THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS

EPISODES 41 -45

Presented by Kevin W. Stroud

©2012-2020 Seven Springs Enterprises, LLC TABLE OF CONTENTS

Episode 41: New Words From Old English ...... 1

Episode 42: Beowulf and Other Viking Ancestors ...... 18

Episode 43: Anglo-Saxon Monsters and Mythology ...... 33

Episode 44: The Romance of Old French ...... 49

Episode 45: To Coin a Phrase – and Money ...... 67 EPISODE 41 - NEW WORDS FROM OLD ENGLISH

Welcome to the History of English Podcast - a podcast about the history of the English language. This is Episode 41: New Words From Old English. In this episode, we’re going to explore the how the Anglo-Saxons expanded their vocabulary by creating new words from old words. This included putting two or more existing words together to create new compound words. It also included the use of prefixes and suffixes – many of which survive into Modern English. And once we’ve explored this process, we’re going to see how this new expanded vocabulary combined with the expansion of learning to make Old English a true literary language – capable of producing sophisticated literature, including the most well-known work in Old English – Beowulf.

A quick note before we begin. This episode is about words – lots of words. In fact, this episode is probably more ‘word-heavy’ than any other episode. And that’s because I want to illustrate how the Anglo-Saxons were constantly creating new words within Old English. And all of those new words ultimately allowed English to emerge as a fully mature literary language.

It is important to keep in mind that the original Germanic language was a very basic ‘earthy’ language. By now, you will have probably noticed that Old English words tend to be short and simple. They are often single-syllable words, and they tend to express basic ideas and concepts. They’re the types of words that children learn very early on. Imagine trying to write a novel or an epic poem with the vocabulary of the average small child. You might be able to do it, but it would be a challenge. And that was the problem with earliest version of Old English. But over time, Old English added more and more new words. Some were borrowed, some were translations of foreign words, and many were new native words. As the vocabulary grew, English was better able to express subtly, nuance and emotion.

It’s difficult to say when English reached this critical mass. There probably wasn’t a specific point and time. It just became easier over time to compose more expressive poems and stories. But by the middle 700s, we can say with some certainty that English had achieved the threshhold of a great literary language because that was the period when Beowulf was likely composed. And Beowulf is still considered by many scholars to be the greatest surviving literary work in Old English.

So let’s look at the growth of the Old English vocabulary. And as we’ve seen over the past couple of episodes, English was growing during the 600s and 700s thanks to the influence of Latin. Sometimes those Latin words were translated into English by using older English words in new ways. And increasingly, those Latin words were beginning to be borrowed directly into English. But in addition to the influence of Latin, English was also enriching its vocabulary from within by creating new native words.

1 In earlier episodes, I’ve noted that the Anglo-Saxons loved to use compound words. This had always been a feature of Anglo-Saxon poetry because that type of poetry relied upon alliteration. And alliteration required poets to use words which began with certain sounds at specific places in each line of the poem.

So Old English poets routinely invented new compound words to make the alliteration work the way it was supposed to. And as we saw, they also relied upon certain stock phrases which allowed them fill in a blank space with a word which began with the right sound.

Well this process of creating compound words was not limited to poets. This was actually the traditional way of creating new words within the language. And this process of making new compound words is a legacy of Old English which survives into Modern English. We still do it all the time. When we encounter new technology, we often invent new compound words to describe it. Think about the vocabulary of the modern computer and internet age. English had to come up with new words to describe all of that new technology. So English speakers created words like chatroom, newsgroup, doubleclick, flash drive, flat screen, widescreen, laptop, smartphone, photobomb, website, webpage, homepage, username – and even the word podcast is a compound word from pieces of other words – iPod and broadcast. So English still makes new compound words all the time.

So let’s take a closer look at some of the oldest compound words in English.

Some of those words used by the earliest Anglo-Saxons have actually survived into modern English in basically their original form, and we still use them all the time. Words like sunbeam, earring, landmark, rainbow and butterfly all exist today virtually unchanged from the time of the Anglo-Saxons. Even the term ice cold – which is two separate words today – was once a compound word in Old English. It’s pronunciation and meaning have changed very little over the centuries.

Sometimes the compound nature of the word has been lost over time. In previous episodes, I have given the example of garlic. It was originally a compound word – gar meaning ‘spear’ and leac meaning ‘leek.’ So it was a spear-shaped leek. But over time, that original meaning has been lost, and we not longer recognize it as a compound word.

Another example of this is place names. A few of these place names have popped up in earlier episodes. England was originally a compound word – Engla-lond – Land of the Angles. Oxford was the ‘ox ford’ – the place where oxen crossed the river. Canterbury was a combination of Cant meaning ‘Kent,’ ware meaning ‘people,’and buruh meaning ‘walled or fortified town.’ So it was the fortified town of Kentish people.

Another Old English compound word which we still have in modern English is headache. It was originally heafod-ece. Another Old English word for ‘headache’ was heafod-weore which was literally ‘head-weary.’

2 In addition to headache, Old English also had the word heartache which was heort-ece. But the original meaning was much more literal. It was literally a pain in your heart or your chest. To express the idea of sadness or grief, the Anglo-Saxons used a similar word – heart-sarnes – which was literally ‘heart soreness.’ So there was a difference between having a ‘heartache’ and having ‘heart soreness,’ but you can see how the meaning of sadness shifted from one term to the other over time since they were so similar.

One other quick note about that word ache before we move on. In Old English, the word ache could be either a noun or a verb just like today. So you could have an ache in your head (a noun) or your head could ache (a verb). But the pronunciation was slightly different in each case. The verb form was /ock/ – pronounced today as /ake/. So your head might /ock/ – or ‘ache’ – if you had a hangover after drinking too much mead.

But the noun form was /ah-che/. So if we shift the sound of that vowel to our modern vowel sound, it would be /ay-che/ for the noun. So you would have an /ay-che/ in your head. But your head would /ake/. And that may seem a little strange, but it really isn’t. Think about words like speak and speech. And stink and stench. So the verb forms are /ake/, speak and stink – all with the ‘K’ sound at the end. And the noun forms are /ay-che/, speech and stench – all with that ‘CH’ sound at the end. So these were common constructions in Old English. But whereas, modern English has retained words like speak and speech – and stink and stench, it didn’t retain both /ake/ and /ay-che/. But interestingly, it retained the pronunciation of one and the spelling of the other.

Notice the spelling of the word ache – A-C-H-E. So English retained the verb form – /ake/ – for pronunciation. But it retained the spelling of the noun form – /ay-che/. So this is one more example of why Modern English spellings are so complicated. Sometimes speakers used one version and scribes used the other, and after that, the two versions no longer matched phonetically.

Another Old English compound word which survives in British English, but is rarely found American English, is fortnight. In America, we generally hear the term used in conjunction with British events – like the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. But otherwise, it doesn’t really exist in American English. The term fortnight is literally ‘fourteen nights’ – or ‘two weeks.’ The Old English word was feowertyne-niht – ‘fourteen night’. But over the years, the word was shortened and abbreviated to simply fortnight.

So you may be wondering why it was called ‘fourteen nights’ and not ‘fourteen days.’ Well, this was actually derived from the original Germanic tribes who tended to count by nights. This was actually mentioned by Tacitus in Germania. And the Anglo-Saxons inherited that tradition. And they not only had a word for ‘fourteen nights’ meaning ‘two weeks’ – they also had a word for ‘seven nights’ meaning ‘one week.’ That word seofon niht – literally ‘seven nights.’ It was shortened to sennight in Middle English, but it eventually disappeared, whereas fortnight was retained.

3 Another example of this process is the word daisy – as in the flower. It also started out as an Old English compound word, but over time it got shortened and the compound nature of the word was lost. It was originally dæges eage which was ‘day’s eye.’ It was called a ‘day’s eye’ because the petals opened at dawn and closed at dusk. And over time, ‘days eye’ became daisy.

And speaking of dawn and dusk, the word dawn was originally a compound word in Old English. It was dæg-red which was literally ‘day red,’ perhaps a reference to the morning sun.

Another Old English word for ‘dawn’ was ær-dæg which was literally ‘early day.’

Both of these words were later replaced by the Norse word dawn after the Vikings arrived. The word dawn was a variation of the word day, so day and dawn are actually cognate.

Now a few episodes back I discussed Anglo-Saxon marriage terms, and I noted that the word bridal was originally a compound word – bride ale which was the ‘bride celebration’ or the wedding reception. And as you may recall, an ale was a feast or celebration derived from the word ale as beer or malted beverage, presumably because a lot of beer was consumed at those feasts.

Well, ale was sometimes consumed at a specific place, sort of like an early bar or pub. And the word for that place survives to this day. It was called an ealo-hus – an ‘ale house.’ And even today, the term ‘ale house’ is still a popular term for bars. And if you’re familiar with Beowulf, you know another name for this type of place – the medu heall – the ‘mead hall.’

And when you drink a lot of ale at the ale house or mead hall, you might get drunk. And drunk is also an Anglo-Saxon word. And the Anglo-Saxons created a couple of other compound words to describe that condition. If you were drunk on wine, you were win-druncen – wine drunk. And if you were drunk on beer, you were beore-druncen – beer drunk.

Now beginning with the late Anglo-Saxons, an English official was assigned to travel around and test the ale to make sure it up to par. He would travel to ale-houses and order a pint and sample it. Depending upon the quality of the brew, he could actually dictate the price that could be charged for the ale. But how did he evaluate the quality of the drink? Well, believe it or not, he would pour it on his bench and sit in it for 30 minutes. When he stood up, if the ale stuck to his pants, the ale-house could be fined for serving poor quality ale which was too sweet or had illegal additives. This official was called an ale-connor. Connor was an Old English word which meant examiner or inspector. And it’s also the root of the modern surname Conner.

Now I noted that ale or mead was also consumed in the ‘mead hall.’ Hall was an Anglo-Saxon word, but another word for ‘hall’ was stig (/stee/). It was the same word used for an animal pen as in pig stig – or ‘pig sty’ using the modern pronunciation. But as I said, stig could also describe a ‘hall’ or ‘meeting place.’ The person who was in charge of the stee was the stee guardian or the stee ward. And stee ward ultimately became steward (S-T-E-W-A-R-D) in Modern English. So steward was originally a compound word. And by the way, steward is

4 also the root of the modern surname Stuart which will become a very important surname in later English royal history.

Believe it or not, some incredibly common English words like none, never and nothing were all originally compound words. None was ‘not one’ – originally pronounced ‘ne an.’ Over time the two syllable ‘ne an’ became the single syllable nan – and later none.

Never was originally ‘not ever’ pronounced ‘ne æfre’ (/nay av-re/). And again, it was such a common expression that it eventually evolved into a single word – never.

And nothing was originally a combination of none and thing. It was pronounced ‘nan þing’ in Old English. And later it evolved into modern nothing.

Another area where a lot of those original compound words survive into modern English is maritime activity. As we’ve seen before, the Anglo-Saxon culture was originally a maritime culture, and a lot of Old English words related to ships and shipping are still found in the language today. And since the Anglo-Saxons occasionally had to come up with new maritime words, they often used compound words.

In earlier episodes, we saw how Old English poets created numerous compound words for the sea and for ships. So a boat was sometimes called sea wood, or a wave-courser, or a curved stem. And the sea was sometimes called the whale road or the water’s back. These were mainly poetic compounds which are sometimes called ‘kennings.’ And in some cases, these compounds were so commonly used as stock phrases that they began to filter into general usage beyond poems. And many of those compounds are still used today.

Words like seawall and ship rope were commonly-used words in Old English.

A stormy sea was storm-sæ – literally ‘storm sea.’ The open sea was wid-sæ – literally ‘wide sea.’

We also know that the Anglo-Saxons used the word mere for ‘sea’ as in mermaid. Well if you were tired of being at sea, you were mere-werig – literally ‘sea weary.’

If you were ‘sea weary,’ you might prefer to be a landlubber – another Old English compound word which survives into Modern English. Landlubber is another one of those words which has acquired a different meaning over time. The word originally meant a vagabond or homeless person. The etymology of landlubber is directly related to the word lope meaning ‘run’ in Old English. We actually saw that word a few episodes back in the context of marriage terms. You might remember that lop is cognate with leap, and it ultimately gives us the word elope – meaning ‘to run away to get married.’

5 Well a person who runs around on land was a land-loper – ‘a land runner.’ It was originally used to describe a person without a fixed home who travels around from place to place. So it was basically a vagabond or hobo. But as the word lop gradually disappeared from English, the original meaning of the word was lost. That word loper gradually evolved into lubber. And over time, the word began to sound like ‘land lover.’ So the word began to acquire a new meaning. And it started to mean a person who loves land, as opposed to the sea.

In Old English, a ‘shipwreck’ was a scipge-broc – a ‘ship break.’

A person who worked on a ship was sea man. And that word still exists as seaman.

Another word for seaman was a shipwright which was literally a ‘ship worker.’ The word wright meant ‘worker.’ It was also used by the Anglo-Saxons to create a word for a jeweler. A jeweler was a gimm-wyrhta – a gem worker. And it was used to describe a wagon builder. The original verison of wagon was wain, so a ‘wagon worker’ was a wainwright. That term no longer exists, except as a family surname. However, thanks to Middle English, we do still have the word playwright which is literally a ‘play-worker.’

Today, the word flood means an overflow of water, but the original version of the word in Old English had a slightly different meaning. It was a more general term for a body of water – either the sea, or a lake, or a river. So the Old English word for ‘deep water’ was heah-flod – literally ‘high flood,’ but it meant ‘high water.’

The Anglo-Saxons also had the compound word heah-tid which was ‘high tide,’ but it didn’t mean ‘high tide’ in the sense that the phrase is used today. It was actually a term for a festival or prominent day. In Old English, the word tid – or tide – didn’t refer to the change in the ocean level. It was a actually a term which meant ‘time.’ In fact tide and time are cognate. And we still have that original usage in some words. For example, yuletide actually means ‘yule time.’

So the compound word high tide actually meant ‘high time,’ sort of like in Modern English when we say “It was high time you got here.” So it actually meant a prominent time of the day or of the year, and it was usually used in reference to a celebration or a festival. And we actually still have the phrase “A high time was had by all” which is basically the same usage. But again, in Old English it was high tide. So we might have said ‘A high tide was had by all.’ So ‘high tide’ didn’t have anything to do with the sea level.

All of that changed in Middle English. During that later period, people would speak of the ‘tide’ or ‘time’ when the sea level was at its highest. And the ‘tide’ or ‘time’ when it was at its lowest. And it was through this usage that the phrases high tide and low tide came into being - again originally meaning ‘high time’ and ‘low time.’

By the way the sense of the word tide as ‘time’ led to the word tidy as well. It originally meant ‘timely’ – or ‘punctual.’ Basically having everything in order at the right time. But now it just means having everything in order, so it means neat or organized.

6 If you were a seaman or a sailor, you had to be careful or you might fall ‘overboard’ – another Old English compound word which has changed very little over the past thousand years or so.

Just like it Modern English, the word board had two meanings. It could refer to a wood plank, or it could refer to the side of a ship as in the word overboard. And since ships were made from wood, it is very tempting to assume that board – meaning a piece of wood – led to the word board meaning the side of the ship. And while that is possible, not everyone agrees with that etymology.

The word board was important in another Old English compound word as well – the word starboard meaning the right side of the ship. The original compound word was actually steorbord which was literally ‘steer-board’ – the board used for steering. Early ships were steered with a large oar or rudder which was actually called the steer. So steer was also a noun in Old English. The rudder or steer was typically located on the right side of the ship. So that became the ‘steer board’ which meant the ‘rudder side.’ So contrary to what a lot of people assume, the word starboard doesn’t actually have anything to do with the stars. Over time, the pronunciation of the word just evolved and changed from ‘steer board’ to ‘star board.’

Since the steering mechanism of the ship was usually located on the right side, it meant that ships had to dock on the left side. So they were loaded and unloaded at port on the left side. This side came to be known as the laddeborde in Middle English, which was literally the ‘loading side’. The term later became larboard, but it was apparently confused with starboard. And if you were trying to maneuver a ship in a severe storm, you didn’t want the sailors to be confused between starboard and larboard. So larboard was soon dropped in favor of another term. Since the larboard or ‘loading side’ was the side where the port was, it came to be known as the port side. And that resolved the confusion with the similar names. So today we have the ‘port side’ and the ‘starboard side.’ But starboard is an Old English compound word which still exists in Modern English.

Now the port side of the ship was literally the port side – the side where people and goods were loaded and unloaded. Well, in order to move people and goods onto and off of the ship, a portable ramp was placed between the ship and the pier. This ramp or passage was called the gangweg on Old English. And it became known as the gangway. And it’s still sometimes used as the interjection – like “Gangway!” to mean ‘Get out of the way, I’m coming through.’

Another Old English compound word related to maritime activity was sund-gyrd which was literally ‘sound gird.’ The word sound in Old English was a verb used to describe the process of determining the depth of the sea. And it was probably from the use of the word sound as a channel of water. And the word gyrd came from the same root as yard and garden. Specifically, it meant to encircle or surround something. So a sund-gyrd was a sounding pole or line to determine the sea depth of the water around a ship. Even though that compound word no longer exists in English, each of its two root words are still found in English. We still use the phrase ‘to sound out’ to mean the process of discerning or determining something. And sometimes we use a

7 ‘sounding board’ to mean a group which discerns or evaluates ideas. Both of these uses of the word ‘sound’ come from the sense of trying to determine the depth of the water around a ship.

The word gyrd also still exists. Remember it originally meant ‘to encircle or surround.’ From that original use, it came to describe something that encircles a persons waist. And it gave us the words girth and girdle – originally meaning a belt or sash worn around the waist. This led to the sense of the word gird to mean something that provides support. And from there, it gave us the word girder meaning a support beam.

So we’ve seen a lot of compound words which still exist in some form in Modern English. But of course, there were a lot of compound words which haven’t survived. And those are kind of fun to look to at because it shows how the Anglo-Saxons used existing words to create new words.

So for example, a crime was a ‘high sin’ (heahsynn). And a lamp was a ‘light vessel.’ (leoht-fæt)

I mentioned in the last episode that the word purple came into English from Latin. But the Anglo-Saxons also had a native English word for the color. Purple dye was derived from shellfish mainly in the Mediterranean. The early Phoenicians was specialists at producing the dye, and in fact Phoenica meant ‘land of the purple.’ The Anglo-Saxons must have had some knowledge of how purple dye was obtained, because they originally called the color purple ‘fish dye’ (fisc- daeg). The word purple actually appeared for the first time in the Lindisfarne Gospels. And it quickly replaced ‘fish dye’ was the name for the color.

In Old English, a distant relative was a feor-sibb – a far sibling.

Someone who was cheerful was glæd-mod (/glad-mode/) which was ‘glad mood.’ Some who was arrogant was ofer-modig (/over-mode-y/) – literally ‘over moody.’ Something that was precious was deor-wurþe which was literally ‘dear worth.’ Something that was desireable was lust-bære (/loost bæ-re/) – ‘lust bearing.’

So you can see how English was becoming more expressive as a language. All of those compound words were providing a subtlety of expression which hadn’t existed before.

Something that was ‘very high’ was ‘high steep.’ (heah-steap)

We’ve seem before that the word for ‘creation’ was frumsceaft – literally ‘from shaping’ or ‘origin shaping.’ Another word used for ‘creation’ was frum-weorc – literally ‘from work’ or ‘beginning work.’

The basic law of the people – what we call ‘common law’ today – was called the ‘folk right’ (folc- riht) or ‘folk law’ (folc-lagu).

We’ve seen before that property was called feoh in Old English. Well, household goods were called innefeoh – ‘inside property.’

8 A ‘stranger’ was a ni-fara – a ‘new farer’ which used the same construction as seafarer and wayfarer.

The word galon meant ‘to sing’ in Old English. Remember that the ‘G’ sound shifted to a ‘Y’ sound in a lot of Old English words – especially before the front vowels I and E. So galon has a related word giellan which ultimately produced the word yell in Modern English. But galon retained its original ‘G’ sound since the initial G in that word came before a front vowel - A. So galon became gale. And a bird which sang at night was a ‘night gale’ – or a nightingale today.

A gale or song could be enchanting and could send someone into a trance-like state. So an Old English word for ‘magic’ was galdor-cræft – or ‘singing craft.’

Another similar word for magic which still exists is the word wicce-cræft – literally ‘witchcraft.’ I noted in an earlier episode that the Anglo-Saxons sometimes called a spider a ganglewavre – a ‘going weaver.’ They also used the word spiðra which is the original version of our word spider. The word spiðra meant ‘the spinner,’ and it is actually cognate with the word spin.

But the most common word for a spider in Old English was another compound word – atter- coppe – literally ‘poison head.’ In Old English, ator meant ‘poison or venom,’ and copp meant ‘top, summit or round head.’ So apparently the Anglo-Saxons thought all spiders were poisonous. And some people today still share that opinion. At some point though, atter-coppe was shortened to simply coppe. And the web which was spun by a spider or coppe was a cop-web – or cobweb today.

The word cucumber came in after the Normans from French. But the Anglo-Saxons already had that vegetable. They called it eorþ-æppla – literally ‘earth-apples.’

And as you might imagine, the Anglo-Saxons had lots or words for warriors and fighters. Berend meant ‘bearer.’ So a warrior was sometimes called a gar-berend – a ‘spear bearer.’ Or a helm- berend – a ‘helmet bearer.’

