’ are just a few. It may seem that these places are real relics, or at least their names themselves are written in an ancient language – but they are not. ‘Ye olde’ is in fact a pseudo-archaic term; no one ever said ‘ye olde’ except in imitation of an imagined speech of the distant past.

But that’s not to say it has no roots in the past. Once there was a letter called thorn that made a th sound. It looked like this: þ. Over the centuries, þ was written increasingly like the letter y with some scribes using them interchangeably. Early printers even substituted y for þ, so the word ‘þe’ (the) ended up looking like ‘ye’. Eventually þ fell out of use, but people continued using ‘ye’ to abbreviate the word ‘the’ in print during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in handwriting until the nineteenth century. English speakers’ memory of the origin of ‘ye’ faded over time, until people began reading the word anew, pronouncing it wrong, and eventually creating the habit in English of saying ‘ye’ to sound old.

So if Old English is not ‘ye olde’ English, what is it and how far back must we go to find it? More than sixty years before the rebuilding of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, William Shakespeare wrote this monologue for his tragic hero Hamlet:

Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across,

Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face,

Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie i’ th’ throat

As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?

Hah, ’swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be

But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall

To make oppression bitter, or ere this

I should ’a’ fatted all the region kites

With this slave’s offal.

The phrasing and vocabulary are unfamiliar, but the English is not ‘Old’. Hamlet’s speech, written by Shakespeare around 1600, is in Early Modern English, the English used from the end of the Middle Ages in the late fifteenth century until the mid to late seventeenth century. The phrase ‘gives me the lie in the throat as deep as to the lungs’ sounds strange, although forcibly shoving unpleasant words down someone’s throat is a familiar concept. We still use the words ‘villain’ and ‘slave’, but they are no longer common insults, and it’s more likely you’ll hear ‘chicken-shit’ or even ‘lily-livered’ rather than ‘pigeon-livered’. People no longer curse with ‘’swounds’, short for ‘God’s wounds’ (although you may spot ‘zounds’ in a comic book), but in the sixteenth century using God’s name in vain like this was considered particularly foul-mouthed. Other Shakespearean oaths included ‘’slid’ (God’s lid, i.e. eyelid) and ‘God’s bodykins’ (God’s dear body), the origin of the mild, antiquated oath ‘odd’s bodkins’.

Hamlet’s monologue is unlike anything you’d hear in modern English today, but a fluent English speaker can probably get the gist of it. Much of the vocabulary can be found in a modern dictionary, even if some words are now used infrequently. Shakespeare employs unfamiliar syntax, or word order (‘who does me this’ rather than ‘who does this to me’), but overall the passage makes sense grammatically, even to us today.

Compared to Shakespeare’s Early Modern English, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is significantly more difficult to read:

Lordynges, herkneth, if yow leste.

Ye woot youre foreward, and I it yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. The Language You Thought You Knew
• 2. Eating and Drinking
• 3. Passing the Time
• 4. Learning and Working
• 5. Playing (and More Drinking)
• 6. Making Friends and Enemies
• 7. Caring for Body and Mind
• 8. The World Outside
• 9. Wildlife
• 10. Travel
• 11. Beyond Human
• 12. Searching for Meaning
• 13. Hoarding Words
• Þanc-word (thank-words)
• Sources
• Images
• A Note from the Author