English Language and Culture

The publication of the first fascicule of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English bears witness to the fulfilment of many vows made at symposia in the past. One of these was to abandon the practice of Bosworth—Toller of providing entries with etymological information. To meet trie objections raised against this policy at the second DOE conference in 1970, Christopher Ball assured the audience that entries would contain etymological information only if it would be impossible to establish the meaning of a word otherwise. ‘Frivolous’ etymology, as Ball termed it, such as linking OE fōt to Latin pedem, would be omitted. The editors of DOE will have been confirmed in their attitude by the fact that in those years Dr Alfred Bammesberger announced a plan for a new etymological dictionary for Old English. Since then, besides numerous articles, he has published a volume of Beiträge Zu einem etymologischen Wörterbuch des Altenglischen. In the preface to this book, Bammesberger stresses that the preparation of such a new dictionary is a project which will not be completed in the immediate future. So, for the time being, the comparist will have to make do with BT and Ferdinand Holthausen's etymological dictionary of Old English. This seems an appropriate time, therefore, to focus our attention on that component of Holthausen's dictionary which concerns the closest relative of English, (Old) Frisian: not least because Holthausen himself devoted so much attention to it.

In this article it is argued that Odin's discovery of the runes when hanging on the tree, as related in the Icelandic Hávamál, is not an indigenous attribute of that god. Nor should the attribution of the invention of letters to Mercury in the Old English  Prose Solomon and Saturn be linked to the Hávamál, as is generally done. Instead I demonstrate that Odin's invention is an adaptation of Roman Classical mythology in which the invention of letters is ascribed to Mercury. The Romans in their turn borrowed this myth from the Greeks, with Hermes Trismagistos playing that role, while the Greeks and borrowed it from the Egyptians, equating their god Thoth with Hermes.

The etymology of English ay(e) 'yes', a word that is recorded for the first time in the late 16th century, has remained unsolved, despite many efforts. It has not been noted yet that the word is already found in 15th-century Frisian. Therefore, 'ay(e) may well be a Frisian loanword in English.

“In a fascinating essay, Bremmer discusses Verstegen’s rather inventive portrayal of the pagan Germanic gods allegedly worshipped by the Anglo-Saxons. These include the seven gods whose names are preserved in the names for the days of the week – in Verstegen’s reconstruction, Sun, Moon, Tuisco, Woden, Thor, Friga, and Seater (!) – each depicted in a whimsical engraving of Verstegen’s own manufacture that depends heavily on the conventions of emblem literature. Bremmer argues persuasively that Verstegen’s primary motivation in producing this work was to promote the idea that the Anglo-Saxon ancestors of the Jacobean English were lost until converted to Roman Christianity by St. Augustine. When viewed in the light of contemporary English politics and Verstegen’s own Catholic leanings, the portrayal of the Germanic gods in Verstegen’s Restitution emerges as a thinly veiled but carefully calculated piece of Counter-Reformation propaganda.”
Anglia 121 (2003), 125.

Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr., includes an understudied chapter in the history of scholarship on the poem in his study of “The Frisians in 'Beowulf'—'Beowulf' in Frisia: The Vicissitudes of Time,” in _Medieval English Literary and Cultural Studies: SELIM_ 15, ed. Juan Comilo Conde Silvestre and María Nila Vásquez González (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia), 3–31. The author notes first that, while the main episodes of the poem are set in Scandinavia rather than Anglo-Saxon England, one West Germanic people, the Frisians, “play a considerable role in two of the epic’s sub-plots: the Finnsburg Episode and Hygelac’s raid on Frisia” (3). Bremmer attributes the poet’s interest in Frisians to their fame for wealth in gold, which resulted from their raising of cattle and control of trade between the Frankish empire and the north. The relative wealth of Frisia during the seventh and early eighth centuries supports an earlier dating of the poem’s composition to some time during this period. Bremmer rejects Walter Goffart’s hypothesis (1981) that the Beowulf poet learned of Hygelac’s attempt to acquire Frisian treasure for himself from the anonymous early eighth-century _Liber Historiae Francorum_, which is based upon Gregory of Tours’s Historia Fran- corum (late sixth-century) but includes further men- tion of the Hetware, a tribal group also alluded to by the Beowulf poet in lines 2363a and 2916a. Bremmer points out that there is still no evidence that the _Liber Historiae_ was known at all in Anglo-Saxon England and that its scant mention of Hygelac’s raid could hardly have inspired the significance attributed to it in the poem, where it is mentioned four times. In the second half of his essay, Bremmer details the interest by Dutch schol- ars in Old English during the late eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries, especially that of two Frisians, Albert ten Broecke Hoekstra (1765–1827) and Joost Halbertsma (1789–1869). This interest was primarily patriotic in inspiration, but Thorkelin’s first edition of Beowulf in 1815 gave it special impetus. Halbertsma contributed to Joseph Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1838) by supplying “many Frisian and Dutch cognates” and a chapter on “Friesic” (24). Halbertsma, by the way, was the first to recognize “that _Cædmon’s Hymn_ as it is found in the Old English translation of Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_, was not the original version, but a rather late one” and “that the original version must have been the Northumbrian one” (25). _Old English Newsletter_ 39.2 (2006) 103-04

Bremmer offers a much-needed reassessment of the career and biography of the famous outlaw. Asking “what national or ethnic sen- timents did the author [of the Gesta] entertain in his description of Hereward?” Bremmer concludes that he “consciously attempted to depict [Hereward] as a latter-day Anglo-Saxon but also that he eventually realized that in view of the new disposition such a characterization could not be maintained until the end of his narrative”. Bremmer situates the Gesta in relation to other later Anglo-Saxon texts concerned with cultural identity, including Ælfric’s Letter to Brother Edward and Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi, yet he notes that that the author also engages in rhetorical flourishes more typical of Classical epic than early English historiography. Ultimately, Bremmer argues, the political realities of post-Conquest England overtake any nostalgia for the Anglo-Saxon past, so that the narrative’s somewhat deflating conclusion—Hereward’s reconciliation with William—serves as a way of inviting the reader to accept the new, Anglo-Norman order: “Anglo-Saxon England is dead! Long live the new England!” (Old English Newsletter  42 (2009), 150)

"[This paper] takes us on a flight from Lindisfame to Scandinavia and the Low Countries. While slightly disappointing, since it reveals Reginald's limited knowledge of the names for different species of birds, it provides new lexicographical material not recorded in dictionaries." Year's Work in English Studies 71 (1993) 149.

Amongst its rich and varied collections, Leiden University Library keeps a small notebook, to be ordered by call number Vossius Latinus Octavo 100 (de Meyier: 188-190). It is bound in a charming English leather binding of the second half of the seventeenth century, the leaves are paper and its contents, two texts, were written down by no less a man than the great seventeenthcentury Anglo-Saxonist, Franciscus Junius 1. The second item does not really concern us here: it is a long poe~ with an equally long title, De la grandeur de Dieu, et de la cognoissance qu'on peult avoir de luy par ses oeuvres, written by Pierre Duval (bishop of Sees, 1545-1564) and copied by Junius in all likelihood from a printed edition. The poen1 was first printed in 1553, with early reprints in 1555 and 1557 (de Meyier: 190). What attracted my attention when I inspected the notebook for the first time was a meticulously written transcript of Defensor's Liber scintillarum. Preceding the actual text itself, Junius wrote a chapter index provided with page numbers for easy reference to the text that he had so neatly copied. Neither at the beginning of this transcript nor at the end did Junius reveal its source. However, in a note carefully stuck on to a front fly leaf (fol. lxv) and penned in a hand that betrays him to have become much older than when he copied Defensor's Liber into his notebook, Junius provided some further information. He wrote: Hie liber Seintillarum e quodam Vossianae bibliothecae codice membranaceo descriptus, evineit alibi quoque pIu res fuisse libros Scintillarum, praeter nobilem Scintillarium Anglosaxonice interlineatum, qui asservatur in Regia bibliotheca Londini, et e cujus fragmentis plurima quondam in usum nostrum excerpsimus.