I’ve also noted before that ‘sword-play’ was an Old English compound word. It meant a battle or fight. They also sometimes used phrases which translate as ‘weapon exchange’ (wæpnge-wrixl) and ‘death-spear exchange’ (wæl-gara wrixl). They has had a term for an argument which translated as ‘word exchange’ (wordum wrixlan). This phrase was used in Beowulf, – and it still exists in Modern English as the phrase an ‘exchange of words.’

And the Anglo-Saxons had several words for a sword. The word sword was an Anglo-Saxon word – sweord. But they had another term which is really interesting if you are a Star Wars fan. They sometimes called a sword – a beado-leoma – literally a ‘battle light.’ Which is really not that far from a ‘light saber.’

So by now, you can see how the Anglo-Saxons were very adept at creating new words by combining existing words.

9 A slightly different aspect of this process was the use of prefixes and suffixes. So instead of combining two or more independent or stand-alone words, they sometimes added a standard prefix or suffix to an existing word to create a new word. And we still do that today. In fact, we still use many of the same prefixes and suffixes which were used by the Anglo-Saxons.

The prefix ‘a’ (/ah/) or /ay/ was used in both Old English and Latin. The Latin version meant ‘not’ or ‘away from.’ But the Old English version meant ‘on,’ and it produced words like alive, asleep and afoot.

After was a common Old English prefix. The period after noon became afternoon. In an earlier episode we saw that the month after Yule – so basically our modern January – was AfterYule. And the Latin word epilogue was translated as afterword.

The prefix ‘be-’ produced words like before, behead and become.

The prefix ‘for-’ produced words like forget, forgo, forbid, and forgive.

The prefix ‘forth-’ produced words like forðcuman – which we know today as forthcoming.

The prefix ‘in-’ produced word like income which was originally a literal compound. It meant to come in or arrive, but it later came to mean ‘incoming money.’ And that is the sense of the word today.

The prefix ‘mis-’ produced words like misdeed meaning a ‘bad deed’ or ‘sin.’ It also produced the verb misdo meaning ‘to do something incorrectly’ or ‘to do something evil.’ Mislike was ‘to do something offensive or displeasing.’ To misthink something was ‘to be mistaken.’ To mistime something was ‘to fail to time something properly,’ and that’s a construction which we still use.

The prefix ‘over-’ produced words like overall, overcome, overdo, and override.

The prefix ‘to-’ produced words like together, today and tonight. It also produced the word tomorrow meaning ‘to the morrow’ or ‘to the morning.’

The prefix ‘through-’ (thurh) produced the word throughout.

The incredibly common prefix ‘un-’ meaning ‘not’ was also an Old English prefix. It produced Old English words like unbind, unborn, unclean, uncouth, undo, uneven, unfair and many, many others.

The prefix ‘under-’ produced words like undergo, underlie, underneath and understand. It was also used to translate the Latin word subscribe meaning ‘to write at the bottom of something.’ Subscribe was translated as underwrite.

10 In a similar manner, the prefix ‘up-’ produced words like upright and upon which was literally ‘up on.’

The prefix ‘out-’ produced words like outward and outlaw – someone outside of the law. And outlandish which was originally a reference to an outlander – in other words a ‘foreigner.’ Foreigners sometimes had odd customs, and they behaved strangely. And outlandish came to refer to strange or bizarre behavior.

The prefix ‘with-’ produced words like within, without and withstand in Old English.

In addition to many common prefixes which still survive, the Anglo-Saxons also used a lot of common suffixes to create new words. Many of those suffixes have continued into Modern English, and in fact are even more common today than they were during the Old English period.

To create adjectives, they used a suffix like ‘-sum’ which can be found in Old English words like lovesome and winsome. And of course, we find that suffix in lots of words today.

Another common adjective suffix was ‘-wis’ – pronounced ‘wise’ today. The Anglo-Saxons used it in the word otherwise. They also combined the word right with that suffix, and they produced the word rihtwis – ‘right-wise.’ But over time the form of the word changed. It eventually became righteous.

The suffix ‘-ful’ was also used by the Anglo-Saxons. They used it to create words like handful and wonderful.

The suffix ‘-leas’ is the origin of our modern-day ‘less.’ The Anglo-Saxons used it in words like careless, endless, headless and lifeless.

And two of our most common adjective suffixes also originated during this early period. ‘-ish’ was used a suffix in childish, manish and the word outlandish which I gave earlier. It was also commonly used as a place of origin. Words like English, British, and Danish we’re all created during the Anglo-Saxon period.

The suffix /ee/ – spelled with a ‘Y’ also originated with the Anglo-Saxons. But it was originally spelled ‘I-G.’ As we know by now, that ‘G’ sound shifted to a ‘Y’ sound in a lot of words - and this was another situation where that occurred. So even though the spelling was ‘I-G,’ – the pronunciation shifted from /eeg/ to simply /ee/. That suffix was used in words like bloody, speedy, crafty, mighty and greedy.

Another common Old English suffix was ‘-like,’ originally spelled either ‘L-I-C’ (pronounced /leek/) or sometimes spelled ‘L-I-C-E’ (pronounced /lee-che/). It survives in the suffix ‘-like’ in words like childlike or ladylike.

11 But that suffix evolved into another form which is much more common in Modern English. The final consonant – /k/ or /ch/ – disappeared over time. So /leek/ or /lee-che/ simply became /lee/ during Middle English. And that suffix became our very common adjective and adverb suffix ‘L- Y.’ So a word like friendly was originally freondlic – ‘friend-like.’ Deadly was deadlic – ‘dead-like.’

The word fatherly was fæderlic – ‘father-like.’ But eventually all of those final consonants disappeared, and we were left with just /lee/ – friendly, deadly, fatherly.

As a general rule, the ending ‘-lic’ – L-I-C – was used for adjectives. And the suffix ‘-lice’ – L-I- C-E – was used for adverbs. So lets look at a few of those early adverbs.

So the adverb carefully was carful-lice – ‘careful-like.’ The adverb dearly was deorlice – ‘dear- like.’ Evenly was efenlice – ‘even-like.’ But again, the final consonant /ch/ eventually disappeared. And today we just have that common adverb suffix /lee/ – spelled L-Y.

The Anglo-Saxons also used a lot of noun suffixes. In an earlier episode, I noted that the word dom meant law or judgment in Old English. And that word was used as a suffix, and gave us our modern suffix D-O-M. So the realm of the king’s judgment was the kingdom. And it was applied by extension to words like earldom, freedom, and wisdom.

The suffix ‘-had’ is the origin of our modern suffix ‘-hood.’ It produced words like childhood, knighthood and priesthood in Old English.

The suffix ‘-ere’ was a suffix to indicate agency, and it was the original version of our modern ‘E- R’ ending. It survives in words like worker, baker and speaker. The related feminine suffix ‘- estre’ was also used. It created a word like songster in Old English which meant a ‘female singer.’ In early Middle English, it created the word spinster. But it eventually lost its original sense as a feminine suffix. And today it is used for words like gangster, teamster, youngster and pollster which are all gender neutral.

The suffix ‘-nes’ was used to create Old English nouns like greatness, fairness, thickness and sickness.

The suffix ‘-ship’ created words like friendship, kingship and lordship. It meant ‘quality or condition.’ So friendship was the condition of being friends. And kingship was the condition of being the king. The condition or quality of land was landscipe – ‘landship.’ But around the year 1600, English borrowed the Dutch version of the same word. Remember that the ‘SH’ sound had evolved in English out of the original Germanic ‘SK’ sound. So when English borrowed the Dutch version of landship, it came in with its original ‘SK’ sound, and it came in as landscape which is the version which we still use today.

Another common Old English suffix was ‘-kin’ – pronounced ‘cynn’ in Old English. This was literally the word kin meaning a relative. It had produced the word cyning meaning leader of the

12 family, and cyning eventually became our modern word king. But that word kin – or cynn – was also used as a suffix. The word anglecynn was a term which preceded the word English. It meant the ‘Angle-kin’ – or ‘Angle-kindred.’ But at the end of words, kin or cynn became kind – and we still see it in words like mankind and humankind. So in its literal sense, mankind is the ‘man-kindred’ – the ‘kindred of people.’

Another suffix which the Anglo-Saxons used was mæl. It meant ‘measurement, fixed time or occasion’. And it’s one of those suffixes which largely disappeared over time. In its sense as measurement, the word mæl is actually cognate with the words measure and meter from Latin thanks to common Indo-European roots. The plural version of mæl was mælum. And when it was combined with a specific unit of measurement, it became an adverb used in the sense of ‘item-by-item’ or one at a time.

So the Old English word dropmælum was literally ‘drop-measurements,’ but it meant drop-by- drop. And fotmælum was literally ‘foot-measurements,’ but it meant foot-by-foot. And gearmælum meant ‘year-by-year.’ So as you can probably discern, this particular suffix died out over the centuries, except in one word – the word piecemeal.

During early Middle English, people in England still remembered that old construction using mælum at the end of a word. And thanks to the Normans, they now had the French word piece. So in order to express the idea of ‘piece-by-piece,’ they went back and used that Old English suffix, and they created the word piece-mælum which survives today as piecemeal.

Knowledge of this suffix must have survived for a long time after people stopped using it because Shakespeare used it in the early Modern English period. He used the phrase ‘to tear her limbmeal’ to mean ‘tear her limb-from-limb.’

So as you can see, the Anglo-Saxons were creating lots of new words to add to their vocabulary. Those original Germanic single-syllable words were growing and becoming much more expressive. Words were being combined. Prefixes and suffixes were being added. And all of this was happening at the same that Latin words were starting to come into English in large numbers. English was slowly emerging as a literary language.

And the final step in this process was a development which we’ve explored over the past few episodes. You can’t have a great literary language without literacy. So the growth of formal education and literacy within Britain was that last fundamental step on the way to English becoming a great literary language.

With the rise of education, the Anglo-Saxons had to come up with new words to express many of those new ideas. A library or a place where books were kept was the boc-hord (‘book hoard’). A school was a lar-hus (a ‘lore house’ – or learning house). Education brought new concepts. The word geometry eventually found its way into English, but it was originally eorþ-cræft (‘Earth craft’).

13 Medicine was also improved thanks to education and learning. A doctor in Old English was a læce – one who speaks magic words to bring about a cure. In fact, læce is cognate with the Latin word lecture thanks to common Indo-European roots. So in Old English, medicine was originally læcedom (leechdom) or læcecræft (leechcraft).

Epilepsy was the fielle-seocnes (‘falling sickness’). Gout was the fot-adl (foot-disease). The body was the flæschama (‘flesh home’) or the sawol-hus (‘soul house’). The eye was the heafod- gim (the ‘head gem’).

So just as new technologies created the need for new words, so did the burgeoning education system. And English proved to be very adept at creating new words related to education.

So I want to digress here for moment and look at the origin of a few English words associated with learning. And let’s start with the word learn.

If you’ve ever sat through a boring lecture staring at the clock counting the minutes as they go by, then you might not be surprised to learn that the word learn and the word last (as ‘to endure’) are both cognate. They both come from common Indo-European roots. The original Indo-European word was something like leis, and it meant ‘footprints or track.’ So if you were tracking an animal, you had to ‘stay on track’ to learn its whereabouts. Similarly, if you were following someone else’s lead, you also had to ‘stay on track’ and ‘follow in their footsteps.’ So this process became associated with learning or acquiring knowledge. To learn you had to ‘follow a track or path’. So this process of acquiring knowledge became læran in Old English. And what you actually learned – the noun – was called lar which is the original version of the word lore. I noted earlier that a school was called a lar-hus in Old English which was a ‘lore house.’ And we still have the word lore in a compound word like folklore which is literally the ‘folk’s learning’ or the ‘people’s learning.’

So learning was the equivalent of following the teacher’s lead. And that meant that you had to be persistent. You had to ‘stay on tract.’ And this produced the word Old English word læstan which meant to ‘last or endure.’ So ultimately, learn and last came from the same source.

By the way, the sense of last as a ‘final position’ actually comes from a completely separate Old English word.

Now the Latin version of the same Indo-European root word leis was lira, and in Latin it retained more of its original Indo-European meaning. It meant ‘furrow or track’. But sometimes you might deviate from the track. To describe that kind of deviation, the Romans combined the prefix ‘de’ meaning ‘away from’ with that word lira meaning ‘path. So delira meant a deviation from the normal path. And that word came into English as delirious and delirium. So if you’re taking a class about folklore, and you’re trying to learn, and you think you’re becoming delirious because you can’t last to the end of class, you can at least rest assured that all of those key words are cognate. They all come from the Indo-European word for ‘footprints.’

14 Of course, footprints is another compound word. But it’s not an Old English compound word because print is a French word which came in with the Normans. Footstep is actually composed of native Old English words – foot and step. But the first written evidence of footstep is from the early 1200s in the early Middle English period. So while it may have been an Old English compound, there’s no surviving written evidence of it during that period.

In Old English, footprints was rendered as fotswæð which was literally ‘foot swath.’ But the Beowulf poet used another compound word for footprints. And that poet harkened back to the original Germanic word which gave rise to words like learn and last. He called footprints – fot- last (‘foot last’). So it a sense, footprints were foot-learning.

The Beowulf poets uses the word ‘foot last’ after introducing the dragon in the last portion of the poem. The dragon is guarding gold and other valuables in his lair, but a thief awakens the ire of the dragon when he breaks in and steals some of the valuables. The dragon discovers the trespass by observing the thief’s footprints – or foot last.

And here’s the actual passage from Beowulf – lines 2287-2290

First, here’s a modern translation:

Then the dragon awakened his anger was renewed sniffing along the stones the dragon discovered the enemies footprints the thief had stepped secretly and craftily near the dragon’s head

And here’s the original version in Old English:

Þa se wyrm onwoc, wroht wæs geniwad; stonc ða æfter stane, stearcheort onfand feondes fotlast; he to forð gestop dyrnan cræfte dracan heafde neah.

So let’s break that down into each half-line and see if we can do a literal translation. The first half- line is “Þa se wyrm onwoc” – ‘then the worm awoke’ or ‘then the dragon awakened.’

The second half-line is “wroht wæs geniwad” – ‘wrath was renewed’ or ‘his anger was renewed.’

“stonc ða æfter stane” – ‘stunk then after stone’ but it really meant ‘sniffing along the stones.’

“stearcheort” – ‘stark-heart’ which was really a euphemism for the dragon. “onfand” – which meant ‘found out.’ So “stearcheort onfand” was ‘the stark-heart found out’ or ‘the dragon discovered.’

15 The next half-line is “feondes fotlast” – ‘fiend’s footprints’ or ‘the enemy’s footprints.’

“he to forð gestop” – ‘he too forth stepped’ – ‘the thief had stepped.’

“dyrnan cræfte” – dyrnan was an Old English word that meant ‘secretly.’ So dyrnan is ‘secretly’ and cræfte is ‘craftily.’ So ‘secretly and craftily.’

And the last half-line is “dracan heafde neah” – ‘dragon’s head near’ or ‘near the dragon’s head.’

I wanted to read that passage to you for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted you to see how the Beowulf poet used the phrase ‘foot last’ for footprints. But I also wanted to illustrate how English had become a literary language by the end of the eighth century – by the time many scholars think Beowulf was composed.

The poet was capable of combining and shaping words in a very sophisticated way. Not only does the passage satisfy the required alliteration of the poem, it also illustrates how the poet could avoid redundancy by pulling from different sources and by making new words. The primary focus of the passage is the dragon which is actually a Latin word. And in that short passage, the poet refers to the dragon three different ways. Each of the ways represents one of the techniques which we have covered over the last three episodes. First, he calls it the worm – a simple, basic Germanic word used to translate the Latin word dragon. Then he uses an Old English compound word to describe the dragon poetically. He calls it the ‘stark heart.’

And finally, he then calls it dracan which is a version of the word dragon, and thus represents a word borrowed from Latin. So in that one passage, we can see how English had combined these techniques to become a full-fledged literary language.

But even though much of this growth in the language has been spawned by the Northumbrian Renaissance, that renaissance was slowing fading away. So I want to conclude this episode by looking at the changing landscape of Anglo-Saxon Britain in the mid and late 700s.

By the middle 700s, the political power of Northumbria was gradually being replaced by another kingdom – the kingdom of Mercia to the south. Mercia had been a threat to Northumbria for decades. Its king Penda had been partially or fully responsible for the defeat and death of the Northumbrian kings like Edwin and Oswald. But Oswald’s bother, Oswy, had finally defeated Penda. And Northumbria prospered in the aftermath of Penda’s defeat.

But in the year 716, Æthelbald assumed power as King of Mercia in the English midlands. He quickly emerged as the strongest ruler of his day. And his power extended well beyond Mercia to the other kingdoms in southern Britain. Even though the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle doesn’t list him as a bretwalder or overlord, most scholars have no problem giving him that label. Æthelbald ruled during Bede’s lifetime, and Bede described him as the ruler of all of England south of Northumbria. In fact, a charter of the year 736 identifies Æthelbald as “King, not only of the Mercians, but of all the provinces which are called by the general name South English.” He even began to call himself ‘King of All South England.’ But the powerful Æthelbald was murdered by

16 his bodyguard a couple of decades after that charter. And a period of civil war followed in Mercia. By the end of the year 757, another relative of Penda had claimed the throne. And this king would eventually surpass Æthelbald in terms of power and prestige. That king was Offa. During the later half of 700s, Offa ruled over a Mercian kingdom that was unrivaled within Britain. And even though Offa never controlled Northumbria, there was no question where the political and social power lay during the later portion of the eighth century.

But the rise of Merica wasn’t the only problem for Northumbria. Across the channel in France, the Frankish kingdom was at the height of its power under the rule of Charlemagne. And Charlemagne, oversaw the Carolingian Renaissance there. And that saw the Frankish Kingdom bring in some of the leading scholars from Northumbria. And within a few years, the Frankish kingdom had replaced Northumbria as the leading center of education in Western Europe.

In addition to those developments, there was another – even greater – threat on the horizon. Literally on the horizon. The Vikings from Scandinavia began to arrive in Northumbria at the end of the 8th century, and all of those great monasteries which I’ve discussed – Lindisfarne, Iona, Whitby, Jarrow – they were all ransacked and plundered. And most were destroyed.

Over the next few episodes we’re going to explore all of those developments and the impact which those developments had on the English language. Next time, we’re going to turn our attention to the east – to Scandinavia – to the ancestors of the Vikings. We going to explore what was happening in Scandinavia while the Anglo-Saxons were busy carving up Britain. And we’re going to explore the origins of the Viking culture.

And this early period is kind of important to the history of English because it provides the setting and backdrop for a poem which I keep mentioning in the podcast. That little poem about a man named Beowulf.

So next time, we’ll explore the historical roots of the Vikings and of origins of Beowulf.

Until then, thanks for listening to the History of English Podcast.

17 EPISODE 42: BEOWULF AND OTHER VIKING ANCESTORS

Welcome to the History of English Podcast – a podcast about the history of the English language. This is Episode 42 - Beowulf and Other Viking Ancestors. In this episode, we’re going to explore the ancestors of the Vikings. And we’re going to examine a period of Northern European history which has relatively few reliable sources and a lot of mythology. So we’re going to try to distinguish myth from reality as much as we can. This place and time period also coincides with the setting of Beowulf. And since Beowulf was likely composed during or shortly after this period of Scandinavian history, it is one of the few somewhat contemporary accounts of the people of that region. So we’re going to see what information Beowulf can tell us about this history as well.

And let me begin by explaining why this is a good time to turn our attention to Scandinavia. In our overall story of English, we’re somewhere in the middle 700s. So we’re basically half way through the Anglo-Saxon period.

The period in the mid-700s is significant because is marks a brief period of time after the Church arrived, but before the Vikings began to arrive. The Viking invasions really began in earnest at the very end of the 700s and lasted for several centuries. When they arrived, the Vikings looted, robbed, killed and plundered. And eventually, they began to settle in large portions of Britain. And with that settlement, a large portion of eastern and northern Britain called the Danelaw passed into the control of the Danes. And the Old Norse language of the Danes began to find a home in Britain.

But just as English was assimilating the influences of Old Norse, the Normans arrived from France in 1066. So within a period of about three centuries, English experienced the dual impact of Norse and then French. And it was really this back-to-back period of invasion and conquest which changed English so fundamentally between Old English and Middle English.

And I think this point sometimes gets overlooked. From the ninth century through the eleventh century, England was racked by invasions and turmoil. The invaders brought foreign languages. And in the process, the English language was battered and beaten. It was twisted and pummeled – it was broken down and put back together again. And it was the back-to-back invasions of Old Norse and Old French which produced those changes. Had there been a greater interval between the invasions, English probably would be a very different language today. But together, Old Norse and then Old French radically changed English, and it produced an early version of the language which we speak today.

So as we consider this period of the mid-700s, we’re in a period in which the original form of English was still being spoken throughout Anglo-Saxon Britain. And we’re in a narrow window in which Britain was post-Christian and pre-Viking. And for that reason – along with others – many scholars think this was the period in which the Beowulf poem was likely composed. And that’s because there are definite Christian influences in the poem, and there are specific references to parts of the Bible.

18 So scholars are confident that it was composed after Christianity had spread across the island. But the poem praises the Scandinavian roots of the Germanic people, and specifically it praises the Danes. It describes a heroic period in which the Danes and the Scandinavian Geats were honorable warriors adhering to the traditional Germanic warrior code. And given that the Scandinavians are generally portrayed in a positive light, many scholars think that Beowulf had to be composed before the Vikings began to loot and ransack the island.

