Tag Archives: Old English

Þ

Thorn survived for ages. That kind of longevity in a dead letter deserves a eulogy. Ye, though Thorn has walked through the valley of the shadow of death it has surely found its way to the great abecedarium in the sky where it may abide in that illustrious dead letter office alongside its companions UI, IO, and EA. Dearest Thorn made it a long time, longer than most, and had a great run, bless its heart. Nettlesome old bastard. Kept showing up to things year after year with its barbed jokes and pointed comments, though it was a giant among letters and always welcome. Thorn, though our days be restlessly marked by the unmet cruelty of your loss, we take great consolation in knowing you sleep amongst the roses.

Though thorn is dead to us as a letter, the Icelandic language still uses it, so it’s really only mostly dead. There’s … More

Stanza 2: Aurochs

byþ anmod.         and ofer hyrned.
fela frecne. deor         feohteþ. mid hornum.
mære morstapa.          is modig wuht
᛬᛫

It is singleminded and overhorned
Fiercely dangerous wild beast, fights with horns
Famous moor-stepper; that is a spirited being.

 

Stanza 28: Beaver

byþ ea fixa         and ðeah abruceþ.
fodres on foldan.         hafaþ fægerne eard.

wætre beworpen.         ðær he wynnum leofaþ ᛬᛫

It is a river fish, though it always enjoys
Foraging on land. 
It has a beautiful dwelling place
Thrown into water, there it joyfully lives.

 

Translating Ior

What is this thing Ior? Runes are riddles and this one is unsolved, but let’s try anyway.

The Rune Poem calls ior a river fish that forages on land. Amphibian. Eel fits well. Some say it is a newt or possibly a water mammal like an otter. Most translators choose eel because it was important in medieval Britain, it was food. I assumed eel for this reason for quite a long time. But this is no way to solve a riddle.

The name of this rune is Ior. There exists an Old English word for eel and it’s not ior, it’s ælfisc. Eel fish. They didn’t call this rune eel fish. They didn’t call it anything we can understand: ior is not a word in Old English, unless it means the letter IO or the rune ᛡ. We have to look under the surface if we want to find this river … More

Translating Ur

Ur, the aurochs, is a wild bovine, like a cow but not a normal cow. Dangerous. Think of the fiercest cows you know: the toro bravo they use for bull fighting, or the Jersey dairy bull which is particularly unpleasant. Gather them together, herd them up, the dangerous cows, and look at them. Imagine what they could do to you if they wanted to, and they want to. These angry cows are nothing; the aurochs was worse. The aurochs was all their daddies.

And wild. The cow is domesticated, the bison is not, so as a wild bovine the bison makes for a better comparison to the aurochs, personality-wise. Take a minute and search up some video of what happens when tourists tease bison. Go ahead, separate window, take a look. Did you see that? Don’t mess with a bison. Leave it alone. Take no selfie. The bison hates you.

The bison is a sweetheart … More

Moody Joy

The rune carvers prized beaver fur and skin, their teeth made a great necklace found sometimes in the graves of women and children and once around the neck of a dog, and by church decree beaver tails counted as fish you could eat during lent. Their castor glands were highly valued and their testicles (possibly still the castor glands but mistaken for testicles) cured disease. Because they were valuable for so many reasons, beavers were an overhunted and dwindling population during the time of the rune carvers.

The aurochs were already extinct in Britain by the time the runes were introduced, gone by the end of the bronze age. They still lived on the European continent, though rare, and they were important in Britain for the extremely high value of their horns. The people would carve them and inlay them with silver, and pass them down to their children as ealdgestreon, ancient treasure, which of … More

Rune Casting: Ior

Well look at that you got the Ior rune. Nice. Beaver, probably. Some say eel. Beaver is happier. When have you ever seen a cheerful eel?

You’re doing alright, I can see that. You’ve got a nice place here. Comfortable, I like it. I like your stuff. You’ll be happy at home, and close to it. Content. Peaceful. Here you can go with the flow, throw yourself right in with it and splash around.