Franciscus Junius (1591-1677) is rightly renowned for his work on Old English, but few people know that he was also well at home in Middle English and Middle Scots literature. Based on his Oxford notebooks and marginal annotations in books from his private library now kept in both the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Leiden University Library, I explore for what reasons and with what tools and method Junius read the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, as published in Thomas Speght's editions of 1598 (Bodleian) and 1602 (Leiden UL).

""In an important essay, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr. situates Junius’s study of Chaucer in the context of a long and robust scholarly career, concluding that “Junius, it would
seem, was as fully at home with Chaucer as he was, for example, with the Old
English poems contained in the Caedmon Manuscript.”" Megan L. Cook, _The Poet and the Antiquaries_ (Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 187

The topic and role of shame and honour in Ælfric’s Vitae has hardly been problematized. This lacuna in the scholarship is perhaps the more surprising in view of the fact that both concepts appear to play a prominent role, not only in many of Ælfric’s hagiographical narratives, but also in Anglo-Saxon hagiography in general.

"Bremmer argues that, contrary to previous work which detected a move in Anglo-Saxon society from a pre-conversion Germanic honour-shame culture to a Christian-based guilt one, there is ample evidence in late Old English saints’ lives for the survival of an honour-shame culture. Indeed, according to Bremmer, values of honour and shame abound in biblical and early hagiographical stories, and it is these notions of shame which are inverted by saints and worn as badges of honour in their martyrdom."

Year's Work in English Studies 2016

Anglo-Saxons were tied to the continent in many ways. Above all, Germania was their cradle: Bede tells a detailed story about their Germanic roots; to Boniface, these roots were an incentive for his missionary zeal; for the narrator of the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, a fact to be mentioned with awe. Artefacts betray the Germanic origin of the settlers who arrived in Britain from 400 onwards. By 600, the culture of the ruling elite shows a much wider horizon: the gifts that accompanied the ship burial at Sutton Hoo hail from as distant places as Byzantium and Egypt. The conversion drew the Anglo- Saxons into a cultural world in which the Mediterranean and Judaeo- Christian element was dominant but which afforded a legitimate place for the Germanic world from which the Anglo-Saxons originated and to which they remained tied not only linguistically. The seventh-century Franks Casket emits this identity in both image and word (see Chapter 3 above): visually, Weland the Smith flanks the adoration of the Magi, and Old English text in runic characters accompanies Latin text in roman script. The Anglo-Saxons so much belonged to the ‘old world’ that Beowulf, though written in England and in English, is set completely in the (north) Germanic world. This chapter, then, charts relations between continental Germanic cultures in and beyond the British Isles from Tacitus and Bede to such poems as Waldere, Widsith, Finnsburh, the Leiden Riddle, the Hildebrandslied, Heliand and Genesis, and examines the cultural and aesthetic work of texts such as these. The chapter also invites a meditation on the powerful cultural traffic between the Germanic world (Francia, Frisia, Saxony) and the English.

An edition with full codicological, literary, and linguistic introduction of a lengthy devotional and pastoral Middle English text on the five senses, uniquely surviving in London, British Library, Harley 2398. The dialect points towards Micheldean, Dean of Forest, Gloucestershire, as do the names of two 16th-century owners. What should we see, hear, feel, taste and smell, and equally important, what not? How can we see and taste God? The author is remarkably tolerant towards Lollards and the way they try to live according to the Gospel, yet unlike the Lollards he is orthodox (transubstantialist) in his view of the Eucharist. Don't spice up your meals, don't turn away from your foul-smelling fellow-Christian. Moderation and mortification of the flesh will make you feel the fruit of love that touches where the Holy Gost teaches and inspires.The text is fully annotated and provided with a comprehensive glossary.

This article not only offers a comprehensive survey of the terms with which Frisians insulted each other in late medieval urban Frisia but also analyses the where, when, who and why of acts of insult: preferably in public places, such as markets, churches (!), and taverns, where many people could be witness, insulters and insulted being both rich and poor, man and woman. Sometimes such insults adopted a ritual aspect when a group of people marched in procession to the house of the victim, beating on the door and front wall and/or pelting these with stones.