Now not everyone agrees with this theory. There are some scholars who argue that the poem was composed later near the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, and I’m not going to delve into all of those arguments right now, but the traditional view has been that Beowulf is post-Christian and pre-Viking. So that leaves this narrow window from the late 600s through the 700s.

And, if that view is correct, Beowulf foreshadowed the arrival of the Vikings a short time later. So at this point in the story of English, we need to turn our attention away from Britain to examine those outside influences which were about to arrive on the British shores. Remember that this is ultimately a podcast about English – not Britain, and in order to understand English, we have to occasionally turn our attention elsewhere.

We’ll begin by looking to the east to Scandinavia to examine the origins of the Vikings and the ultimate origins of Beowulf. And a couple of episodes from now, we’re going to briefly look at developments in the Frankish kingdom, and we’ll examine the origins of Old French.

But let’s begin by looking at the ultimate ancestors of the Vikings in Scandinavia.

And let’s remember that linguists traditionally divided the Germanic languages into three groups. There were the East Germanic languages which included the Gothic language, but all of those languages eventually died out. Then there were the West Germanic languages which include most of the Germanic languages which we have discussed so far in the podcast. That included the languages of the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Franks and the ancient tribes which produced the modern German language. But up in the north in Scandinavia were the North Germanic languages. And up until the period of the Vikings, these North Germanic languages were so closely related that linguists believe they represented a common language. We know that language today as Old Norse.

We actually know very little about the early form of the language because the Scandinavians were still largely illiterate. They did use runic symbols, so a little bit can be discerned from those inscriptions. But the alphabet was still several centuries away. And that means that the Scandinavians weren’t writing their own history. So very little is known about those early tribes with any certainty.

As with the other Germanic tribes, much of our information about those early tribes come from the people who were literate and who were keeping histories – people like the Romans and Greeks. And while those writers had some knowledge of the tribes located along the Rhine and Danube, they didn’t know as much about the Germanic tribes further north.

19 And these Scandinavian tribes were the most remote and distant tribes from the perspective of the Romans and the Greeks. So not surprisingly, early written accounts of these northernmost tribes are very limited.

Now we do have Nordic sagas, legends and chronicles. And those also provide some history, but those legends weren’t documented until many centuries later, and they often mix history with mythology. So those sagas are helpful and provide a few answers, but they often raise just as many questions.

And all of this helps to explain why the Beowulf poem is so important to this part of history. It is one of the rare detailed written accounts of life in the region during this early period. And if we accept the view that it was written in the pre-Viking period, it is actually a contemporary account of the people of this region. And the Beowulf poet clearly had a good knowledge of Scandinavia. He describes weapons and artifacts which resemble the types actually used there. And he mentions obscure leaders and tribes whose existence has been confirmed from other sources, including later legends and sagas. And of course the poem centers around Beowulf and his tribe the Geats, who were an actual and somewhat obscure – tribe from Scandinavia. So there does appear to be some bona fide history mixed in with the battles against monsters.

So let’s turn our attention to Scandinavia. And as always, geography is kind of important to this story. Once again, Louis Henwood has been kind enough to prepare a map which shows the region and the general location of the tribes around the time of the Beowulf story. Just go to Episode 42 at the website – historyofenglishpodcast.com. You can also go to the ‘maps’ tab for all of the maps mentioned in the podcast.

Now I know a lot of you are listening and don’t have access to the maps. And if you only have a vague sense of the geography, let me try to set the scene for you. The region of Scandinavia is really based around two peninsulas. One large peninsula extends southward from the Arctic Circle, and that’s the Scandinavian Peninsula. And it is the home to modern-day Sweden and Norway. The other much smaller peninsula is the peninsula which we’ve discussed in prior episodes. It’s the Jutland peninsula which extends northward from northern Germany into the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. And as we know, the Jutland Peninsula was the ultimate home of the Angles and the Jutes – the tribes which settled in Eastern and Northern Britain. So all of the kingdoms which we have been discussing in the first half of the Anglo-Saxon period – kingdoms like East Anglia, and Kent, and Northumbria and Mercia – they all have their origins in this peninsula. So those tribes were ultimately of Scandinavian origin. And that’s why a poem like Beowulf reflects that heritage.

Now today, the Jutland Peninsula and the large islands to the east of the peninsula comprise modern-day Denmark. But the key is the fact that these two peninsulas extend towards each other and are only about 50 miles apart. And the large island of Zealand largely bridges the gap between the two peninsulas. And fact, today you can drive between the two peninsulas via Zealand thanks to bridges which link the island to the two peninsulas.

20 So its important to understand that these various land masses were distinct from each other, but they were close enough that they could be accessed via boat or ship. So from the very beginning, the people of Scandinavia were very adept at building ships and traveling by sea. And that helps to explain why the Angles and the Jutes were able to migrate in such large numbers to Britain. Sea-faring was really second-nature to the them. And as the Angles and Jutes migrated westward out of the Jutland Peninsula, the Danes rushed into fill the vacuum. So historically, the Danes were neighbors of the Angles and Saxons. And again, that helps to explain why the first two- thirds of Beowulf is set in the land of the Danes.

When we think of Viking ships, we often think of long-ships with a dragon-head protruding from the front. And in fact, dragons and sea serpents were a common feature of Scandinavian mythology. So again, that helps to explain why Beowulf concludes with a fight against a dragon. But it is also relevant as we examine the geography of the region.

If you look at the Scandinavian Peninsula, as it protrudes southward out of the Arctic Circle, it actually resembles a dragon’s head or a sea serpent. The tip of the peninsula splits in half as it approaches the continent, and it resembles the open mouth of a dragon. The eastern half is modern Sweden, and the western half is modern Norway. But this interesting geographical feature is almost poetic given the later association between the Vikings and dragons. And if one thinks of the Scandinavian Peninsula as a dragon’s head extending southward with its mouth open, the Jutland Penisula is the land mass which is about to be consumed by it. The Jutland Peninsula actually extends right into the open mouth of the much larger Scandinavian Peninsula. And if you can keep that image in your mind, the geography discussed in this episode may make a lot more sense.

So let’s turn our attention to the early history of this region. The first detailed source of information about these northern Germanic tribes is a source which we’ve explored before – Germania by Tacitus. As you may recall, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote his description of the Germanic tribes around the year 98. And in Germania, he specifically mentions the Swedes. He refers to them as the ‘Suiones.’ And he states that they live on an island in the ocean. But scholars generally agree that what Tacitus was describing was the Scandinavian Peninsula. And in fact, later Greco-Romans writers during this early period also called it an island. So why did they do that?

Well, again, the answer is a matter of geography. The peninsula extends southward out of the Arctic Circle. And from the perspective of the Romans, you didn’t really travel from Eastern Europe, up into Finland, through the Arctic Circle, and then down into the Scandinavian Peninsula. In fact, most of them may not have been aware that you could even do that. So from their perspective, there was this large land-mass out in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea that extended up into the ice and snow of the Arctic Circle. You had to travel by ship to get there from the Jutland Peninsula or northern Germany. So they just assumed that it was a large island. But today, we know that Tacitus was referring to the southern tip of the Scandinavian Peninsula – basically southern Sweden.

21 Tacitus also notes that the Swedes – or ‘Suiones’ – were known for their powerful fleets, and their unusual boats which have a prow at each end so the boat can move in either direction. So what he is describing here is an early version of the Viking longship – a shallow boat that was capable of crossing a sea or traveling up and down rivers. It could be propelled by sails or oars. And it was very strong, yet it was light enough that the crew could get out and carry it over land if necessary.

And because of its unique design which is mentioned by Tacitus, the longship could travel in either direction without having to turn around. So a raiding party could cross an ocean, sail up a river, conduct a raid, and then flee very quickly without having to turn the ship around. So these innovations gave the Vikings some huge advantages in later years. And Tacitus suggests that some of these innovations were in place very early on.

So these ships represent both a design and a technological innovation. In the past, we’ve seen how small technological advances often led to military superiority and rapid expansion. The Indo- Europeans mastered horse-riding and wheeled-wagons, and that led to their expansion. The Huns mastered the stirrup on both side of the horse, and that led to their expansion. Well, the early Scandinavians mastered this new type of naval technology, and that ultimately led to their expansion out of Scandinavia and into much of Europe.

And it’s not surprising that they developed advanced maritime technology. Much of the Scandinavian Peninsula is mountainous, so most of the villages and settlements were located along the islands and inlets near the coast. And south of the Scandinavian Peninsula were all of the islands associated with modern Denmark. So the best way to travel from one village to another was by boat. So the Scandinavian culture evolved into an advanced maritime and shipbuilding culture.

And so it might not be surprising that we get several words related to ships from Scandinavian sources. The word keel meaning the lowest part of a ship and the word bow meaning the front of a ship are both usually attributed to Scandinavian origins.

And its important to keep in mind that the Germanic languages in Northern Europe were all very closely related early on. So very often when we compare Old English and Old Norse words, many of the words are almost identical. And even by the time of the Viking invasions of Britain, it is believed that both languages were still similar enough that the Viking settlers and the Anglo- Saxons could communicate with each other – at least on some basic level – without the need for a translator.

So as we look at Old English and Old Norse, it shouldn’t be surprising to see very similar words in both languages. So as it relates to maritime activity, both languages had the Germanic word mast meaning the long pole that supports the sail.

To describe a body of water or flowing water, Old English used the word flod and Old Norse used the word floð. Of course, the Old English word produced our modern word flood, and it’s cognate with the words flow and float. And the only difference between the English word and the Norse word was a slightly different ending.

22 To describe the ‘sea shore,’ Old English used the word strand and Old Norse used the word strönd. Again both words were derived from the same Germanic root word. The English version ultimately gave us strand still meaning seashore. And we still use it that way as in the ‘Grand Strand’ to refer to the beaches around Myrtle Beach, or the ‘Silver Strand’ for an area of coastline near San Diego. When a ship ran ashore, it was stuck on the strand. So it produced the word stranded, originally meaning shipwrecked, but today meaning any situation in which someone is left helpless.

And even the words boat and ship were almost identical in early Old English and Old Norse. Both words were derived from common Germanic words shared by both languages. And it appears that both words derived from Indo-European root words which meant ‘to cut, split or divide something.’ The connection here is apparently that ancient people originally made boats and ships by splitting a tree truck into two halves, and then they would hollow out the trunk to make a primitive boat.

Again, the original Indo-European word for ‘boat’ meant to ‘split, strike or bite.’ So think about the Modern English words boat and bolt – as in ‘lightning bolt.’ They’re very similar and they’re both cognate. The word bolt comes from the fact that it strikes something with great force. So if a lightning bolt strikes a tree, and it splits in half, then your boat is half way done. All you have to do is hollow it out. So that’s the ultimate connection between boat and bolt.

But what about when an animal strikes at something trying to eat it. Well, we get the word bite from the same ultimate root as boat and bolt. And when you get in your boat to go fishing, you have to bring something for fish to bite. In other words, you have to bring bait. Another word from the same root. In fact, Old English and Old Norse both had similar versions of that word, and bait is actually the Old Norse version. It eventually replaced the English version – bat.

By the way, one type of insect that bites is beetle – another word from that same root. And if you bite something and it doesn’t taste very good, you might say that it is bitter. Another word from that root. So bite, bitter, beetle, bait, bolt and boat are all cognate. They all relate to some aspect of striking, splitting or biting something.

As for the word ship, the story is very similar. It comes from the original Germanic word skipam – which ultimately gives us the words skiff and skipper. But as I noted in an earlier episode, the ‘SK’ sound shifted to an ‘SH’ sound during the period of Old English. So the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons had the same word – skip in Old Norse and ship in Old English. And just like with boat, some scholars – not all – but some scholars trace that Germanic root back to an original Indo-European root word which meant to ‘cut or divide’ as in cutting or splitting wood to create a ship. And if this ultimate etymology is correct, it means that ship – or its original version skip – is cognate with the word scrape which was very similar in both Old Norse and Old English, but Modern English actually uses the Old Norse version – scrape. It also means that ship and scrape are cognate with the Germanic word scoop – borrowed from Dutch. And all of that actually makes sense if we think about the process of hollowing out a tree trunk.

23 You might scoop out the middle and scrape the contours to make an early ship or boat. And thanks to that ‘SH’ sound shift in English, we have the English word shape – another word derived from that same root if that ultimate etymology is correct. That means that ship and shape are cognate, and once again we see the connection between ‘shaping’ a tree trunk and making a ship.

So I wanted to make two points with that digression. First, I wanted to show the ultimate origin of words like boat and ship. And secondly, I wanted to show how similar some words were in Old English and Old Norse.

Words like flood, strand, boat and ship were very similar in both languages. And the Norse influence was so great after the Viking invasions, that English occasionally gave up its native English word, and elected to use the Norse version of the word going forward. That’s what happened with a word like bait which replaced the native word bat. And both Old English and Old Norse had the word skrapa or scrapian meaning to ‘scrape.’ But English developed that ‘SH’ sound shift. So the English version later became shrapen in Middle English. Now obviously, that word died out. But the Norse version, with its original ‘SK’ sound survives, as the word scrape. So the Norse version ultimately won out over the English version. And as we’ll see in an upcoming episode, that happened a lot.

The relationship between Norse and English was different from the later relationship between French and English. When it came to French, English would borrow French words, but it also tended to keep the original English words. So English was often left with two words for the same thing. But with respect to Norse words, it was more a case of ‘either-or.’ Since English words and Norse words were so similar, they didn’t both survive into Middle and Modern English as a general rule. So one was selected and the other disappeared from the language. But what is so interesting, is that it was often the Norse word which was selected. And that shows how great the Norse influence was in Britain after the Viking settlers were in place there. And again, we’ll examine the Norse influence on English vocabulary in much more detail in the future.

So let’s return to the story of the original Scandinavians – the ancestors of those Vikings. Tacitus told us a little bit about them in the first century. But about 50 years after Tacitus around the year 150, we have the writings of the Greco-Roman mathematician and geographer Ptolemy. Like Tacitus, he mentions a big island in the region called Scandia. Again, as we know, it wasn’t really an island. It was actually the tip of a large peninsula. And that name Scandia stuck. It later came to refer to a small region near the tip of the peninsula. And it later centuries, it produced the term Scandinavia – a term used for the entire region, and later applied to the name of the peninsula itself.

Ptolemy also mentions a variety of tribes living on the islands east of the Jutland peninsula. The tribal names he mentions are obscure, and they generally disappeared from history over the following centuries. Surprisingly, he doesn’t mention the Swedes at all, and they were apparently the dominant tribe in the region. So it shows how sketchy the reports were from those Greco- Roman sources in the first couple of centuries.

24 In fact, with maybe a couple of exceptions, the tribes which Ptolemy mentions can’t be connected with later groups, but he does mention a tribe called the ‘Goutai.’ And this is where the story of the early Scandinavians starts to get complicated, and where we have as many questions as we do answers.

The first thing to understand is that there are two parts of southern Sweden which have very similar names. The southern portion of the actual Scandinavian Peninsula is called ‘Gotaland,’ and it’s spelled G-O-T-A-L-A-N-D which reflects an earlier pronunciation with an initial ‘G’ sound, so it would have been more like /got-a-lond/. But there is also a large island to the east of the peninsula called ‘Gotland’ spelled G-O-T-L-A-N-D. So even though the names of the two regions are pronounced differently today, they have almost identical spellings. So historically, the names were very similar.

Now add to that the fact that we have two historical tribes who apparently originated in this same region. One is the Goths and the other is the Geats which was supposedly Beowulf’s tribe. And the big question is how to connect all of these pieces.

Historians generally believe that the Goths originated in of these two regions, probably ‘Gotaland’ in the southern peninsula – basically the southern part of mainland Sweden. And this is in part because the first real historian of the Goths – Jordanes – said that. He said they came from Scandza. Remember that’s that another name for southern Sweden. So this region of southern Sweden is considered to be the original home of the Goths before they began their migration into eastern Europe.

But what about the Geats? Well, the Geats are much more mysterious than the Goths who had a long and well-attested history throughout Europe. The Geats are mentioned in occasional sources, and of course Beowulf focuses heavily on them. Well, the name of that southern region of Sweden – Gotaland (/yee–ah-teh-lond/) – is generally interpreted as ‘Land of the Geats.’ And there seems to be a general consensus today that the Geats were a distinct tribe, and they lived in this same region of southern Sweden.

And modern linguists have studied the etymology of the name Geats and the name Goths. And many linguists are convinced that both tribal names derive from the same ultimate root. So many scholars put all of these pieces together and conclude that the Geats and Goths were once the same tribe in southern Sweden. And at some point very early on, one portion of the tribe broke away and migrated across the Baltic Sea into eastern Europe, and they became the Goths. And the other portion of the tribe remained in southern Sweden as the Geats. Now again, this is one theory. And we may never be able to confirm it with any certainty, but it reflects a modern trend which recognizes the Geats as a distinct tribe in this region.

Now mixed in with the view that the Geats were a distinct tribe in southern Sweden, there’s another view that holds that the Geats weren’t necessarily a single tribe, but they were more like a group of independent but related tribes. And that may explain why many of the early sources cite tribal names which can’t be matched with any specific tribe. We’ve seen how the Franks and the Saxons emerged when several smaller tribes joined together and coalesced into a single tribe. So

25 this may have been a similar situation, but perhaps that various groups never fully coalesced in the way that the Franks and the Saxons did. However, many historians think these Geatish tribes were pretty powerful – especially if they fought together. It appears that they even challenged the power of the Swedes to the north.

So at this point in our story, we have the Swedes in the central part of the Scandinavian Peninsula and the Geats in the southern part of that peninsula. And over in Jutland, we have the Jutes to the north, and the Angles in the south.

And as far as the contemporary written sources are concerned, that’s about it until the middle of the sixth century. We have about a 400 year gap without a contemporary historical source. But in the sixth century, the Roman historian Jordanes wrote his ‘History of the Goths.’ As I noted earlier, Jordanes also refers to the supposed island of ‘Scandza,’ and he says that the Goths originated from that region.

He then mentions the Suehans, and later the Suetidi, which is generally considered to be two different names for the same tribe – the Swedes. Much of his information was based on other sources, and he apparently confused two variations of the same name in some of the other sources.

Now with respect to the Swedes, he seems to confirm that they were the dominant power in Scandinavia. He notes that they were the source of the black fox skins which were sold in Roman markets, and this is evidence of their extensive trade across the Baltic and deep into southern Europe. This trade had apparently made the Swedes very prosperous, and it contributed to their early dominance of the Scandinavian Peninsula.

Jordanes also says that the Swedes were famous for their horses. And this reference to horses is also notable. The English term filly meaning ‘a small female horse’ was borrowed from the Vikings. And it’s actually related to the Old English word foal meaning ‘a young horse.’ So filly and foal are cognate – one is the Norse word and one is the native English word.

But what about the word horse? Well, you might remember that it was a common Germanic word, but it was one of those Germanic words which can’t be traced back to the original Indo- Europeans. The original Indo-European word gave us the words equine and equestrian. So the word horse was picked up from somewhere else, perhaps from people who were native to the region when the first Indo-European speakers arrived. But it became part of the standard Germanic vocabulary.

Both Old Norse and Old English had the word horse. But they also had another word which also meant ‘horse.’ In English, that word was hengest, and in Old Norse it was hesta. The English version hengest eventually died out. But the Viking settlers in Britain used their version of the word in the term hesta-maðr to mean a horse-boy or horse attendant. It appears that the latter Anglo-Saxons took that term from the Vikings, and they substituted the English word hengest for the Norse word hesta and it became hengest-maðr. And that term eventually produced the term henchman – originally meaning a horse-attendant or servant, and later meaning a bully or enforcer – like a gangster’s henchman.

26 But those two terms horse and hengest are closely tied to Germanic mythology. According to Bede, the first two Germanic leaders who were ‘invited’ to Britain were two brothers named ‘Hengest’ and ‘Horsa.’ Supposedly those two brothers were Jutes, and they established the kingdom of Kent. And scholars have always been intrigued by this story because both names mean ‘horse’ – ‘Hengest’ and ‘Horsa.’ And since horses were so important and prestigious, it was apparently an honor to have a name which meant ‘horse.’ But I mention this here because that name ‘Hengest’ also pops up in Beowulf. So there are some interesting connections here, but we’ll explore those connections in the next episode.

So let’s go back to Jordanes. He tells us that the Swedes were famous for their horses, and that they were extensive traders. But then he tells us something else very important. He provides one of the first mentions of the Danes. He says that the Danes were an offshoot of the original Swedish tribe. So apparently the Swedes had become so large in number that the Danes split off from the main branch. And Jordanes says that the Danes had since migrated and displaced other tribes in the region.

Now we know that the Danes eventually settled in the southernmost part of the Scandinavian Peninsula and the islands to the south and west of the peninsula. So putting these pieces together, it appears that the Danes broke away from the main group of Swedes somewhere in the central part of modern-Sweden. They then migrated southward. The timing is uncertain, but it was apparently during this 4-century gap in our sources. So perhaps in the third and fourth centuries.

As the Danes spread southward, they took over most of the islands between the two peninsulas. That included the large island of Zealand which is the island that bridges the gap between the peninsulas. And that island was the traditional home of the Danish kings, and its still the home of the modern Danish capital – Copenhagen.

Even though the Danes had migrated southward and occupied a large portion of modern Denmark, they hadn’t yet reached the Jutland Peninsula. That’s where the Angles and the Jutes lived. But as we know, in the middle of the 5th century around the year 450, the Angles and the Jutes were headed west to Britain. This was the period of the early Anglo-Saxon migration. And according to that legend which I just mentioned, they were led by two Jutes named Hengest and Horsa. And we know from later sources that much of southern Jutland was soon abandoned. So as the Angles and Jutes moved out, the Danes moved in, and they soon filled the vacuum.