Rune Casting: Ur

I hope you’re ready for a fight because you are about to be flattened so badly you’ll be famous for it. Something is howling in from the wilderness, sent to blow your life down and not in a subtle way. This will be a wolf in wolf’s clothing with a one track mind, eyes locked on you, and your sad little piggy house is made of nothing.

How to prevent? Don’t make eye contact and stay out of the wilderness.

IO: extinct Old English diphthong. Of the bajillions of possible sounds we can make with our voices, only a few are needed for language. We made this one redundant. Exiled. Fired its ass. It barely did anything around here. What’s it for? It’s absent from other Old English alphabet collections, the malingerer. It’s unwanted as far as we’re concerned. EO does everything IO can do, and does it better. We don’t need IO. What’s IO even doing here? Pack up your stuff IO and get out, you’re history.

But of course IO has to be difficult on its way out. Typical. Try carving this one into anything. You’ll need a precise hand and a sharp knife. A little finesse. This isn’t hammer and chisel like ᚢ. Make an X, now draw a line through it without slipping to one side or the other. Pass straight through that X’s meeting point, right down … More

Send air through your larynx without stopping it. Let it pass freely. Let it through, some things you just have to let go. That’s a vowel. Stop the air with your throat or mouth, it’s a consonant.

Don’t stop, this is about U. U and U alone. Place your tongue in the middle of your mouth, center it. Now pull in your lips on all sides. Pursed. Hold up now, Just a teeny purse, don’t let your lips stick out too far: you want to say the letter U, not detach yourself from reality. There you go, now let the air out. Excessively pursed lips tell facial recognition experts (trust me, there is such an expert) that you are saying something opposite to reality, the one in your head: you are speaking in opposition to your thinking. Maybe you don’t understand what you are saying, but you are saying it anyway. Maybe you are lying. … More

Stanza 29: The Grave

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.

 

Stanza 1: Wealth

ᚠ  byþ frofur.         fira gehwylcum.
Sceal ðeah manna gehwylc.         miclun hyt dælan.
gif he wile. for drihtne         domes hleotan
᛬᛫

It is a consolation to each one of us,
Though each of us must distribute it generously,
If we will before God, cast lots for judgement.

 

Translating Feoh

Feoh means cattle, which meant everything to the rune carvers. People kept sheep and pigs, but it’s the cows that were the money. Cattle are useful, they pull things, they’re delicious, you can make stuff out of their fat and their hides. Lots of stuff. Good stuff. Stuff people depend on and value. Stuff you must give away. You must. Yes this stanza says the people sceal spread it around, it sounds like shall, but the meaning is more of a must than that. You shall and you will and you had much better do it than don’t.

Do what?

Daelan. Deal it out. Give it away.

Why? That’s gif he wile. If you will.

You will. It’s a big mistake not to, the last line says so. What you do with your wealth you do in front of God and everybody, and fate has a way of paying attention to how you … More

Translating Ear

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

Byþ

Remember your future, what you thought it would be. Put yours in mind, it’s different for different people. You know that, obviously, but I’m not talking about individual people. I mean groups of people, peoples, whole societies of people past and present. They way we think about future and what the rune carvers thought about it is not the same. To find the difference, if you want to know the root and the soul of a culture’s sense of future, get right up close to one specific word, and take an embarrassing long look. Make you both blush. Be. That’s the word. To be. This is the word for reality, and the way this word is treated always reveals a culture’s idea of temporality, and so much more. Be means existence, which precedes essence so some philosophers say, that we are neither nature nor nurture, but something foundational to both. This is true for people … More

Octave

The rune carvers, the people who knew the Rune Poem by heart, probably sang it. There’s a lot of evidence for that, not to mention putting a story to music makes the retelling easier to remember. We can all sing along, others joining in where memory fails. Poetry has beats and rhythm and we sing ours too, but we don’t call it poetry when we do that. We have another word for that. Language takes all the music out of poetry. Language did not take language out of music.

