ᛠ byþ egle eorla gehwylcun.
ðonn fæstlice flæsc onginneþ.
hraw colian hrusan ceosan
blac to gebeddan bleda gedreosaþ.
wynna gewitaþ wera geswicaþ ᛬᛫
It is grievous for everybody
When quickly the flesh of the corpse
Begins to grow cold.
The pallid one chooses the earth as its consort
Fruits fall, pleasures depart, covenants are betrayed.
Old English uses very few words at a time, but in all the minimalism there’s a massive amount of meaning: often multiple meanings of the same word are intended, black is sometimes white, and frequently there’s a pun in there somewhere. To translate Old English we need to use more words than the original, and still it’s difficult to pack all that meaning back in. Translation fills graveyards of context and nuance, left behind to grow cold. What is lost by gaining? What do we kill dead? Alliteration and meter, the music makers of language. The beat, deceased, sounds abandoned. Look at this:
blac to gebeddan bleda gedreosaþ
Now say it:
black to yeh-bed-an blea-da yeh-dre-o-sath
There’s some sound in it, listen. Alliteration and beat. Three repetitions of B making a beat and there’s a pause in the middle: two parts sung as one statement. Or a call and response. Old English poetry has a … More
We die and we know it beforehand. We have a birth and we have a death, beginning to end: time is a line. We have patterns that change, the sun, the moon, the seasons, plants grow and then die and come back again: time is a circle. You. Look at yourself. Reading this, thinking stuff, remembering things, connecting thoughts, noticing surroundings, all in the changing now: time is phenomenal flux. You know this already like muscle memory because you experience it with your body: time is sensory perception. Death is a passage to another existence similar to this one except it goes on forever: time is endless duration. Something or someone or several someones made us and set us into a finite time line, but their world is eternal and non-linear: time is the distinction between creator and creature. There is no creator, eternality resides inside us, was never born and will never die: … More
Tell me your future. Tell me, what do you hope will happen before you’re dead? And what is it you are afraid of? Never mind. Doesn’t matter what. The future is not in the what, it’s in the hope and the fear that you hold now, in the present. Whatever it is coming to you, or coming for you, is happening now. In here. In your mind. There is no other future. Well, there is the one thing that is going to happen, Ear says it for sure. It’s coming to you and it’s coming for you. You’ve got it coming. You’ll choose the earth as your consort and sleep together forever. Everything is temporary, except that. That’s carved in stone.
EA. Diphthong: a compound vowel. This one is deceased, we don’t use it any more. What did EA sound like? Maybe like EO, maybe like AU, emphasis on the E or the A because all Old English diphthongs fall down dead in the end: you pronounce both letters but not equally, let the second one drop away to its death, thirty two feet per second per second.
Maybe EA sounds like the E in second. Maybe EA sounds like ÆA, like a hybrid of what A is doing in gnaw and in mad. More like gnaw, but it’s still pissed off. Or it was, EA is dead and gone now, some sounds die. They get eaten up, don’t be mad about it. What chewed EA away? Everything is temporary.
Carve a W and make it look like a fresh mound of earth in a valley. Dirt piled over a grave. Put it on a stick … More