The expansion of the Danes into Jutland is reflected in a story which is recorded in slightly different versions in a couple of Danish texts which were composed many years later in the twelfth century. The story involved an early Danish king whose power extended to Jutland. This king designated two brothers as his rulers there. The Danish king was so impressed with one of the brothers, that he gave his daughter to the brother in marriage. And the two of them had a son named ‘Amleth.’ But the other brother named Feng became jealous. And he killed the first brother and took his wife. But the young son Amleth later avenged his father’s death by killing his murderous uncle Feng. Now if that story sounds vaguely familiar to you, imagine the young Amleth wrestling with the decision of whether or not to kill his uncle. Imagine him pondering this

27 dilemma with the line ‘to be or not to be.’ Because Amleth was the original Hamlet. His story was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s famous play.

So at this point, we have the Danes in Jutland. And this basically takes us to the point in time described in Beowulf. In Beowulf, the Danes are a distinct tribe living in modern Denmark. The Danish king is Hrothgar. He builds a great hall called ‘Heorot.’ And it’s believed that this hall was probably based upon an actual hall built by the Danes on the island of Zealand – not far from modern-day Copenhagen.

As we survey the surrounding region during this time, we’ve seen that the Danes were filling the vacuum left by the departing Angles and Jutes in the Jutland Peninsula. But there were probably some remnants of the Jutes and Angles still on the ground.

To the north of the Danes was the Scandinavian Peninsula. It appears that the Danes may have also occupied part of the southern tip of that peninsula. But much of the southern peninsula was occupied by the Geats. That was Beowulf’s tribe. In fact, Beowulf’s first appearance in the poem is his journey ‘by sea’ from the land of the Geats to Hrothgar’s Danish kingdom. So it basically describes Beowulf traveling from Southern Sweden to the island of Zealand – near again modern- day Copenhagen.

The first two-thirds of the poem is actually set in Denmark, and then Beowulf returns home to Geatland. So he returns to southern Sweden. And the poem suggests a good and stable relationship between the Geats and the Danes.

In fact, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two groups. A good example of this problem is the story of Hygelac.

There is actually very little in Beowulf which can be used to date the poem with any certainty, but there is one historical event mentioned in Beowulf which has been confirmed and dated by several other independent sources. And that is a raid by a leader named Hygelac on Frisia around the year 520. That raid is mentioned multiple times in Beowulf, so we know that the poem was composed after that date. And that raid is significant because it is one of the first documented raids by a Scandinavian tribe into Western Europe. So this raid as been cited as one of the very first Viking excursions. This raid is documented in several other historical sources from around the same time – most notably Gregory of Tours’ ‘History of the Franks.’ He says that Hygelac and his men crossed the sea in ships and attacked northern Gaul – so basically Frisia. They ransacked the region and took captives and valuables. Then they loaded their ships and started to head home. But the Frankish king’s army arrived just in time to defeat Hygelac and his men. And Hygelac was killed in the resulting battle.

Now the significance of this raid is that Gregory of Tours says that Hygelac and his men were Danes. And this was a Danish raid. But in Beowulf, Hygelac is King of the Geats. In fact, he is Beowulf’s king, and he is actually Beowulf’s uncle. And according to the poem, Beowulf accompanied Hygelac on that raid in Frisia. And even though Hygelac and the other Geats were killed, Beowulf was able to escape, and he was able to swim all the way back to the homeland of

28 the Geats. This is presented as another example of Beowulf’s superhuman strength. And with Hygelac’s death, it sets the stage for Beowulf to eventually become the King of the Geats.

So we see how the Beouwulf poet mixed history and with legend. But it leaves us with a mystery. Was the real-life Hygelac a Dane or a Geat? Gregory of Tours and at least one other contemporary sources says Dane. The Beowulf poet says Geat. So this illustrates how closely connected those two groups were. And again, the Beowulf poem emphasizes the friendly relationship between the Danes and the Geats.

But the story is different with respect to the Swedes. Throughout the poem, there are references to conflicts between the Geats and the Swedes, so these two tribes were apparently vying for power in southern and central Sweden. The Swedes were located to the north of the Geats in central Sweden. And when Beowulf dies at the end of the poem, the poem suggests that the Geats are doomed without their great leader. And it ends with an ominous prediction that the Swedes will soon sweep in and overpower them. Well, since we know that the poem was composed a few centuries later, it is obvious that the poet knew of the ultimate fate of the Geats. By the late 600s, the Swedes did in fact move southward, and they did overtake the Geats. And in the process, the Geats were lost to history as a distinct tribe, and the Swedes came to occupy most of the region of modern-day Sweden.

I say the Geats were ‘lost to history,’ but their name still survives in the name of that region – ‘Gotaland’ – Land of the Geats.

But what happened to the Geats? Were they simply assimilated into the Swedish kingdom? Or did a large portion of them flee and go somewhere else?

Well, the possibility that a large number of Geats fled elsewhere raises some interesting questions. And one proposed scenario provides some intriguing links between the Geats, the Angles, and the Sutton Hoo ship burial, and ultimately the poet who wrote Beowulf. This theory proposes that the Swedes swept in and conquered the Geats in the southern part of the Scandinavian Peninsula. And then, a significant number of Geats fled the peninsula and followed the same westward path as the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes. In other words, they headed to Britain.

This theory suggests that they settled in East Anglia, and it proposes that the emigrating Geats mixed in with the Angles in East Anglia, but the Geats soon emerged as the early rulers of the kingdom. And the first East Anglian dynasty was in fact of Geatish origin. So what is the evidence to support this theory?

Well the strongest evidence lies in the names of the family dynasties who ruled East Anglia and the Geats. The original East Anglian royal family was called the ‘Wuffingas’ – or ‘Wuffings.’ And according to later Norse sagas, the ruling family of the Eastern Geats at the time of the conquest by the Swedes was the ‘Wulfings.’ So between the ‘Wuffings’ and ‘Wulfings,’ the names are almost identical. And given the tremendous variation with which many of these names appear in these old chronicles and sagas, they type of similarity is actually striking.

29 And we have to combine this evidence with the fact that many scholars have long assumed some connection between the East Anglian court and Scandinavia. Remember this is where the Sutton Hoo ship burial occurred. That type of ship burial is closely associated with Scandinavia. And it’s the only known ship burial of its kind in Britain. So that suggests some type of unique link between the East Anglian kings and the Scandinavian kings.

And we should keep in mind that the story of Beowulf begins with a ship burial which is amazingly similar to the Sutton Hoo ship burial. And so, many scholars believe that the Beowulf poet likely had some knowledge of the Sutton Hoo ship burial. Maybe it was second-hand or third hand knowledge, but he was definitely aware of the details of these types of burials.

But more than that, the poem describes objects and artifacts of the type normally found in Scandinavia. For example, the poem repeatedly mentions objects with curvy-interlaced patterns. And several objects unearthed at Sutton Hoo have those same type of patterns. And the poem also mentions ‘boars’ on helmets, and the Sutton Hoo burial also has objects with boars on them – including a helmet. So we also have an archaeological connection between East Anglia and Scandinavia.

Perhaps a group of Geats migrated from Scandinavia and brought some of these artifacts with them. And those Scandinavian artifacts or heir looms were buried with that ship. And somehow, the Beowulf poet was aware of those objects. And the timing actually works. Sutton Hoo occurred in the early 600s, and if we assume the probable date of Beowulf was the late 600s or 700s, then that means that the poem was composed within the living memory of Sutton Hoo.

We also have to consider that the Geats are a somewhat obscure tribe in the historical sources. Not a lot is known about them. But Beowulf is really the story of the Geats – at least a famous Geatish warrior who eventually becomes King of the Geats. And more importantly, the poem praises the Geats and the Danes. Both groups are generally portrayed in a flattering light. But the Swedes are portrayed as an ominous threat. So that suggests that the poet may have had some connection to the Geats or at least to Geatish mythology and legends.

So how did the poet know so much about the Geats? And why was he so interested in them? And why would he assume that his audience would be interested in them? And the poem makes lots of passing references to Geatish and other regional leaders – many of whom are obscure. But it’s very clear that the poet expects his audience to know who these figures were. So again, this suggests that the poem was composed at an early date when the Anglo-Saxons would have known about those fifth and sixth century figures, but it also suggests that the audience had an historical connection to those people. So some scholars have proposed that the Beowulf poet was in fact a poet in the East Anglian court, and if the East Anglian court was connected to the Geatish court in Scandinavia, then all of that would start to make sense. It would certainly connect a lot of dots in this period of history.

But again, even though this theory has been advanced by some scholars, it all falls into the category of speculation. And we may never know if these pieces of history can be connected.

30 So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us with the Swedish conquest of the Geats in the southern part of the Scandinavian Peninsula. And that left the Swedes in control of most of the eastern half of that peninsula – so most of the territory of modern Sweden. Meanwhile, the Danes were in control of much of modern-day territory of Denmark – so the Jutland Peninsula and the islands to the east of the peninsula.

And up to this point, I haven’t really mentioned Norway. And that’s partially because, up to this point, the western region of Scandinavia was still mostly empty. There were several isolated communities, but no semblance of unity or common governance. Each community was basically an independent kingdom. The communities were generally located along the west coast of Scandinavia amongst the chain of islands and sheltered harbors. And the mountain range that runs along the spine of the peninsula kept the people of Norway and Sweden separated from the very beginning.

For most of the maritime people of Scandinavia, the North Sea and Baltic Sea was the center of their universe. If they set out for the Baltic lands to the East, they went austrvegr – the East Way. If they set out for Germany and continental Europe to the south, they went suthrvegar – the South Way. And if they set out for the region on the northwestern side of the Scandinavian Peninsula, they went Norvegr – the North Way. And that Old Norse term translated directly into Old English as ‘North Way,’ and later became Norway.

And this was basically the state of Scandinavia at our point in the overall story of English around the middle 700s.

The three main groups – the Swedes, the Danes and the Norwegians – were about to set sail. By this point, Scandinavian traders were already active in Britain. There is evidence that some men in Northumbria had begun to wear their hair in braids to mimic the hairstyles worn by Scandinavian traders. This was considered a sign of toughness.

And as the Scandinavians traded with places like Britain, they came to realize that those places were actually pretty wealthy. And the wealthiest places of all were monasteries. And there was another important thing about those monasteries. A lot of them like Lindisfarne were located right long the coast. And they were full of monks and nuns. And monks and nuns weren’t exactly known for their ability to fight. So you didn’t need a formal education to do the math. The wealthiest targets in Britain happened to be very easy to access by water, and they also happened to be very poorly defended. And the Scandinavians just happened to have the maritime technology to engage in lighting quick raids. And they were already engaging in those raids in places like Frisia.

So the Vikings were about to make their presence known in Britain. But before we explore the Viking invasions of Britain, there is one more aspect of Beowulf which I want to explore.

In this episode, I’ve focused on the historical background of Beowulf, but next time, I want to look at a little closer at the mythology of the poem. We’ll take a closer look at some of the legendary stories surrounding the poem. And we’ll focus on the monsters and the supernatural

31 elements of the poem. We’ll also explore the presence of monsters and mythological creatures in Anglo-Saxon society. And we’ll see how these themes connect the culture of the Anglo-Saxons with the culture of the Scandinavians.

Let me conclude by noting that I am still working on that special Beowulf series which actually takes you through the whole poem and examines the specific language of the poem. I should have it ready pretty soon. So stay tuned for more information about that.

And as always, if you have any questions or comments regarding the podcast, please free to contact me at [email protected]. And let me thanks all of you who have made donations to the podcast, as well as those of you who rated the podcast and written reviews on iTunes. And if you haven’t rated the podcast on iTunes before, I would invite you to do that because it actually helps new listeners to discover it.

So thanks again, and until next time, thanks for listening to the History of English Podcast.

32 EPISODE 43: ANGLO-SAXON MONSTERS AND MYTHOLOGY

Welcome to the History of English Podcast - a podcast about the history of the English language. This is Episode 43 - Anglo-Saxon Monsters and Mythology. Last time, we looked at the early history of Scandinavia and the historical background of Beowulf. This time, we’re going to explore the other aspect of Beowulf – the monsters and supernatural elements of the story. And that’s really what fascinates most modern readers. And were going to use Beowulf as ‘jumping off point’ to explore the monsters and mythology of the Anglo-Saxons, as well as the early Vikings. Remember that both groups shared a common Germanic heritage, and that included a lot of mythology. But by the time the Vikings arrived in Britain, the Anglo-Saxons had largely converted to Christianity. So those two world views clashed during that later period.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com. And you can always reach me directly by email at [email protected].

And the Beowulf series is coming along as well. I hope to have it ready within the next 2 to 4 weeks. That series will explore the poem – the story, the history and the language of the poem. But before we move on from Beowulf, there is one key aspect of that poem which I wanted to explore here in the podcast. And that is the way in which the poem reflects the Anglo-Saxon view of monsters and mythology. In fact, as we’ll see, the poem has probably survived the centuries in large part because it is a monster story.

So let’s start with Beowulf – specifically the name Beowulf. It is very tempting to assume that the name Beowulf refers to some type of wolf. In fact, wolf is a very common part of Anglo-Saxon names. It appears in the names of kings like Aethelwulf which was ‘noble wolf.’ It also appears in the name of an early Anglo-Saxon poet who we haven’t discussed yet named Cynewulf. It also appears in the popular Anglo-Saxon name Wulfstan. In fact, this was a common element in Germanic names. We still have it in the German name Wolfgang. And wolf was once the original ending of modern names like Adolph and Rudolph.

So it isn’t surprising that Beowulf uses that same ending. But the name Beowulf is unknown in Anglo-Saxon Britain outside of this particular poem. So it is generally believed that the name is a poetic compound which remember are sometime called ‘kennings.’ The first thing to understand is that wulf didn’t necessarily mean ‘wolf.’ It was often used as a descriptive term to mean ‘hunter.’ So because wolves were considered ravenous hunters, it was just used as a euphemism for hunter.

So if the poet used the term wulf as ‘hunter,’ what was he hunting? In other words, what was beo? Well, it is generally believed that beo meant ‘bee’ as in honeybee. So Beowulf was the ‘bee hunter.’ And what animals hunt honeybees? Well, animals that want honey. Specifically, bears. So Beowulf – or ‘bee hunter’ – is considered to be a poetic compound which meant ‘bear.’ A large, powerful creature which resembles a human, especially when it’s standing on its hind legs. And of course, the character of Beowulf is a man with superhuman strength who grasps monsters with his bare hands and rips their arms off.

33 Now there was also another implied connection between wolves and bears in Germanic mythology. Their warriors were often formed into warbands that are sometimes called ‘wolf cults’ or ‘bear cults.’

Within the early Germanic tribes, powerful leaders emerged which supported by loyal groups of warriors. The warriors were bound together by sworn allegiances to the common leader. And those war bands evolved into raiding parties. You might remember that the Romans had built the Saxon Shore defenses along the British coast to deal with raiders from the North Sea long before the Anglo-Saxon invasions began. So these types of raiding bands had been around for a long time. And within the Norse culture, these groups evolved into the early Viking raiding parties.

A term developed within German for these types of warrior bands. The term is Mannerbund which is literally a ‘man bond,’ but it meant a warband of men. Each tribe had one of these warbands to defend it against similar warbands from other tribes. As tribes grew over time, the Mannerbund became the most elite warriors within the tribe. In Old Norse, a member of this group was called a sveinn which is the source of the common Scandinavian name Sven. It is also cognate with the word sib which gives us the modern English word sibling. So these were warbands were like brothers – an early verison of the term ‘band of brothers.’ Now this development wasn’t unique to the Germanic tribes. Even when we looked at the original Indo- Europeans, we saw evidence that they routinely engaged in raiding, and much of that raiding was conducted by similar warbands. And those same types of warbands existed in most early tribal cultures.

But within the early Germanic culture, certain traditions and mythologies began to emerge around those warbands. One of those was the animal cult in which warriors wore animal hides or skins. Sometimes they wore wolf skins, and sometimes they word bear skins. Those warbands followed and worshiped Woden. If they died in battle, they went to his Heavenly Hall in the sky – Valhalla. And in Germanic mythology, Woden had two giant wolves as pets. And in that same mythology, Woden is ultimately destined to be swallowed or consumed by a giant wolf. So these wolf cults derived from the association of the Woden with wolves.

Since they wore wolf skins, they resembled wolves. But there was more to it than that. The warrior cults had very sophisticated and harsh initiation rites. In Germanic mythology, Woden had experienced his own type of initiation when he hanged himself from a tree with a spear wound. So the initiation rites for these new members often included being stabbed by spears and even hanged from trees until the warrior passed out. This was called a ‘little death.’ These initiations were designed to toughen the young warriors and form tight bonds between them. But there was also a mythological component. It was believed that these types of rituals created a special type of war ecstacy. It was designed to develop a special mental state in which they lost all fear and actually became consumed by the battle itself.

34 In addition to wolf cults, there were also bear cults in which members wore bear skins – or ‘bear shirts.’ In Old Norse, a ‘bear shirt’ was a berserkir. And this was the origin of the famous berserkers. And in battle, they worked themselves into such a frenzy that they actually felt that they were invulnerable. And that Old Norse word gave us the modern English word berserk.

That berserker rage was fostered by those early initiation rites. And the wolf cults used the same process and had many of the same beliefs. And it was believed that these warriors could actually transform themselves into wild animals like bears or wolves in battle. They didn’t just fight like wild animals, they actually became wild animals. So there was a spiritual aspect to this process. And it was believed that the man’s soul would actually leave its body, and in its place, a wild animal would take its place. And the soul would return to the body when the fight was over and the animal left.

And this is believed to be the ultimate origin of the concept of the werewolf – literally the ‘man wolf’ – the man who is transformed into a wolf. Werewolves were feared throughout the Germanic world and beyond. And it was tied to this idea of the human soul leaving the body, and it being replaced with that of an animal. And we’ll come back to this concept in a moment.

But I wanted note the connections here between bears and wolves and that name Beowulf. It wasn’t a common name. As I noted, it doesn’t appear in any Old English text other than the poem Beowulf. But remember that it meant ‘bee wolf,’ and it was a compound word which meant ‘bee hunter’ or ‘bear.’ So that name Beowulf had imagery of both wolves and bears. And wolves and bears were closely associated with Germanic and Norse warriors. So there was a implied meaning in that name which isn’t really obvious to modern English speakers.

By the way, the tradition of wearing bear skins was eventually limited to simply wearing bear skin hats. And that tradition spread throughout much of northern Europe. And even to this day, tall bearskin hats are still worn by royal guards in Britain and other European countries. And even if the U.S., marching bands are sometimes led by a drum major who wears a similar bearskin hat, but this tradition can ultimately be traced back to the Germanic tribes and those early ‘bear cults’ and war bands.

Now as I noted, the idea that a soul could leave its body and be replaced by an animal was a fundamental belief within Germanic culture, but sometimes the soul actually took physical form and existed separate from the original body. And the one thing you didn’t want to do if your soul had left your body was to meet the other version of yourself. If you did, it was a considered to be a premonition of death. Sometimes the soul took the appearance of a woman. This was common in the northern tradition. In one later Icelandic saga, a man named Thorgils is riding with his men to the assembly called the Thing. Along the way, he meets a large woman who starts screaming at him and his men. As he approaches her, she dodges around him. And he doesn’t realize it at the time, but the woman is really his disembodied soul in the form of a woman. And soon afterward, Thorgils is killed by an ax.

35 So that’s the northern tradition, but in the southern Germanic regions, it was more common for the disembodied soul to appear as a clone who looked just like the original person. We actually have the German word for this clone’scenario in Modern English. It is the word Doppelgänger – which is literally ‘double goer.’ And this idea of an alter-ego has passed down into European literature. And we still have a version of it in modern TV, movies and literature with the idea of the evil twin.

And these ideas of the disembodied soul and the doppelganger are found in many later Scandinavian sources. And in some of those stories, we can actually find similarities and parallels to Beowulf. And scholars think that some of those Scandinavian stories and the Beowulf story actually share some common roots. It is unlikely that the later Scandinavian stories were actually influenced by the Beowulf poem itself because Beowulf was composed in Britain, and there are not any references to the poem within Britain during the Old English period or even the Middle English period. So any similarities between Beowulf and the Scandinavian stories had to have come from an earlier common source.

One Danish legend which is believed by many to derive from the same roots as Beowulf is the story of Hrólf Kraki – a Danish king who is believed to be same person as Hrothulf in Beowulf. In both stories, he is identified as the nephew of the old Danish king Hrothgar. He is also identified as the nephew of Hrothgar in that poem Widsith which I discussed in an earlier episode. So he is well-documented. But he is only mentioned in passing in Beowulf and Wisdith. But in this later Danish legend, he is the actual focus of the story.

In the Danish legend, the nephew is now the King of the Danes having succeeded his uncle at some point. And he finds himself in battle with his brother-in-law who is trying to seize the throne. And the legend says that the king’s bravest fighter was named Bodvar Bjarki. And many scholars think that this figure of Bjarki is derived form the same original source as the character of Beowulf. So we might say that the two characters are cognate in the sense that they both may have derived from the same original legendary figure. And that is because there are some strong parallels between the two stories. Just as Beowulf fights on behalf of the Danish King Hrothgar against several monsters, Bjarki fights on behalf of the Danish king Hrolf against the people who are trying to usurp the throne. And there are also parallels in the names – Beowulf and Bjarki. We established that Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon compound word which meant ‘bee-hunter’ or ‘bear.’ Well, the name Bjarki means ‘little bear.’ So Beowulf and Bjarki actually have the same meaning.