Music has an alphabet of its own: the letters are notes. And these notes we arranged into groups of eight. Octaves. Take a note, think of a sound. It’s got a letter, but from such a short alphabet. Now hum it. Hum it steady, you sound terrible because you are not actually doing it out loud. Do it. There you go. Your note, that … More

Against every Evil Rune Poem

How are you feeling, you ok? You don’t look so good. You’ve been reckless haven’t you, got a bit too close and breathed in. I know what you’ve been doing. But hey, no worries, too late now, not to dwell, it happens, it’s all good, you’ll be fine. I’ve got the cure right here. Read it, it’s English. Look at the first line with the big letter Ƿ (wyn, looks like a P sounds like a W). It says against every evil rune poem and also to counter stuff an elf might have done, write the Greek letters Alpha and Omega plus a bunch of other things including my name looking all Romano British. It doesn’t say where. I think right onto your body. Makes the most sense, everything else is written there. Go on, you are safe in my hands. We need to get you better. Done? Show me.

Has it … More

Rune Casting: Feoh

Feoh means money, in the form of cattle. Think of a cow’s value: milk, meat, hide, tallow, vellum, pulling heavy stuff. That’s good money. Your stock picks will be bullish and your cow will fetch a good price. You have money coming your way. Or, you have debts or desires and will be paying money out. Be generous. Money flows and it’s going to flow through you more than normal. Whatever the direction, you just cast lots in front of something or somebody who has a whole different relationship with the future than you have, and might have some say in how what happens next goes down. You did that. Just now. Right in front of them.

 

 

Rune Casting: Ear

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.

Lips to teeth, expel air, use force. Ef. Efv. Old English has no V: an F between two vowels is a V. Efen. Even. Efern. eVern. Electronic Vern.

The first letter of several ancient languages means cow. The letter A upside down is a horned cow. Cows were a big deal. You want a cow. Cows are money. ᚠ is for money.

Carve a line straight down. Carve two more lines on the right side at a 45 degree angle up from the middle and midway to the top. A horned cow in profile.

 

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

Vern Tonkin

Spanish was my first language but I was a toddler when my family moved to the States, where my world became English only, that I grew up as an English speaker and thinker and struggled learning Spanish when I had the chance in college. I got a pity D- in my third year of Spanish because my Argentine professor couldn’t fathom how a girl from Peru could only grasp the basic language of a baby, and she just couldn’t bring herself to fail a South American as I deserved. In Spanish I can understand everything and say nothing much. I do know all the swear words. So.

In grad school, I needed one more year of Spanish to get a Ph.D., or I could learn Old English. I was there to study temporality, as much as a very generous and forward thinking English department would let me, and another South American, an Argentine I loveMore

O Yes, W.


byþ frofur.         fira gehwylcum.
Sceal ðeah manna gehwylc.         miclun hyt dælan.
gif he wile. for drihtne         domes hleotan
᛬᛫

It is a consolation to each one of us,
Though each of us must distribute it generously,
If we will before God, cast lots for judgement.

 


byþ anmod.         and ofer hyrned.
fela frecne. deor         feohteþ. mid hornum.
mære morstapa.          is modig wuht
᛬᛫

It is singleminded and overhorned
Fiercely dangerous wild beast, fights with horns
Famous moor-stepper; that is a spirited being.

 

Þ
byþ ðearle scearp.         ðegna gehwylcum.
anfengys yfyl         ungemetun reþe.
manna gehwylcun.         ðe him mid resteð
᛬᛫

It is severely sharp for all of the attendants
Laying hold of it is evil, with unmet cruelty
For anybody who rests with them.

 


byþ ordfruma.         ælcre spræce.
wisdomes wraþu.         and witena frofur.
and eorla gehwam.         eadnys and to hiht
᛬᛫

It is the source of every speech,
The support More