But there is more to it than that. In the Danish legend, in the decisive battle against the usurpers, a bear suddenly appears beside the king Hrolf, and the bear decimates the opposing fighters in much the same way that Beowulf decimates his opponents in the Beowulf poem. But at the exact same moment that the bear appears, Bjarki disappears. And he is found sitting in the hall tired and sleepy. He is encouraged to join the battle, but when he does so, the bear disappears and the tide of the battle ends up shifting to the other side.

36 So in this story, we not only see a possible connection to the Beowulf story, we also see an apparent example of a warrior taking the form of a wild animal. And in the process, we see the soul of the warri=0or becoming disembodied and forming a type of doppelganger. So these ideas were a fundamental part of the Germanic warrior culture.

These ideas also persist in modern ghost stories which sometimes describe an image of a person appearing in one place around the same time that the person dies in a completely different place.

The idea of a disembodied soul also exists in the German word Geist which was originally a soul that had been dispatched by sorcery and appeared in a frightful form. Old English had its own version of the word Geist which was gast, and that word survives in Modern English as the word ghost.

That German version of the word gave us poltergeist, literally a ‘noisy ghost.’ But German also developed a more general sense of the term meaning the part of person’s nature or inner being that we can’t see or touch. So it basically meant a person’s spirit. And in that context, it gave us the word zeitgeist which is literally “time spirit” or “spirit of the age,” basically the general attitude or spirit of a group of people during a particular time period.

And very much like German, English also developed a more general sense of that term.

Now since gast typically referred to a scary spirt, it produced words like aghast, originally meaning ‘terrified.’ And it also produced ghastly which meant ‘frightening.’

Beowulf also uses the term gast to refer to the monster Grendel. Early in the poem, he is referred to as “se ellen gæst,” which is literally ‘the bold ghost’ or ‘the bold spirit.’ And later, he is referred to as “se grimma gæst,” literally ‘the grim ghost’ or ‘the grim spirit.’

So as we’ve seen, the Germanic tribes routinely mixed supernatural elements into their warrior culture. And like many ancient cultures, they both feared and embraced the supernatural. And they tried to control it. They relied upon magical rites to ensure good luck and good fortune. Magical rituals were also used for protection against diseases and to cure diseases. This type of magic is commonly known as sorcery, but the words magic and sorcery are both French words brought to Britain by the Normans.

The Anglo-Saxons used other words to describe this process of using magic to control the world around them. One word was drycræft derived from the name of the native Celtic druids who routinely conducted magical rituals. So drycræft was the craft or skill of the druids.

And in an earlier episode, I mentioned that a song could be enchanting and could send someone into a trance-like state. And a song was sometimes called a gale as in nightingale. So another Old English word for ‘magic’ or ‘sorcery’ was galdor-cræft which meant the ‘singing craft.’

37 Of course, drycræft and galdor-cræft have both disappeared from English, but there was another Old English word for ‘sorcery’ which has survived into Modern English. That word was wiccecræft – or witchcraft today. As its name suggests, witchcraft was the craft of the wicce or the wicca. The female version was wicce and the male version was wicca. The ultimate origin of those words is uncertain, but they were apparently derived from a common Germanic word because similar forms of those words appear in other Germanic languages. The original Germanic word had the ‘K’ sound near the end as in the male version wicca – spelled W-I-C-C-A. But the ending changed for a female. It became W-I-C-C-E. And remember that in Old English, the sound of the letter C changed when it appeared before a front vowel like E. It shifted from its original ‘K’ sound to the ‘CH’ sound. That goes back to our discussion of the letter C. So when the ending of the word changed, from A to E, the pronunciation of the letter C changed from /k/ to /ch/. So from wicca (/wee-kah/) to wicce (/wee-cheh/). But again, those are just the male and female versions of the same word.

In recent decades, there has actually been a revival of some of these pagan beliefs and traditions. There are modern-day practitioners of what is known as wicca. And that term was actually borrowed from the original Old English word wicca. And the practitioners still call themselves witches.

And wicca also produced the Modern English word wicked. So a ‘wicked witch’ is really kind of redundant.

Another example of this same type of sound shift can be found in the words wake and watch. Both come from the same root word. Wake retains the original ‘K’ sound of the Old English word wacan meaning to ‘arise or awake.’ If you were a guard, you had to stay awake at night to keep an eye on any threatening activity. This state of being awake was called wæcce, and it produced the Modern English word watch as in to ‘keep watch.’ So the same vowel change at the end of the word produced that same sound change.

Now I gave the example of wake and watch for a reason. Some scholars think that all four of those words – wicca, witch, wake and watch – are all derived from the same root word. And the proposed connection is the fact that witchcraft sometimes involved waking the dead. So wacan was ‘to become awake,’ and wiccian was ‘to practice witchcraft.’

And if that connection seems a little odd, when someone died, it was customary to have a wake when someone would stay awake and keep watch for the dead spirits. So wake and watch had an inherent association with death and dead bodies. So that is one theory regarding the origin of wicca and witch.

Another word for a witch in Old English was hægtesse. It ultimately produced the modern word hag as in ‘an old hag.’ But there is something very interesting about that word hægtesse. The first part – hæg – is cognate with and closely related to the word hedge. The second part – tesse – is believed to mean fairy or flying demon. Both Old Norse and Old High German also had similar words. And they all literally translate as ‘hedge-flyer’ or ‘hedge-rider.’ So it’s someone who flies

38 or rides along the hedges which is very similar to the later notions of witches flying around on brooms.

By the way, since we’re talking about witches, I should note that the Medieval Latin word for ‘witch’ was masca. And it ultimately produced the word mascoto meaning a ‘charm or sorcery.’ And that word came into English as mascot meaning a ‘person or thing which brings good luck.’ So if you have a favorite sports team, the mascot isn’t just a person dressed in a funny costume. It was originally a good luck charm. And the word mascot is derived from a Latin word meaning sorcerer or witch. But let’s go back to Old English.

And obviously, the word witch has survived from Old English, but the male version wicca didn’t survive, except as the name for the modern pagan religion. The word wicca gradually gave way to the word wizard in Middle English. And the root of wizard should be familiar to you if you listened to the most recent bonus episode. Wizard developed in Middle English out of the word wise. A wizard was a ‘wise’ person .The original sense of the word survives when we describe someone as a ‘wizard’ at math or science. It also survives in the term whiz as in ‘whiz kid.’ But over time, the term wizard took on a more specific meaning. The wisdom of the wizard was reflected in his ability to see into the future, and this ultimately led to the sense of the word as someone who possessed magical or supernatural powers.

Another word for a male witch is warlock. And warlock is also ultimately derived from Old English, but it didn’t mean a male witch until about the sixteenth century. Warlock originally meant an ‘oath breaker’ in Old English. War was originally wær, and it meant ‘oath or vow.’ And lock is derived from the same Germanic word which gives us the words lie and liar. So a warlock was an ‘oath liar’ or ‘oath breaker.’ By the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, it was being used as a euphemism for the Devil. From there, it came to mean someone who was in league with the devil – in other words, a sorcerer or wizard.

Now initially, witchcraft was an accepted practice. But as Christianity spread, the two belief systems started to come into conflict. I’ve noted in earlier episodes that King Alfred – known as Alfred the Great – was one of the most important figures in the history of English. He was the Anglo-Saxon king from Wessex who finally stemmed the tide of the Viking invasions. He secured the homeland of the Anglo-Saxons, and he put a major emphasis on preserving the English language. But Alfred never ruled all of England. The Danish descendants of the Vikings still controlled the area known as the Danelaw in eastern and northern England. So Alfred signed a treaty with the Danish king there. We’ll look at these developments in more detail in a future episode. But for now, it is important to understand that that treaty required the Danish king to convert to Christianity. And together, Alfred and the Danish king issued a set of laws which theoretically covered all of England – the English regions and the Danish regions. And those laws were some of the first laws to specially outlaw witchcraft.

Issued around the year 890, the law reads as follows in Modern English: “If witches or diviners, perjurers or morth-workers, or foul, defiled, notorious adulteresses, be found anywhere within the land; let them be driven from the country, and the people cleansed, or let them totally perish within the country, unless they desist, and the more deeply make bot (ie., ‘make amends or

39 reparations’).” By the way, bot largely disappeared from English in this sense, but it still survives in the phrase ‘to boot’ meaning ‘moreover, ’ as in “My car wouldn’t start, and I missed the train to boot.”

Now these particular laws against witchcraft applied specifically to women – not men. So it applied to witches, but not wicca, or wizards or warlocks. And it reflected an attempt by the Christian authorities to weed out witchcraft. We’ve seen before that a standard test for identifying a witch was called an ordeal. That was an old Germanic term, and it gave us the modern English word ordeal meaning a difficult experience. One type of ordeal was placing a suspected witch’s hand in hot water to see if blisters occurred. And that is the ultimate origin of the phrase ‘to be in hot water’ or ‘find yourself in hot water’ to mean ‘get into trouble.’

Now I noted that Alfred’s Laws used the word bot, which exists today in the phrase ‘to boot.’ But those laws also used another term which you probably have never heard before – the term was morth-workers. Specifically, the law says that it applies to “witches or diviners, perjurers or morth-workers.”

Well, morth was an Old English word which meant ‘death.’ So the term morth-worker meant someone who worked or consulted with the dead. Basically it meant a ‘spiritualist.’ And that might make sense because we have words like mortal and morbid in Modern English which also relate to death. And all of those words are cognate. But mortal and morbid come from the Latin version of the word which we got from French. Morth was the Germanic version of the same Indo-European root word.

In Old English, when a person was killed unlawfully, it was morðor. It didn’t become murder until the Normans arrived because their version of the same word was mordre. And that ultimately gave us the modern English version of the word – murder.

And since we’re taking about death, I should note that the words death and dead came from Old English where they had essentially the same spelling and meaning. But the word die (D-I-E) was borrowed from the Vikings which had a related but slightly different word. And to describe the process of dying, the Anglo-Saxons sometimes used the word steorfan which ultimately gave as the modern word starve.

So we’ve seen that witchcraft was associated with raising the dead – and also with conjuring the spirits of the dead. Well, it was also believed that witches could imposes curses. And one specific type of curse which Anglo-Saxons feared the most was a curse on livestock. Since healthy livestock was a key to survival, any threat to the health or well-being of livestock was taken very seriously. In Old English, a curse on livestock was called a blasting. And if something was blasted, it was cursed or blighted. That word still survives in the word blast, and the connection appears to be the fact that curses were often imposed by a blowing or puffing action in the direction of the person or thing being cursed. So today, we tend to use the word blast in the sense of an explosion, but the original use of the word in the sense of a curse has survived in one context where it refers to someone who is not in their normal state of mind. So when we

40 say that someone who is drunk or stoned is ‘blasted,’ we’re using the term in a way that is based on its original meaning.

Now to counter-act a ‘blasting’ or curse, people would burn a fire to ward off evil spirits. In Old English, the fire was called a neidfyre. They would also sometimes take blood from sick cows or other livestock, and boil it to get rid of the curse or evil spirits.

Now the Anglo-Saxons not only thought livestock diseases was caused by curses, they also thought sickness in general was caused by evil spirits who literally sucked the health out of animals and people. This was an old Germanic belief that was actually common in many parts of Europe. It ultimately led to the idea of the vampire, the creature that sucks the blood of the living.

There are some scholars who actually believe that suck and sick are ultimately cognate. They argue that the word sick derives from the same word which produced suck because sickness was thought to result from demon sucking.

One type of sickness which was believed to be caused by evil spirits was mental sickness or insanity. The Old English word for ‘insane’ was gidig – a word which still exists in modern English, but today it means silly, foolish or impulsive. In Old English, gidig had an underlying sense of being possessed by spirits. This belief wasn’t unique to the Anglo-Saxons, however. The Greeks had the same general idea which was called entheos and meant ‘God inside’ or ‘possessed by God.’ It later produced the words enthusiasm and enthusiastic. So enthusiastic and giddy both originally meant ‘possessed by spirits or God.’

It was also believed that evil spirits possessed people while they were sleeping. This type of spirit was called a mare. By the time of Middle English, that word mare was used to describe the experience of being possessed by an evil spirit while sleeping. It was called a ni¥t-mare, or as we know it today, a nightmare.

And shortly after the Normans arrived, they gave English two other words for a demon or spirit which appears while someone is sleeping. Those words were incubus and succubus – both of which first appeared in English within a century of so after the Norman Conquest.

Another word for an evil spirit is a demon which is another word that came into English via Latin and the Normans, and ultimately from Greek. And it was another very early borrowing from Latin in the first century after the Normans arrived. So apparently English speakers were intrigued by these new words for evil spirits. The Anglo-Saxons had called an evil spirit a deofol – or ‘devil.’ They also called it a fiend which still exists in Modern English. In fact, fiend was the preferred term used by the Beowulf poet. He called Grendel a ‘fiend from Hell.’

Now I mentioned that spirits sometimes took over the body at night or appeared in dreams at night. Well, the word dream has a strange history. The use of the word dream as ‘a vision one has while sleeping’ goes back to the early Middle English period, but it wasn’t a new word at that time. The word dream is also well-attested in Old English. But during the Old English period, it

41 was always used to mean ‘joy, merriment or music.’ And scholars are not sure why the meaning changed from ‘joy’ in Old English’ to ‘sleeping visions’ in early Middle English.

One theory is that the Anglo-Saxons did also use the word dream to refer to ‘sleeping visions,’ but that use simply doesn’t exist in the surviving texts which we have today. So it might have been a secondary meaning which isn’t really documented in the surviving Old English manuscripts.

The other theory is that the modern sense of the word came from the Vikings. As we’ve seen before, the Vikings brought their own words which were often very similar to the native Old English words. And sometimes the Norse version of the word replaced the English version. Old Norse had the word draumr which meant ‘ an illusion or deception,’ and it’s believed that this led to the modern use of the word dream which is something that seems real, but really isn’t.

But that Norse word draumr was cognate with another Norse word – draugr. And that word is important to our discussion because it meant a ‘ghost or apparition.’ So again, it meant something that seemed like a real person, but wasn’t a real person.

Within Scandinavian folklore, the term draugr could mean a ghost, but it was also used to mean an animated corpse. It was a dead person who had a grievance and roamed around at night seeking vengeance. So think zombies and Walking Dead. But unlike a zombie, a draugr could speak, and it was usually angry.

Another type of animated corpse was a vampire which is a Slavic word meaning ‘witch.’ And the most famous vampire is Dracula. So was Dracula a draugr? Well, they’re both living corpses, but despite the similar names, there doesn’t appear to be a linguistic connection between Dracula and draugr.

However, Dracula is cognate with the word dragon. And dragon takes us back to Beowulf because a dragon was one of the three creatures or monsters featured in the story. So I want to transition from our look at Anglo-Saxon spirits and witches and sorcery, and I want to turn to Anglo-Saxon monsters. Because, ultimately, Beowulf is a good old-fashioned monster story.

And in fact, that may be why the poem survived all of those centuries. Many scholars today think that the poem may have been preserved primarily because it was a monster story. The manuscript which contains Beowulf actually contains five different texts. Beowulf is the fourth text in the book. Unfortunately, parts of the first and last text are missing, presumably due to wear and tear over the centuries before the book was rescued from that fire in Sir Robert Cotton’s library in the eighteenth century. The first three texts are all prose pieces, so they’re written in normal Old English speech – not poetry. And based upon the particular handwriting styles and scripts used by the scribes, scholars have determined that all three of those texts were copied by the same scribe. The next text – the fourth text – was Beowulf, and that same scribe copied the first two-thirds of that poem. But then, a second scribe took over. The last portion of the Beowulf poem and what survives of the fifth and final text was written by this second scribe. He used a distinct script, and he had a different handwriting style. And his spellings were sometimes different from those of the

42 first scribe. But here is the key. All four of the works which the first scribe copied, the first four texts in the book, including the majority of Beowulf, all concerned monsters or unusual creatures.

The first text is a life of St. Christopher who is described as having a dog’s head and being almost twenty feet tall. The next text is called The Wonders of the East, and it also contains many monsters, including dragons. The third text is entitled Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, and it describes a great battle between men and water monsters. And then we have Beowulf and his battles against monsters and dragons. The final piece is a fragment of a poem called Judith, and it’s really the only work which doesn’t specifically concern monsters, but it was also added by that second scribe. So it isn’t clear if it was originally intended to part of the collection. So some scholars have concluded that either the first scribe or perhaps both scribes selected those first four works for preservation because they were all about monsters. And it is also believed that that may be why the manuscript survived the centuries.

For some reason, this particular manuscript was selected for safe-keeping when so many other Old English texts were burned and destroyed over the centuries. And it may have been kept by various collectors over the years because of its association with monsters.

In fact, there is an interesting connection here between the Beowulf manuscript and another book compiled by Anglo-Saxon scribes called Liber Monstrorum which is Latin for ‘Book of Monsters.’ As its name indicates, it is a catalogue of monsters and marvelous creatures, and it was composed in Britain. But as was the general custom, it was written in Latin. It is believed that the book was originally composed in the late 600s or early 700s. So as we’ve seen before, this is the same general time frame in which many scholars think Beowulf was originally composed. It’s in that narrow window after the introduction of Christianity and before the arrival of the Vikings. The original Liber Monstrorum was copied several times over the centuries.

And the book purports to be a summary of all the monsters and creatures known to the author during his time. The basic idea of the summary is to determine whether the monsters are actually real or not. Mixed in with the monsters and supernatural creatures are real life creatures in far away lands which the author had heard about, but couldn’t confirm. It includes a description of an elephant and a Rhinoceros, among other animals who lived in far away places. So it is fascinating to see the writings of an author who has heard stories of all of these creatures, but he can’t discern which ones are real and which one are just legends. In the end, since the author can’t always verify the status of the creatures, he leaves it up to the reader the decide if they’re real or not. So what’s the potential connection with Beowulf?

Well, as I noted, the Liber Monstrorum was a book about monsters which was compiled in Britain around the same time that Beowulf was probably composed. But more significantly, the text specifically mentions Hygelac, who you might remember was Beowulf’s uncle and King of the Geats in the Beowulf poem. I briefly discussed Hygelac in the last episode. He was the king who led a raid against the Franks in Frisia and was killed in the battle. Well, in that episode, I noted that this raid is mentioned in several other historical sources from around the same time period. And I also noted that there was some confusion as to whether Hygelac was a Geatish King or a Danish King. Almost all of the other historical sources say that he was a Danish king. But there

43 are two sources – and only two sources – that say he was King of the Geats. One of those sources is Beowulf and the other source is the Liber Monstorum.

So in the Liber Monstrorum, we have a text that was likely composed around the same time as Beowulf, and it mentions this obscure Scandinavian figure Hygelac like Beowulf does, and it describes him as a Geat like Beowulf does, and those are the only two known texts to do that. So all of these similarities have led some scholars to conclude that the Liber Monstrorum may have been composed in the same scriptorium by the same scribes who composed Beowulf. Unfortunately, there is no way to prove any of that, but it is possible that a group of scribes somewhere in Britain in the late 600s or early 700s decided to collect and compile a bunch of stories about monsters, and both of these surviving manuscripts may have been part of that original collection.

And that takes us back to a more fundamental question. Where did the story of Beowulf come from? It seems very likely that the poet who composed the poem pulled from earlier legends and stories. And it appears that those original stories also passed into the oral tradition of the Scandinavian people, and they were captured in writing many centuries later when the Norse tribes became fully literate.

Earlier I mentioned the Danish legend of Hrólf Kraki which has some similarities to the Beowulf story and mentions some of the same historical figures mentioned in Beowulf. It also contains a brave fighter was named Bodvar Bjarki who may have some connections to the character of Beowulf. So some scholars think there may have been an original Scandinavian story or legend which inspired both of those stories.

But there is an even more striking parallel to Beowulf in another Scandinavian legend. An old Icelandic Saga from around the year 1300 has some amazing similarities with the story of Grendel and Grendel’s mother in Beowulf. So let me give you a summary of the two stories. And see if you can notice the similarities.

Let’s begin with a quick summary of the first two-thirds of Beowulf.

Hrothgar is king of the Danes, and he directs the construction of a great mead hall called Heorot. Every night the hall is filled with revelry, and a monster named Grendel who lives in a nearby lake is driven to rage. One night, Grendel barges in and attacks the men in the hall and kills thirty of the men inside. Grendel returns over and over again and kills more of the Danes for several years.

Meanwhile, in the land of the Geats, a brave and noble prince named Beowulf hears of the attacks. He prepares a ship and travels with a group of men to the land of the Danes. When they arrive, they are escorted to meet Hrothgar. Beowulf offers to assist the Danish king by killing the monster.

That night, Beowulf and his men remain in the hall after everyone else leaves. Grendel storms into the hall ripping the door from its hinges. He seizes and kills a sleeping warrior and drinks his blood and consumes his body, but Beowulf seizes Grendel’s arm. The two begin to grapple and

44 fight. Beowulf eventually rips off Grendel’s arm which the poet describes as ‘burston bánlocan’ - ‘bursting bone locks.’ Grendel is mortally wounded and flees from the hall back to the lake. Beowulf then places the severed arm above the mead hall door.

Back at the lake, Grendel’s mother discovers her dead son, and she vows to avenge his death. A few nights later, she travels to the mead hall where the Danes were sleeping. Beowulf was still there, but he had been given lodging at a different location. So Grendel’s mother makes her way inside the mead hall, and she unleashes a fierce attack upon the sleeping Danes. And she kills one of Hrothgar’s warriors.

Hrothgar and Beowulf soon arrive to see the death and destruction, but Grendel’s mother has already fled. So Beowulf decides to pursue her and kill her as well. They travel to the lake or mere where she lives which is full of snakes and serpents. Beowulf jumps in the water. He swims for most of the day before he finally reaches the bottom.

Grendel’s mother senses Beowulf’s presence, and she reaches out and grabs him. She pulls him to her lair where sea creatures began to attack him. The fight continues for a while before he finally finds a massive sword. He swings the sword at Grendel’s mother and strikes her neck killing her. The poet uses the phrase ‘ban-hringas braec’ – ‘bone rings broke.’ The men who had gathered by the shore see blood bubbling up from the bottom. And they assume it is Beowulf’s blood, and they leave.

Meanwhile, Beowulf, who is still in the lake, comes across Grendel’s lifeless body and cuts off his head. Beowulf then swims back to the top of the lake when Grendel’s head in tow. And that concludes the second of the three battles in the Beowulf poem.

Now by comparison, here’s a summary of a portion of the Icelandic Grettis Saga:

A female monster is threatening a farmstead. After each visit by the monster, a man is missing. One night, the mistress of the house leaves for church, and a man named Grettir stays behind in the main hall to see what type of creature is stalking the farm. Grettir barricades himself in the hall and lies down to rest. The monster arrives and Grettir is attacked. The two begin to fight, and the fight extends outside to a deep gorge with a waterfall by a river. Grettir finally cuts off the monster’s right arm with a knife. She then falls down into the water fall. Later, Grettir tells the parish priest what happened. The priest doubts the story, so Grettir takes the priest to the waterfall. There is a cave behind the waterfall. So Grettir jumps into the water and reaches the cave. A giant is sitting beside a great fire burning inside the cave.

The giant jumps up and lunges at Grettir and the two begin to fight. The giant reaches for a sword hanging on the wall of the cave. As he does, Grettir seizes the opportunity and finally kills the monster. The priest back on shore sees gore rushing in the water, and he thinks it is Grettir’s blood, so he gets scared and runs away. Grettir then returns to land, and he accuses the priest of not being faithful.

45 Now as you can probably tell, the basic events of both stories are the same. And even some of the details are the same. The hero cutting off the arm of the monster in the first battle. The sword which appears at during the second battle. The blood which fills the water. The witnesses standing by the water who leave before the hero returns.

It is unlikely that all these similar details were the product of a coincidence. Most scholars today agree that both of these stories were influenced by common legend which must have been floating around Scandinavia, and which ultimately passed to Britain, possibly with the early Anglo-Saxon migrations.

In the last portion of Beowulf, after he has returned home to the land of the Geats, a dragon is awakened by a thief who steals a cup from a treasure horde which the dragon was guarding. The dragon retaliates going on a rampage throughout the land of the Geats killing people and destroying houses. Beowulf, who by now has been the King of the Geats for many years, goes off to fight the dragon. Ultimately, Beowulf slays the dragon with the help of a loyal thane, but not before receiving a fatal bite from the dragon. Beowulf dies, and his body is burned in a large funeral pyre.

The origin of this last part of the story is difficult to pinpoint with any certainty. And that’s because fights against dragons and serpents were very common in Germanic folklore. One common belief was that the world inhabited by humans – the Middle Garden or Middle Earth – was surrounded by a primordial ocean, sort of like a large moat encircling the Earth. Remember, they didn’t understand that Earth was a planet. To them, it was more like a large island. And beyond that island, was the circular ocean. And beyond that ocean was the outer world which was inhabited by giants and other creatures. But in that ocean which separated humans from monsters was a huge serpent which had been cast there by the gods. That same mythology purports to describe how the world will one day end in a great battle. Thor will end up fighting that giant serpent, and Thor will kill it with his famous hammer. So some scholars think that Thor’s legendary battle with the giant serpent may have been an ultimate source for some of these later tales which describe battles against dragons.

But dragons and serpents weren’t just Anglo-Saxons creatures. They are found in the folklore and literature of many ancient cultures. So their ultimate origin is much deeper and much more ancient than the Germanic tribes. The word dragon is actually a Greek word which meant ‘serpent or sea monster.’ The word was later borrowed by the Romans. And English borrowed it from Latin twice. The first time was before English was English, back when the Anglo-Saxons were still living on the continent. During that period, the word was borrowed by the early Germanic tribes from the Romans. So Old English had the word as draca. And that’s the version of the word used in Beowulf.

Later, after the Normans arrived in 1066, English borrowed the French version of the word – which was spelled exactly like the Modern English version - D-R-A-G-O-N. So that word hasn’t changed for nearly 1,000 years.

46 By the time of Old English, the concept of the dragon had evolved from its original notion as a serpent or sea creature to the more modern notion of a flying creature who could breathe fire. When the Anglo-Saxons wanted to describe a more traditional sea serpent, they would use the term sæ-draca – "sea dragon." Sometimes that it would call it a sæ-deor which is literally a ‘sea- deer’ which seems odd today, but in Old English deer was a generic term for a wild animal. And in case you were curious, Old English had a different term for the animal we know today as a deer. It was called a heorot which by the way is the name of that mead hall built by Hrothgar where Beowulf battled Grendel. And that’s because the name of the hall meant “Hall of the Deer’ in Old English.

Of course, today we don’t use the phrase ‘sea-dragon’ or ‘sea-deer.’ Instead, we tend to use either serpent or snake. Snake is the older Old English word – snaca – and Old Norse has a very similar version of the word. But serpent is the Latin word borrowed from French immediately after the Normans arrived. The two words are not related though. They each come from different Indo- European root words, though both root words had the same meaning – to crawl or creep. The original root of snake also produced snail and sneak which also relate to creeping or crawling.

Similarly, asp and adder both mean a snake, but they also are not related. Asp is the Latin word from Old French, and adder is the Old English word. But again, they are not cognate.

Adder is actually one of my favorite words because it’s modern form is the product of linguistic confusion. The Old English version of the word was næddre – and in some modern dialects of Northern England it is still pronounced as nedder. So if you had one nadder, you had ‘a nadder.’ But over time, people became confused – and they though it was ‘an adder.’ So they thought the ‘N’ was part of the article, not part of the noun. So basically, the ‘N’ was shifted forward from the noun nadder to the article, and ‘A’ became ‘an.’ And so it became ‘an adder.’ The same thing also happened with words like apron which was originally napron. And the same with the word umpire which was originally French noumper.

Old English also had some other words for monsters which have long-since disappeared. A wretched creature was sometimes called an arming. A giant was called an ettin. Old English also had the word orc which meant a devouring monster. The source of the word is uncertain, but it is often connected to the Latin word ogre which had a similar meaning.

JRR Tolkien revived the word orc, and he often used it as a another word for goblin. It also appears to be the root of the word orca for a type of whale – specifically a killer whale – another type of sea creature.

Another type of sea creature in Old English was a nicor. It was originally a water monster. And in fact the Beowulf poet uses the term nicor to describe Grendel’s mother at the bottom of the lake. Nicor is cognate with the word nixie which is a water fairy. Nixie is actually very late borrowing from German. The Scottish poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott first used the term in English in the early 1800s. But it also came in through the Brothers Grimm around the same time. One of their stories was ‘The Nixie of the Mill-Pond.’

47 Another Germanic creature that found its way into the works of Tolkien and the Brothers Grimm was the troll. Troll is actually an Old Norse word, and in fact it still retains its original spelling and pronunciation. The word was deposited by the Vikings in the islands north of Britain and existed there from the Viking period. But it didn’t enter general English until the 1800s – thanks to the works of the Brothers Grimm and other authors of the period.

Another Old Norse word which is directly related to monsters, goblins and witches is the word ugly which originally meant ‘frightful or horrible in appearance.’ I noted in an early episode that our modern ending ‘-ly’ – L-Y – is derived from the word like. Well, ugly was originally uglike – ug-like. And it eventually became ugly.

And before I conclude, I should note that Old French gave us the word monster – another word borrowed from the Normans within the first century after they arrived in Britain. It was derived from the Latin word monere which meant to ‘warn or remind.’ So that makes monster cognate with the word monitor. Since the original Latin word also meant ‘to remind,’ it also makes monster cognate with ‘monument.’ It is also related to admonish and premonition. That Latin word monere was used for the name of the Goddess Juno Moneta, and her name gave us words like money and mint, so that makes those words cognate with monster as well. Monstrosity and demonstrate are also derived from the same Latin roots. And if we trace those same Indo- European roots back to Greek, we get words like manic, mania, maniac and maniacal. And even the word mantis in ‘praying mantis’ goes back to that same Greek root. So all of those words are connected to the Modern English word monster. They all come in via Greek, Latin and French.

So as we’ve gone though all of the names for these various creatures, you should have noticed an underlying theme. English has generously borrowed the names of monsters and creatures from other languages. And as always, the three main sources of these words are Old English, Old Norse and Old French. So within these words, we can get a sense of how these three languages blended together.

And as we move forward, the next four centuries of our history is really the story of how these three languages blended together to form Middle English and Modern English.

And having looked at the history of Old English and Old Norse up to the end of the eighth century, we have to briefly turn our attention to the third leg of that tripod – Old French. So next time, we’re going to explore how Old French emerged Latin. And we’ll also explore the rise of Charlemagne and the Carolingians – and the evolution from the Frankish kingdom to France. And you might be surprised how much the developments there impacted modern English. And with the conclusion of the next episode, we can then turn our attention back to Britain and the Viking Invasions of the ninth century.

So until then, thanks for listening to the History of English Podcast.

48 EPISODE 44: THE ROMANCE OF OLD FRENCH

Welcome to the History of English Podcast - a podcast about the history of the English language. This is Episode 44 - The Romance of Old French. In this episode, we’re going to explore the development of Old French from the Latin spoken by the Romans. Together with Old English and Old Norse, French was one of the three fundamental components of Middle English. So those three languages came together to produce the language of Geoffrey Chaucer, and eventually the language of Shakespeare.

Over the last few episodes, we’ve explored the history of the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians up the point of the Viking invasions. This time, I want to focus on the third part of that story – the Franks and the early history of their French language.

Even though this is a podcast about the history of English, I think it is important to digress as this point to explore the development of French. This part of the story is important for several reasons. As we know, the later Norman Conquest brought a lot of French words into English. Nearly half of the words in normal conversational English come from French. This influence makes English the most Latin of all the Germanic languages. So that alone should justify our look at the early history of French. But French also affected the pronunciation of certain words in English, and it even affected the grammar of English. And it heavily impacted the spelling of English words. So because of that extensive influence, it is important to understand the origins of French.

It is also important to understand how the Frankish kingdom developed into early France. In the same way that English is the most Latin of all the Germanic languages, we can make a similar statement about French. French is considered to be most Germanic of all of the Latin-derived Romance languages. And that’s because the Franks were a Germanic tribe closely related to the Anglo-Saxons. So the Germanic language of the Franks actually had a significant influence on the development of Old French. And we’ve seen in earlier episodes how French brought Frankish words into English that were closely related to Anglo-Saxon words. For example, yard is a native Anglo-Saxon word. Garden is the Frankish word from French. Similarly, ward and warden are Anglo-Saxons words, but guard and guardian are the Frankish equivalents from Old French. So there are deep connections between English and French which might not be obvious at first glance.

But there is another reason why this period of French history is important to our story of English, and that is the common shared influence of that other language – Old Norse. As we’re going to see, the history of the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks, and the Scandinavians becomes more and more intertwined as we move forward. And the common link between those the three groups is the Normans.

We know that the Normans were from Normandy in northern France. And we know that they spoke French. And they brought their French language with them to England in 1066. But here’s the thing you might not know. The Normans weren’t native to France . They were originally Vikings from Scandinavia. Just as the Danes settled in eastern Britain and created a region called the Danelaw, the Normans did basically the same thing in France. They were originally the

49 ‘North Men’ – the people from the North – in Scandinavia. And the term ‘North Men’ was later shortened to Normans.

And that is actually a very important point in the overall history of English. The Normans not only brought French to England, but they also brought some Norse influence as well. So Norman French was largely Latin, but it had some of the Germanic influence of the Franks, and it also had some of the Scandinavian influence of the Vikings. And that language became mixed with the Old English of the Anglo-Saxons and the Old Norse of the Danes in Danelaw. So you can start to see how incredibly mixed the languages became during this upcoming period.

Take a word like harness which you put on a horse. It’s a Scandinavian word from Old Norse. And it is tempting to assume that it came from Danish Vikings who invaded and settled in Britain. But it didn’t. It came from the Normans after 1066. It was an Old Norse word which they had brought with them to northern France. And it survived in their Norman French dialect when they brought it to Britain.

Sometimes linguists can identify an Old Norse word in English, but they can’t identify the source of the word. It’s not always clear if the Norse word came from the Vikings or the Normans. A few episodes back, I mentioned that the word bait is related to the word bite. Bait is an Old Norse word, but linguists aren’t sure if it came from the Vikings or the Normans. It doesn’t appear in English texts until after 1066. So it could have come from either source, and it could have come from both.

So as we move forward in the story of English, we’re going to have an incredible mixing of languages. And sometimes we’ll see sources buried within other sources. But it all revolves around the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans. So having explored the early history of Old English and Old Norse, it’s time to explore the early history of Old French. So let’s turn our attention south across the channel to the area which the Romans called Gaul.

As we know, French is a Romance language. And even though many people consider French to be the language of love, that’s not why it’s called a Romance language. It’s a Romance language because it evolved out of the language of the Romans which of course was Latin. French is one of several Romance languages, including Spanish, Italian, Portugese and Rumanian. But despite their common origins, the modern Romance languages sometimes have very distinct sounds. Most people can easily distinguish the sound of French from the sound of Spanish, even if they’ve never studied a Romance language. And as we’ll see, some of those difference were present from the very beginning.

The first thing to understand is that there is a great deal which is not known about the early development of the Romance languages. Scholars tend to rely up written evidence to trace the development of early languages if they have that written evidence. And that’s one of the problems we have with the Germanic languages. They weren’t written down until pretty late. English was the earliest attested Germanic language beginning in the early 600s. But believe it or not, written English not only preceded the other Germanic languages, it also preceded the other Romance languages by several centuries. And that may surprise you since the Romans were literate. You

50 may assume that we can therefore trace the early history of the Romance languages from Latin with some precision, but that’s not the case at all. And that’s because there was a fundamental split between the Latin that was spoken and the Latin that was written down.

Through the eighth century, virtually all Latin texts were written in the standard, educated form of Latin which was taught in Roman schools, and in later monastic schools. This is what we know today as ‘Classical Latin.’ But by the late Roman period, that wasn’t necessarily the language being spoken on the ground in many parts of Western Europe. As we know, all languages are constantly evolving, and that was happening to Latin as well. The language that was being spoken on the ground was changing and evolving. These were the Vulgar Latin dialects. Vulgar didn’t mean crude or ugly. It just meant common. So those were the dialects of the common people. But if you were a scribe in the Latin-speaking world, you didn’t write in your local vernacular. You wrote in the proper written language - ‘Classical’ Latin. So as the spoken language evolved, it became more and more distinct from the written version of the language. And since there were no tape recorders, it was only the written version which survived. So that is why much of the early history of French is vague and uncertain. It wasn’t actually written down or documented until it was a completely distinct language.

A good example of this disconnect between written Classical Latin and spoken Vulgar Latin can be seen in the word for ‘horse.’ As I’ve noted in prior episodes, the Indo-European word for ‘horse’ was ekwo, and it produced the Latin word equus. That was the standard Latin word for ‘horse’ in the surviving texts which were written in Classical Latin. And it ultimately produced equine and equestrian in Modern English. But the modern Romance languages don’t really use that word as their primary word for ‘horse.’ They use an altogether different root word which was caballus.

In Classical Latin, it was used – sometimes disdainfully – as a ‘nag’ or ‘work horse,’ but it is the original version of the word for ‘horse’ in Modern French. That word is cheval. Spanish also uses that same Latin word – which is caballo. Portugese, Rumanian, and Italian also use that same root word. And it also found its way into English. It gave us words like cavalry from French and cavalier from Italian. That Latin root word caballus actually comes from an unknown source, it doesn’t appear to be Indo-European at all. Some scholars think it came from a Balkan or Anatolian language. But wherever it came from, it was apparently borrowed very early on, and it became the standard word for ‘horse’ in the local Vulgar Latin dialects as they spread throughout Western Europe. But Classical Latin – the written language – held onto that original word equus. And this in only one small example of the disconnect between the written language and the spoken language throughout the Late Roman period and the early Middle Ages.

Not only was there an early distinction between spoken Latin and written Latin, there were also differences from one region to the next. And those regional differences ultimately led to the modern Romance languages.

But one thing that is interesting about this process is that there were regional differences from the very beginning. It is tempting to assume that a common form of Latin once existed throughout

51 Western Europe, and that the regional differences only began to emerge at a later date. But modern linguists believe that there were never a common uniform language throughout the region.

One of the reasons why there were regional differences is because Latin spread throughout Western Europe at different times. And since languages are always evolving, slightly different versions of Latin entered different places at different times.

The Latin which was spoken when Rome was originally founded was somewhat different from the Latin spoken a few centuries later during the Punic Wars against Hannibal and Carthage. The Punic Wars ultimately led the Romans into Spain around the third century BC. And that was the ultimate origin of Spanish. But Latin continued to evolve. A couple of centuries later, Caesar emerged as the dictator of Rome. And it was Caesar who brought Latin to central and northern Gaul. Over the first couple of centuries AD - or the Common Era - Latin gradually spread throughout Gaul as the Romans came to rule the region. So the Latin of Gaul was a slightly later verison of the Latin which had been brought to Spain a few centuries earlier. The regional differences were minimal at the time, but slight differences early on can lead to big differences down the road.

These early differences between the Latin of Spain and early France can be seen in some incredibly common words in both languages. Even if you’ve never studied Spanish or French, you may know a few common phrases in each language. One of the first phrases which English speakers usually learn is ‘Do you speak English?” That’s kind of an important question, especially if you don’t speak Spanish or French. So you may be familiar with these phrases.

In Spanish, you might ask, “Habla inglés?” And in French you might ask, “Parlez-vouls Anglias?” But even if you don’t know much about those two languages, you might already be aware that Spanish and French use different words to mean ‘speak.’

The Spanish verb is hablar. And the French verb is parler. But if both Spanish and French derived from Latin, why do they have different words for ‘speak.’ Well, the answer lies in this early history of Roman expansion. The Spanish hablar is the older verb which was used in pre- Classical texts. It was in common use when the Romans settled in Spain shortly after the Punic Wars. Roman texts from the period of the Punic Wars show that this was the typical word used in Latin for the verb ‘to speak.’

But after the Punic Wars against Carthage, Rome spread to the east and eventually conquered Greece. And that is when they began to pick up a lot of Greek words. And one of those words was parabole which meant a ‘comparison,’ and it ultimately gives us the English word parable. Well that word passed from Greek into Latin, and it eventually came to mean ‘word.’ And this was the Latin word which was carried into northern Italy and Gaul. And that word became parler in French. So today, French and Italian use that later verb. And that also means that French parler and the English word parable are cognate.

52 Another example of this early division among the Latin dialects can be seen in the respective words for ‘cheese.’ In Spanish, the word for ‘cheese’ is queso. But in French, it is fromage. Well, again, Spanish uses the older noun ,which is actually the Classical Latin noun, but French uses a noun which developed at a later date. And there is an interesting connection here to the English word cheese.

As we saw in an earlier episode, the English word cheese is ultimately derived from the Latin word for ‘cheese’ which was caseus. It was a very early borrowing by the Germanic tribes on the continent. They apparently encountered the early Romans and borrowed that Latin word. And of course, that same Latin word produced the Spanish word queso. Within later English, the ‘K’ sound shifted to the ‘CH’ sound, thereby giving us cheese. So queso and cheese are both derived from the same old Latin word. But over time, Latin developed a term which meant ‘formed or shaped cheese,’ so the type of cheese you might buy in a market. And they actually used the same Latin word which gave us the English word form or formed. And that word was formaticum. Originally, it was a slang word for cheese which was rarely used in written Latin, but it became the more common word in the Vulgar Latin dialects which spread into Gaul. And it produced the French word fromage. So once again, we see that Spanish uses an earlier Latin word, and French uses a later Latin word.

These are just a couple of examples using words or phrases that are familiar to many English speakers. But the larger point here is that there were basic differences between the Latin dialects within the Roman Empire from the very beginning. And those minor differences became more significant over time as the language of each region evolved in its own unique direction.

The early Latin dialect spoken in Gaul is known by linguists as ‘Gallo-Roman.’ So this was the earliest version of the regional dialect that would later become French. Again, this was just a spoken dialect – not a written dialect. Only about one percent (1%) of the population was literate. And again, when they wrote, they wrote in the standard Classical Latin dialect.

Over the first four or five centuries, Latin gradually replaced the native Celtic languages in most of Gaul. And much like English, the native Celtic languages contributed very little to French. Some linguists estimate that about 100 Celtic words survive from the original Celtic-speaking Gauls. And also like English, much of that Celtic influence comes in the form of place names. Just as London is a Celtic name which survives in English, Paris is a Celtic name which survives in French.

And there was one event which occurred during this early period of Gallo-Roman which was destined to confuse English speakers in much later generations. And that was the loss of the ‘H’ sound in Gallo-Roman, and for that matter in most of the Romance languages. The letter ‘H’ became a silent letter, and it’s still silent in Modern French. And a lot of those words passed into English. That’s why words like honor, honest, hour (H-O-U-R), and heir (H-E-I-R) all have those silent H’s at the beginning. They’re all Latin words which passed through Gallo-Roman and lost their ‘H’ sound in the process.

53 But those silent H’s sometimes confused later English speakers. So today, do you pronounce H-E- R-B – the plant – as /herb/ or /erb/? Well, it probably depends on which side of the Atlantic you’re on. In Latin, the H was pronounced, but it disappeared throughout the Latin dialects in around the third century. So in Gallo-Roman – the ancestor of French – it was /erb/, not /herb/. And that was still the pronunciation when the Normans arrived in Britain. So the initial H was still silent in Middle English and early Modern English. And when English speakers settled parts of the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they brought that pronunciation with them. That’s why it’s still /erb/ in American English. But in the nineteenth century, the pronunciation changed in England, and the word finally got its original ‘H’ sound back. And there is an interesting story about why that happened, but we’ll have to wait until Modern English to discuss that. Or you can just check out the History of the Alphabet series where I briefly discuss that change.

But the point here is that some of the changes which happened in Gallo-Roman ultimately impacted English as well. And it can still create some confusion in Modern English.

Around the time the ‘H’ sound was disappearing from Gaul, something else was also beginning to disappear from Gaul – specifically, the Romans. As we saw in earlier episodes, the Western Roman Empire gradually collapsed, and a variety of Germanic tribes began to pour into Gaul. Early on, the region became divided between Visigoths, Franks and Burgundians. All of these groups eventually began to speak Gallo-Roman, but these groups also contributed to regional variations within Gaul itself.

The Visigoths had initially settled in southern Gaul, but the rising power of the Franks in the north eventually pushed the Goths down into Spain. The last time we looked at the Franks in any detail, we saw that Clovis was the first king to unify the Frankish tribes and rule most of modern France, as well as a large portion of modern Germany. So by the late 500s, the Franks controlled most of modern France, and the Visigoths controlled most of modern Spain and Portugal. And this also contributed to some of the differences between modern Spanish and French.

In Gaul, the Franks initially retained their Germanic language and their Germanic culture. So there was a mixing of Roman and Germanic elements there. But down in Spain, the Germanic influence was much more limited.

So let’s take a minute a look at what was happening down in Spain. In Spain, the Germanic Visigoths were in control, but remember that they had a long history of fighting both against Rome and on behalf of Rome as federates. So the Visigoths had been partially Romanized before the conquest of Spain. So they embraced the Latin culture there, and they didn’t seek to impose Germanic culture in the same way that the Franks did to the north. It’s believed that the Visigoths in Spain were bilingual in both Latin and Gothic. So they just continued to use Latin for most government and other literary purposes. Gothic was never a written language in Spain. So the Germanic language of the Visigoths had very little influence on Spanish.

54 In an earlier episode, I noted that the word rix was borrowed from Gothic and appears in the modern Spanish word rico meaning ‘rich.’ The Germanic word banda meaning a group of soldiers also passed into Spanish. It’s basically the equivalent of the native English word band.

Espia meaning a spy also came from Gothic. A few others also passed to Spanish, but the best example of Gothic influence in Spanish can be found in family surnames. Ruiz, Rodriguez, Fernandez, Hernandez, Muñoz, and Gonzalez are all names derived from a Latinized form of an original Gothic name. And the fact that these names are so common in Spain and Latin America indicates the early influence of the Visigothic rulers and their Gothic surnames.

But in the year 711, the Islamic Moors from northern Africa crossed the Mediterranean and invaded southern Spain. Even though the Moors never ruled all of Spain, they did eventually control about three-quarters (3/4) of the peninsula (excluding the extreme north and northwest). And during this period, early Spanish and Portugese adopted a lot of Arabic words which don’t appear in the other Romance languages. So that marks another distinction between those languages and French.

Whereas the Visigoths tended to be bilingual and routinely used Latin, the early Franks in Gaul spoke their native West Germanic language, which remember is closely related to Old English. But soon after the establishment of the Frankish kingdom under Clovis, the Frankish rulers did start to become bilingual. They spoke both Frankish and the local Gallo-Roman dialect of Latin. But unlike the Goths down in Spain who were replaced by the Arabic-speaking Moors, the Franks were never forced out of Gaul. So the Germanic influence in Spain was limited to a couple of centuries, but the Germanic influence in Gaul was uninterrupted until it finally merged into the native Latin language. So that pervasive and long-term influence explains why the modern French language is considered to be the most Germanic of all of the Romance languages. About ten percent (10%) of the modern French vocabulary can be traced back to the Germanic language of the Franks. This percentage is the largest percentage of Germanic words in any Romance language.

Another somewhat unique aspect of the Frankish kingdom was the way that it dealt with succession following the death of a king. It was the tradition of the Franks that a kingdom would be divided among the king’s descendants when the king died. And that is part of a recurring theme in Frankish history. From time to time a powerful king would emerge and unify the various Frankish kingdoms, but when that king died, the unified kingdom would be divided among his children or grandchildren. And there would be a period of disunity for a while until another strong king emerged, and the whole process would start all over again. And we see the first example of this process with the death of Clovis in the year 511.

When Clovis died, the kingdom was divided among his four children – and then eventually among their children and so on. Within a few generations, the Frankish kings had become so divided, and their kingdoms had become so fractured, that none of them had any real power. Much of the practical governance was left to prominent nobles who were called ‘Mayors of the Palace.’ During the first couple of centuries of the Frankish kingdom, many of the regional kings were minors who were under the control of their mother or under the control of the local Mayor of the Palace.

55 When an adult king did emerge, his power was usually limited. Since the nobles were basically running the government, the early Frankish kings were entirely dependent upon those nobles to carry out any action or to enforce any degree. And the nobles were willing to break with the king if they disagreed with him. It was the nobles who could actually raise an army and provide protection. So they became the real power behind the throne. And the kings were generally viewed as ineffective figureheads.

Clovis was the founder of what was called the Merovingian Dynasty – the first ruling family of what would become France. During the time in which they ruled, they were sometimes referred to as the ‘long-haired kings’ because they tended to grow their hair very long. But later French historians gave them another nickname. Due to the fractured and weakened state of the kingdom, the Merovingian kings became known as the ‘Do Nothing Kings.’ In fact, the kings had become so weakened, that the nobles actually began to ignore them.

Over time, several aristocratic families started to vie for power among themselves. One of those families was led by a man named Pepin of Herstal, or sometimes called ‘Pepin II’ since there was an earlier leader also named Pepin. Through alliances and military defeats, Pepin emerged as the most powerful Mayor of the Palace within the Frankish territory. From that point on, his family could have done away with the actual Merovingian king at any time, but Germanic tradition still honored and respected the position of the king, even if the king had no real power.

Pepin ruled as Mayor of the Palace in the late 600s during the emergence of the Northumbrian Renaissance up in Britain. And Pepin soon took note of what was going on in Northumbria. He was a Christian, and he decided that it was important for the Franks to convert their Germanic cousins back in Germania. He also sought to expand Frankish control into Germania, so the conversion of the Germanic peoples in that region was an important part of that overall plan.

But he didn’t really send Frankish missionaries to carry out those conversions. Since the Franks were seen as rivals, Frankish missionaries weren’t likely to be welcomed with opened arms. But there was another problem. And that problem concerned language. We get a sense at this point as to how much the Gallo-Roman language – that Latin dialect – had taken over in the Frankish Kingdom. Even though some of the Frankish nobles still spoke their native Germanic language, most of the people in the kingdom were speaking Gallo-Roman, but Pepin needed missionaries who could speak the language of the Germans. So in order to find Christian missionaries who could speak directly with the Germans, Pepin reached out to the Anglo-Saxons.

The Anglo-Saxon missionaries solved several of the problems he had with the conversion of the Germans. First, unlike the Franks, they were more likely to be welcomed in the Germanic regions. Also, the Christian culture of the Anglo-Saxons had become so advanced that they were seen as a good source of missionaries. And then there was that language issue.

The Anglo-Saxons still spoke a language closely related to that of the Frisians and Old Saxons. It was likely that the British missionaries could still communicate directly with the northern Germans without too much difficulty. And this is actually the period in which the term Anglo- Saxon first began to be used, and it was used to distinguish the British Saxons from the

56 continental Saxons. But they were still seen as distant relatives in the minds of the Franks. And their respective languages were still seen as very similar. And all of this is kind of important to our story because it shows that the language of the Anglo-Saxons was still fundamentally a Germanic language, but the Germanic language of the Franks had been largely abandoned within the Frankish kingdom – having been absorbed within the Gallo-Roman dialects.

As the Franks began to rely upon Anglo-Saxon missionaries in northern Germany, vital links were being established between the Anglo-Saxon churches and the Frankish churches. And those links are going to be very important when we get to Charlemagne in a few decades.

Pepin died in the year 714. At the time of his death, his two legitimate children were both deceased. There were also some legitimate grandchildren, but they were very young. Meanwhile, Pepin also had a couple of illegitimate children. And one of them was named Karl, but thanks to a later sound shift in French - we know him today as Charles – specifically Charles Martel. And after a brief war against the legitimate heirs of Pepin, Charles quickly emerged as Pepin’s successor. Again, Charles was still not the actual king. He just succeeded his illegitimate father, Pepin, as Mayor of the Palace. And just like his father, Charles was the real power behind the Frankish throne. But about 15 years after he emerged as Pepin’s successor – and as the de factor ruler of the Franks – he faced his greatest threat.

I noted earlier that the Visigoths down in Spain had been defeated by the Muslim Moors from northern Africa. Well, now that kingdom down in Spain was starting to spread into the southern part of the Frankish kingdom. This was considered both a political threat and a religious threat. Not only did the invaders threaten the power of Franks, but as Muslims, they also threatened Christianity in Western Europe. In the year 732, Charles Martel led an army against the Muslin invaders and defeated them in a battle known as the Battle of Tours. And this is one of those landmark battles in European history because it ended the Muslim advance into western Europe.

Not only did Charles block the advance of the invaders from the south, he also re-conquered much of the territory that had been lost during the later rule of the Merovingians. He extended Frankish control to parts of the Germanic territory east of the Rhine. To build up his army, Charles gave out land titles to his nobles in exchange for their pledge of loyalty to him. By this point, the stirrup was finally being used in western Europe. That was the technology which had been brought by the Huns a few centuries earlier. Now Charles’s army was using that technology, and he began to build up a sizeable cavalry. The era of the mounted knight had finally arrived, and Charles was laying the foundation of the later feudal system, which was later imported into Britain with the Norman Conquest in 1066. He also mastered the technique of the feigned retreat where he would appear to retreat in battle, and when the enemy let down its guard, he would launch another attack. He was considered a brilliant military leader, and he reportedly lost only one battle throughout his entire career.

Charle’s military prowess led to his modern name – Charles Martel – which literally meant ‘Charles the Hammer.’ Marteau is the French word for ‘hammer.’ So that produced the name ‘Charles Martel.

57 But while Charles may have been ‘The Hammer,’ he was not the King. The traditional Merovingian King was still there in the background, and Charles continued to rule in the king’s name. But with the power accumulated by Charles, the king’s days were numbered.

The culture of the Franks had become much less Germanic, so that old loyalty to the King’s title and line of descent was fading. But Charles never formally crossed that line. He proclaimed himself ‘Savior of Christendom’ and ‘Duke of the Franks,’ but he never took the title of King. That would be reserved for his son.

When Charles Martel died in 741, his son – another Pepin – became the Mayor of the Palace. This Pepin is sometimes known as Pepin III – or Pepin the Short. And this Pepin decided that it was finally time to do away with the facade of Merovingian kings. Since Pepin was effectively the king in everything but the actual title, he decided to go ahead and take the title as well.

But in order to be recognized as the king, Pepin needed the blessing of the Pope. And as it turned out, the Pope was under threat from the Germanic Lombards who had settled in northern Italy. So Pepin and the Pope worked out an exchange. The Pope recognized Pepin as king of the Franks, and Pepin assembled an army and defeated the Lombards in northern Italy. From that point on, Pepin and his descendants were the official rulers of the Frankish Kingdom, and the Merovingians passed into history.

Since Pepin was the son of Charles Martel, the new ruling dynasty was actually named after Charles who was still actually known as Karl. The new ruling family was called the Carolingians. Carolingian is based on a Latin version of the name Karl. But during this period of early Carolingian rule, the name Karl was starting to becoming Charles. And that’s because of a standard sound shift which occurred in this intermediate period between Latin and French.

So I want to digress for a moment and discuss that sound change because Modern English is basically a time capsule which captures this sound change. So let me explain what I mean by that.

As we know, Latin has the ‘K’ sound which was almost always represented by the letter C. So the Germanic name Karl was usually rendered in Latin as Carolus - C-A-R-O-L-U-S. And we saw in earlier episodes that the ‘K’ sound shifted to the ‘S’ sound in early French when it appeared from a front vowel – so basically the sounds represented by the letters E and I. Well, this was the period in which that sound change was occurring. And a Latin word like centum meaning ‘hundred’ was becoming cent – the original version of our modern English word cent. And this type of change was actually happening throughout western Europe. The other Latin dialects in Spain and Italy were experiencing similar changes. And even Old English was experiencing some similar changes as the ‘K’ sound became a ‘CH’ sound in the same contexts. So rice (/ree-kuh/) be came /ree- chuh/ and eventually rich.

So all of these languages were getting softer by replacing some of the hard /k/ and /g/ sounds – which are known as stops – with smoother sibilant sounds like /s/ or /ch/. You might remember that linguists call this process is called assibilation or palatalization. But Gallo-Roman or very

58 early French was taking this process even further. It was sometimes making a similar change even before a front vowel like ‘A’. So Karl became Charles. And this was really unique in the languages which we’ve been exploring. And it was part of an overall process which was occurring within the Gallo-Roman language that was making the language very soft and smooth. And it was this overall process that later gave French it’s smooth and flowing sound – the sound that so many people consider to be romantic and has caused it to be described as the ‘Language of Love.’

During this intermediate period between Latin and Old French, Frankish speakers were busy slurring all kinds of sounds. The ‘CH’ sound (/ch/) was created for the first time in the language, and the ‘V’ sound (/v/) and the ‘J’ sound (/j/) were also created for the first time.

With respect to that new ‘CH’ sound in a name like Charles, it was originally more like the modern English ‘CH’ sound – /ch/. But that sound continued to evolve within later French, and it became even softer over time. And today it’s pronounced as an ‘SH’ sound in French. So ‘Charles’ is actually /sharles/ in Modern French. And since English has borrowed Latin and French words over the centuries, those sound changes are actually preserved as relics in Modern English.

In order to see this process in English, let’s consider the Latin word caput which meant ‘head.’ You might remember that it’s actually cognate with the English word head thanks to Grimm’s Law. Well, that Latin word produced another Latin word cappa which meant a head covering or cloak. And the Anglo-Saxons borrowed that Latin word during the period of Old English. It produced the words cap and cape. So those words arrived in Old English shortly after the Church arrived in Britain and well before the Normans arrived. And cap and cape retain that original Latin ‘K’ sound at the beginning.

Well, back in the Frankish Kingdom, you might remember that St. Martin had a famous cape or cloak which became a holy relic. The building that was constructed to house the cloak – or cappa – was called a cappella. But then that sound change happened in the language. And cappella became chappella – and then chapel. And that word arrived in English in the thirteenth century shortly after the Normans arrived. And the related word chaplain also arrived in English around that time. And the word chief, meaning ‘the head person’ from that same word ‘caput’ also came in during that period. But notice that those post-Norman words came into English with the ‘CH’ sound because that reflected the French pronunciation of that initial consonant at the time.

But in the sixteenth century, near the beginning of the Modern English period, English borrowed other variations of that same root word from French. That included words like chapeau for a type of cap, and the word chef meaning the head or chief of a kitchen. And notice that even though words like chapeau and chef retain the same ‘CH’ spelling, they came into English with their later ‘SH’ pronunciation - /shapeau/ and /shef/. So from cap and cape in Old English, to chapel and chaplain and chief in Middle English, to chapeau and chef in Modern English, we can actually trace the history of that French sound change within English.

59 In fact, as a general rule, French words that came into English during the first three centuries of Norman rule tend to have that earlier ‘CH’ pronunciation. That includes words like charge, charm, chance, chase, champion, chapter, charity and chattel.

But French words that came in during or after the 1400s tend to have that newer ‘SH’ sound. That includes words like chapeau, chaperon, charade, chateau, chauffeur, champagne, chardonnay, chandelier and chauvinist. So you can see how the pronunciation is affected by timing.

In fact, we can take this one step further. We’ve seen that the ‘CH’ letter combination usually represents the /ch/ sound. That sound existed in Old French and it also exited in Old English – in words like rich, and church and cheese. So after 1066, the Norman French scribes applied that same ‘CH’ letter combination to all of those native English words as well. So when we use the letter combination ‘CH’ for the /ch/ sound, we can thank French for that. And when we see the letter combination ‘CH’ being used for the /sh/ sound in words like chapeau and champagne, we now know that that probably represents a later borrowing from Middle French or Modern French where that sound had changed to the /sh/ sound.

But what about words choir, character, chaos, chrome, chronic and chameleon. All of those words also have a ‘CH’ spelling at the beginning, but that spelling represents the ‘K’ sound. So what’s going on there? Well that’s another legacy of Latin in Modern English. And those words actually reflect the original use of the ‘CH’ letter combination. Interestingly, when the ‘CH’ letter combination was invented by Roman scribes, it didn’t represent the /ch/ sound. In fact, as I just noted, the /ch/ sound didn’t even exit in Latin at the time. It developed within the later Vulgar Latin dialects like Gallo-Roman. So the ‘CH’ letter combination was originally used for a completely different sound. And that sound came from Greek.

After Rome conquered Greece, all of those Greek words started to come into Latin. And Greek had certain sounds which didn’t exist in Latin. One of those sounds was that guttural consonant sound in the back of the throat – the /x/ sound – which Latin didn’t have. It was similar to a ‘K’ sound, but the air didn’t stop like it does for a ‘K’ sound. It continued to flow through, so it was a fricative. We’ve seen that sound before in Old English and other Germanic languages. And it’s still a common feature of many languages, but it didn’t exist in Latin.

Since this sound was sort of like a very breathy ‘K’ sound, the Roman scribes represented it in those Greek words by combining the letter C for the ‘K’ sound and the letter H which represented a breathy sound. And that was the origin of the ‘CH’ letter combination. And initially, it was just used for those Greek words in Latin. But since Latin didn’t have that specific sound, those words ended up being pronounced with the traditional Latin ‘K’ sound. So all of those words were spelled with a ‘CH’ for the /x/ sound, but they were just pronounced with a regular /k/. And that’s the origin of those words I mentioned – words like choir, character, chaos and chameleon. They’re all Greek words with that original Latin ‘CH’ spelling. So any time we see an English word which is spelled with ‘CH’ at the beginning, and that ‘CH’ represents the ‘K’ sound – like choir or character – that’s a clue that we’re probably looking at a Greek word that passed through Latin into English.

60 The main point of that discussion was to show that English is kind of like a time capsule. Once we know the history of certain sound changes, and the way the alphabet was applied to those sounds, we can make reasonable guesses about the history of a word just based on its spelling and pronunciation. And that’s kind of neat, but it also means that modern English spellings are very convoluted. All of that history is buried within those spellings, so it drives us crazy in school, but its actually a valuable tool once you discover the history of the language.

As I noted earlier, during this transitional period between Latin and French, the language was experiencing several different sound changes. And as a general rule, these sound changes were making the Frankish language sound softer and smoother. And we see lots of new sibilant sounds. Just as the /k/ sound was shifting forward in the mouth to the /s/ sound and /ch/ sounds, a similar change was occurring to the ‘hard G’ sound.

That ‘hard G’ sound (/g/) was becoming a ‘soft G’ sound (/j/) before the front vowels – E and I. As its name suggests, when you replace a ‘hard G’ with a ‘soft G,’ you get a softer sound. And of course many of those French words with the ‘soft G’ eventually found their way into English. And this accounts for some of the modern confusion over the pronunciation of the letter G in English.

When a G appears before a back vowel like A, O or U, the sound is almost always the original ‘hard G’ sound. Just like the ‘K’ sound, the ‘hard G’ is in the back of the throat. So it fits together nicely with those vowel sounds in the back of the throat – like /ah/, /oh/ and /oo/. So the ‘hard G’ rarely changes before back vowels. And that is true for Germanic words like game, got, gone and gun. And its also true for borrowed French words like gain, gallant, goblet, gulf and gum.

But things get complicated before the front vowels E and I because that’s where the French sound change occurred. Since modern English has a mixture of Germanic and French words, the G before an E or I can be pronounced either hard or soft depending on the word, but here is a very general rule for you. If the word is an old word – so an Old English word or a Middle English word – the pronunciation of the G is generally determined by where it came from. If it came from a Germanic language like Old English or Old Norse, it retains its original hard Germanic G sound. So that includes words like gear, geese, get, giddy, gift, gill, girl, girth and give.

But if it came from French, it has that early French sound shift to the soft G. So for example, the following words came from French: gender, general, genie, gentle, gentry, Geoffrey, germ, German, giant, gigolo and gist. And words like geometry and geography are of Greek origin, but they came in to English directly from French, so that have that same sound change. So that soft G is usually a clue that we have a French word. Now these are obviously general rules. There are exceptions. Sometimes the exceptions occur because the pronunciation and spelling of the word has changed over the centuries. So the original heritage is lost. And these rules just apply to older words within Old English, Old Norse or Old French, they don’t necessarily apply to words borrowed from other languages.

61 But in the case of those old words, a ‘hard G’ before E or I usually means a Germanic word. And ‘soft G’ before E or I usually means a French word. So once again, our language is a time capsule. If we know a few basic rules, we can make some reasonable guesses about the history of a word based simply on its spelling and pronunciation.

Now we just looked at the ‘soft G’ sound which is really the same as the ‘J’ sound. So you might go the ‘gym’ (G-Y-M) with a friend named Jim (J-I-M). Same sound – two different letters. Well, the early French speakers apparently loved this sound because this was when words like /yoo- piter/ and /yoo-lius/ became Jupiter and Julius. This new ‘J’ sound was finally emerging during this transition period between Latin and Old French. And once again, this represented a shift of the sound forward in the mouth. This sound had been represented by the letter I – but a ‘fancy I’ with a tail on the bottom began to be used to represent this new /J/ sound. And that ‘fancy I’ eventually became our letter J. In fact, that letter J didn’t really become a formal letter of the alphabet – distinct from I – until the 1800s.

But that /j/ sound which developed in early French had a long-lasting influence on English. That /j/ sound isn’t really a Germanic sound. Old English had developed the sound in some situations, but it was very limited in Old English. But when the Normans arrived, that sound poured into English. And it’s a very prominent feature of English to this day – much more so than any other Germanic language. And I have some research which states that English is the only Germanic language that has the /j/ sound today. I’m not sure if that’s accurate, but of all the Germanic languages, it is most prominent within English. And that is another example of the heavy French influence on English.

So the net result of what we’ve seen so far in early French is that sounds like /k/, /g/, and /y/ were shifting to newer sounds like /s/, /ch/, /sh/ and /j/. A slurred ‘Z’ sound – /z/ – also began to appear in the language and became very prominent. So the sound of modern French was starting to emerge.

There was at least one other sound shift which was completed during this transitional period. The Latin ‘W’ sound was finally being pronounced as a ‘V’ sound – from /w/ to /v/. We’ve come across this particular sound change a lot in the podcast. And this was one of those sound changes that was pretty common throughout the early Romance languages. So when we look at cognate words, the Old English version usually has the original ‘W’ sound, and the Romance words tend to have the later ‘V’ sound.

So we have Old English wisdom and French vision.

We have English wine, which was a very early borrowing by the Germanic tribes from Latin – vinum (/wee-num/). But then we have Italian vino and French vine, vineyard, and vintage. We also have French vinegar which is literally ‘sour wine.’ Inexperienced wine makers sometimes end up with vinegar instead of wine. Well this result produced the word vinegar – a combination the word vine and the Latin word which gives us acrid. So it is literally bitter or sour wine.

62 This sound change also gave us English wagon and French vehicle.

Another example is the English word word and the French word verb. Word and verb are both cognate. The French version has the ‘V’ sound.

We also can see this sound change in the phrase ‘vast wasteland.’Vast and waste are cognate – both coming from the Latin word vastus (/was-toos/) meaning desolate or empty. Old English already had a Germanic version of the word waste which was westen with an initial ‘W’ sound. So the French version basically merged with the Old English version, and the word waste retained its ‘W’ sound at the beginning in English. But the word vast was borrowed from French in the 1500s, and it came in with its newer ‘V’ sound.

So as we’ve seen, all of these sound changes gave the Gallo-Roman dialect much of the smoother, flowing sound that we associate with Modern French. But it wasn’t just the sounds or phonemes which were changing. The vocabulary was also changing.

By the early 700s, it appears that even the Latin-speaking clergy in the Frankish kingdom were speaking a new language. During that period, monks in Picardy north of Paris produced a glossary which translated over 1,000 Classical Latin words into the local vernacular which was being spoken at the time. And those translations show that the vocabulary of the language had changed considerably. For example, the Classical Latin word forum had been replaced by mercatum which gives us the French words market and merchant and merchandise. And Classical Latin liberi meaning ‘children’ had become infantes, which gives us the French words infant and infantry.

In addition to changes in pronunciation and vocabulary, the third basic element of language was also changing – specifically the grammar. Throughout the former Roman territories, the Latin system of inflections and inflexive endings was eroding. The six different noun inflections of Latin (subject, direct object, indirect object, addressee, possessive and adverbial) were now being reduced to just two (subject and object). The loss of inflections would continue as French evolved, and specific word order began to take its place. And the new word order was generally subject-verb-object. And if that sounds familiar to you, it should, because English experienced many similar changes during Middle English.

By the late 700s, the Gallo-Roman vernacular spoken in the Frankish kingdom was starting to be called Romance meaning ‘Roman.’ So some of the literature from this period uses that term Romance, but it didn’t mean all Latin languages at the time. It specifically meant the Latin dialects spoken in the Frankish kingdom. By the year 813, the language of the people had diverged so much from Latin, that the Classical Latin of the Church could no longer be understood by many congregations. So in that year 813, priests were encouraged by the Council of Tours to preach in “the rustic Roman language,” by which they meant the regular vernacular of the people. And this illustrates how much the language had changed outside of the Church.

During this same time period in the 8th and 9th centuries, several distinct dialects were in place throughout the Frankish kingdom. And the dialects within those regions were becoming

63 increasingly distinct from each other. One of the most obvious distinctions between those regions was the way they pronounced the word for ‘yes.’

And in much the same way that the Centum-Satem split in the early Indo-European languages was based on the way the word for ‘hundred’ was pronounced in the different regions, the same thing basically happened here. The regional pronunciation of the word for ‘yes’ was a shorthand way of marking the distinction between the two regions.

The word for ‘yes’ had originated with the Latin word hoc which meant ‘this’ or ‘that.’ As I noted earlier, the ‘H’ sound had largely disappeared in Late Latin. So in the south of France, the word for ‘yes’ was simply hoc (/hoke/) without the ‘H’ at the beginning. So it became oc. And these southern dialects were called the ‘langues d’oc’ – meaning the ‘languages of oc’ or the ‘oc languages.’

But in the north, speakers also used that Latin word ‘hoc’ (/hoke/) but they didn’t just drop the ‘H’ sound at the beginning. They also dropped the ‘K’ sound at the end. So it was just ‘O’ (/oh/). And they would add a specific pronoun to the end, depending on the context of the question. So if I wanted to say ‘yes’ to a question you asked me, I would say ‘o-je.’ Je means ‘I’ in French. So ‘o- je’ meant ‘yes for me.’ But if I was answering a question on behalf of a group of people, I would say ‘o-nos’ meaning ‘yes for us.’ And if I was answering ‘yes for you,’ I would have to say ‘o- vos.’ Well, that got complicated, so speakers eventually dropped the various pronouns at the end, and they just used the generic pronoun il which meant ‘that.’ And it produced the word ‘o-il’ (/oy-il/), which meant ‘yes for that’ or ‘that is correct.’ And these northern dialects came to be known as the ‘langues d’oil.’ Of course, ‘o-il’ eventually lost that ‘L’ sound at the end. And it just became /oy-ee/, and then it lost the ‘O’ sound at the beginning, and it just became oui (/wee/), but it retained that older spelling – O-U-I. That ‘O’ at the beginning is a holdover form the original Latin word hoc – H-O-C. But the pronunciation of the word oui today is really based on that pronoun il meaning ‘that’ which was added to the end of the word during this period of early French.

But the important point here is that there was a general north-south division in the dialects. And that division could be signified by the way the word ‘yes’ was pronounced. The northern dialects were spoken in and around Paris, so they eventually emerged as the standard dialect of French. Those northern dialects also influenced the language of the Viking Normans when they arrived in northern France. And so the Norman French also spoke a northern variety of French.

Since English was influenced by Norman French, and since it was a northen dialect, we won’t concern ourselves very much with the southern dialects of French. However, those southern dialects are notable for a couple of reasons. First, those dialects were spoken along the Mediterranean coast where they also mixed in some Italian elements. Those dialects became a standard vernacular used by sailors, traders and merchants. This particular trading dialect was called the ‘lingua franca’ – the language of the Franks. But over time, that term came to be applied as a generic term for any common language used by a variety of people to facilitate communication.

64 Those southern French dialects are also notable because one region where they were spoken was Aquitaine – a very important region in southwestern France. And that region actually impacted English history, as well as the history of the English language.

We’ll cover this history in more detail when we get to Middle English, but let me note here that Aquitaine was home to one of the most fascinating figures in Medieval history – Eleanor of Aquitaine. She inherited the Duchy of Aquitaine in the southwest of France as a child when her father died. And that made her one of the most eligible women in Europe. She later married the French King and she became Queen of France, but after an annulment from the French King, she later married Henry II of England and became Queen of England. So she was both Queen of France and Queen of England. And that marriage to Henry of England resulted in a vast kingdom which included England as well as large portions of France. In fact, when you add Aquitaine to Normandy and some of the other regions claimed by Henry, he actually laid claim to most of Western France. And that set the stage for a lot of conflicts between the England and France in the late Middle Ages. And those wars against France were a major factor which caused the French language to lose its prestige in England. In the midst of those wars – like the Hundred Years War – it wasn’t cool to be French anymore in England. English kings decided that they were more English than French, so they stopped speaking French, and they started speaking English again. And in fact, about 25 years after the Hundred Years War began, French was repealed as the official language of England, and English finally became the official language again – almost three centuries after the Normans arrived. For the first time, English was used in the English Parliament. So had it not been for all of those messy entanglements down in places like Aquitaine, French might still be the official language of England. So all of these pieces are connected if we look far enough down the line.

With that historical note, I want to briefly turn back to the history of the early Carolingian Dynasty.

I noted earlier that Charles Martel’s son Pepin III – or Pepin the Short – was the first Mayor of the Palace to be proclaimed as King of the Franks, thereby launching the Carolingian Dynasty. But Pepin died in the year 768. And in keeping with Frankish tradition, Pepin’s kingdom was divided among his two sons. And it looked like history was destined to repeat itself as the powerful Frankish kingdom started to become divided again. But one of Pepin’s two sons died three years later, and that allowed the other son to assume control of the entire kingdom as ‘King of the Franks.’ That son’s name was Karl, and he became known to history as ‘Karl the Great’ or ‘Charles the Great.’ But we know him by the French version of that name – ‘Charlemagne.’ And the emergence of Charlemagne as King of the Franks brings our story current with the overall story of English. Charlemagne came to power on the eve of the Viking invasions, and during a period in which Britain was ruled by its most powerful king to date – Offa of Mercia. So all three story lines are now in the same place in the late 700s.

And Charlemagne spoke a language which we can probably call Old French. I say ‘probably’ because technically the Old French period begins shortly after the death of Charlemagne.

65 Now we’ll look more closely at Charlemagne’s reign and in the next episode, but let me briefly jump ahead to this death because his death triggered the document which marks the official beginning of Old French.

As I noted earlier, one of the recurring themes of Frankish history is the emergence of a strong leader who unified the kingdom followed by the division of the kingdom when that leader died. Well, this same scenario occurred again at Charlemagne’s death.

In the year 842, two of his grandsons signed a treaty called the Oath of Strasbourg which settled the division of the kingdom into three parts, thereby laying the ultimate foundations of the modern nations of Germany and France. The treaty covered the land of the Franks as well as Germany. So it was written in two versions – one in the Romance vernacular of the Franks and one in the Germanic vernacular of the people east of the Rhine. And this is considered the first document to be written in the local vernacular of the Franks, so it marks the first official document written in Old French. And it marks the official beginning of the French language. It also happens to be the first document to be written in any local Latin vernacular. Italian and Spanish weren’t documented until the next century. So all of those Romance languages were finally starting to be written down over two and a half centuries after English had become a written language.

So I am going to conclude this episode on that note because we now have all of the pieces in place – Old English, Old Norse and Old French.

Next time, we’ll move the story forward to ninth century. We’ll look at the most powerful king which Anglo-Saxon Britain had seen up that point – Offa of Mercia. And we’ll examine the connections between the Anglo-Saxons and Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire. We’ll see how the Northumbrian Renaissance in Britain was replaced by the Carolingian Renaissance in France. And most importantly, we’ll explore the first raids by the Vikings. And along the way, we’ll examine how all of those events impacted the English language.

So until next time, thanks for listening to the History of English Podcast.

66 EPISODE 45: TO COIN A PHRASE - AND MONEY

Welcome to the History of English Podcast - a podcast about the history of the English language. This is Episode 45: To Coin a Phrase - and Money. In this episode, we’re going to explore the events of the late 700s. This was a period in which both the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks were ruled by their most powerful kings to date. In Britain, it was Offa, King of Mercia – a king who directly or indirectly ruled over most of the Anglo-Saxons. In the Frankish kingdom, it was Charlemagne – the most powerful European leader since the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, up in Scandinavia, the Vikings were beginning to set sail. And there was something which connected all of these developments during this period – commerce. Commerce and trade linked all of these peoples, and part of that story is revealed in the coins which survive from that period.

Before I begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com. And you can reach me by email at [email protected]. And you can follow me on twitter @ englihshistpod. And I’m still working on the Beowulf project between episodes of the podcast. So I’ll keep you updated on that as it nears completion.

This time I want to move the story of English forward through the end of the eighth century. And the one underlying theme of this episode is trade and commerce, and more specifically, the coins used in that trade and commerce. Coins are not only currency. They’re cultural artifacts. And since they’re made of metal, they tend to last a long time – sometimes thousands of years. So unearthed coins are a wonderful resource for historians and archaeologists. They can often be traced back to a specific location and usually a specific time. It was the presence of coins at Sutton Hoo which allowed historians to determine the approximate date of the ship burial. The presence of coins can also reveal trading patterns. A significant increase in coins from a particular region may indicate a period of economic growth. And a sharp decrease in coins may suggest economic decline. And inscriptions on coins can actually tell us a little bit about the language and culture of the people. So coins can tell us a lot about a particular time and place.

Roman coins had once dominated commerce in Western Europe, but when the Western Roman Empire collapsed, that coinage began to disappear. The early Franks in Gaul developed their owns coins, but in Britain, the early Anglo-Saxons weren’t as Romanized as the Franks, so they didn’t have their own coins as first. And this is kind of important. Because the lack of a coinage limited trade with other regions. Without a coinage, the Anglo-Saxons had to rely upon barter or a foreign currency whenever it trickled in.

The Sutton Hoo ship burial has been dated to the early 600s thanks to some Frankish coins which were found in the ship, but no Anglo-Saxon coins were found there. And that was probably because the ship burial occurred before the Anglo-Saxons began to mint their own coins. But a short time later, they did start to mint some very basic – very crude – coins. Those first Anglo- Saxon coins were struck in gold mainly from mints in London and York. They mimicked Frankish and Roman coins, but those gold coins were short-lived. Gold coins also disappeared from the Frankish kingdom around this same time which suggests that there was a general shortage of gold supply by the late 600s.

67 With the apparent gold shortage, silver became the metal of choice. Throughout Northern Europe, silver coins began to replace gold coins. And in Britain, the Anglo-Saxons began to produce very crude silver coins called sceattas.

An individual coin was called a sceat which may have been derived from the same word which gave us the modern word sheet. And that was presumably because the coins began as sheets of metal.

By the way, the Latin word plate has the same original meaning. It meant a ‘flat sheet of gold or silver,’ and since coins were made from those sheets, the term plate was sometimes used for a flat, round coin. Of course, bowls and dishes were also made from those gold and silver sheets, so over time the term plate was applied to dishes as well.

Those metal sheets were cut into lots of little circular discs. At first, it was just a little plain disc with nothing on it, so it was called a blank, or blanc in French. There was actually a French coin introduced in the 1300s called a blanc. By the 1500s, a blank had come to refer to a losing lottery ticket. So if you drew a losing ticket, you ‘drew a blank.’ By the 1800s, it had come to refer to bullets with no projectile. So you might end up ‘shooting blanks.’ But originally, a blank was piece of plain round metal.

The piece of metal was then stamped with a wedge-shaped tool which actually created the image on the piece of metal. The Latin word for ‘wedge’ was cuneus. And since a wedge-shaped tool was used to create the image, that word cuneus produced the word coin. Again, coin was a Latin term. So the Anglo-Saxons didn’t call their coins ‘coins.’ Remember they called them sceattas.

I should also note here that the Latin word for ‘wedge’ – cuneus – also gave us the name of the ancient Near East writing system cuneiform. Those Near Eastern scribes also used a wedge- shaped stylus to press markings into clay tablets. So both cuneiform and coin come from the name of the wedge-shaped instruments used to press inscriptions.

By analogy, the process of inventing new words or phrases was compared to the process of minting new coins. In the 1500s, it produced the expression ‘to coin a phrase’ to refer to the invention of a new word or phrase. Even Shakespeare uses the expression when he wrote, "So shall my Lungs Coine words till their decay."

Now I noted that there was an original preference for gold coins. Gold is an Old English word with very deep Germanic roots. In fact, gold can be traced back to an original Indo-European word which was *ghel with a very aspirated ‘G’ sound at the beginning. It meant shiny or bright. And of course, gold is a very bright or yellow metal. And if fact, the word yellow comes from the same root as gold.

As we know, the ‘G’ sound often shifted to a ‘Y’ sound in many Old English words. We’ve seen that before in words like garden and yard. Well, we also have it here. That original Indo- European word *ghel produced gold with its original ‘G’ sound and yellow with that newer ‘Y’ sound.

68 Another word which comes from the same root as yellow and gold is yolk which is the yellow part of the egg. Obviously, it has the same ‘y’ sound as yellow.

But outside of yellow and yolk, most of the words which came from that original root word came in with that original ‘G’ sound. One of those words was gold. Gold has the /oh/ vowel sound between the ‘G’ and the ‘L’ giving us /gooool-d/. But that vowel sound actually disappeared early on in another variation of that same root word. The result was a ‘G-L’ sound – /gl/. And that sound appears at the beginning of a lot of words in Modern English which mean bright and shiny. That includes words like gleam, glimmer, glitter, glint, glisten, glare, gloss, glass, glaze and glow. All of those are Germanic words which mean ‘bright or shiny,’ and they all derive from the same root as gold.

So ‘all that glitters may not be Gold,’ but glitter and gold are cognate, having derived from the same root word.

Something that was covered in gold was gilded from the same root. Mark Twain used that term to describe an early period of US history which he called the ‘Gilded Age.’ And we can thank Shakespeare for the phrase ‘gild the lily’ to mean ‘adorn something with unnecessary decoration.’ The phrase derives from a line in Shakespeare’s King John which is "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily. To throw perfume on a violet." So if you ‘gild refined gold’ in the words of Shakespeare, you’re literally covering gold with gold. So it’s unnecessary decoration.

So that’s gold which was and still is a very precious and valuable metal. But as I noted, there was apparently a gold shortage by the late 600s because gold coins were phased out around that time in both Britain and the Frankish kingdom. And they were gradually replaced with silver coins.

Those early Anglo-Saxon silver coins – those sceattas – were thick and crude, and they were initially used for local trade and small-scale transactions. And you may be surprised to learn that they weren’t issued by kings or kingdoms. They were actually issued by individual moneyers. The moneyers probably paid something to the king for that privilege, and the kingdom probably had some oversight as to the weight and quality of the coins to prevent fraud, but the kingdom itself was not directly involved in the process. So early coins from this period sometimes have the name of the mint or moneyer, but they don’t have the name or image of the king.

But all of that started to change in the mid-700s. Around that time, the Frankish kings and the Anglo-Saxon kings began to take control of their respective currencies. For the first time, they started to issue official coins by order of the king. In 755, the denier was made official in the Frankish kingdom. And that innovation soon spread to Britain.

In Britain, Kent was the closest region to France – located just across the channel. So Kent had the closest ties with the Franks and Frankish traders. So shortly after the Frankish kingdom introduced its official coins, the Kentish king did the same thing. The mint in Canterbury produced the first official coinage in Britain. And those new coins began to replace the crude sceattas which had been minted before. They were also the first Anglo-Saxon coins to identify the king who issued them.

69 Now, they may not have realized it at the time, but that new official coinage was destined to have a major impact on the economy. It actually produced a massive increase in trade and commerce. And that’s because a standardized currency facilitated trade. It made transactions more efficient. Traders didn’t have to rely upon barter or crude coins of questionable value. So standardized coins were a huge boost to traders. And that increased trade led to increased revenue for the king. And that was partly because coins made it much easier to collect taxes.

One way in which the kings generated revenue was by minting coins which were valid for a limited period of time – say three or four years. After that period, you had to bring those old outdated coins back to the mint for new coins. But here was the key, if you brought 100 old coins in, you didn’t necessarily get 100 new coins. You might only get 95 in return. The extra 5 coins were kept by the mint to cover the cost of production, and a portion of that went back to the king. So in other words, the king collected a hefty tax every time the old coins expired. And this could only be done with a standard currency issued under the authority of the kings. The currency also enabled kings to levy direct taxes. For example, Offa’s predecessor in Mercia – Aethelbald – levied a toll on ships.

But the Anglo-Saxons didn’t call a payment levied by the King a tax because tax is a Latin word which came into English with the Normans. The Anglo-Saxons called a tax or payment to the king a scot. That word scot still survives as scot in the phrase ‘scot-free’ meaning ‘penalty-free’ – as in “He got away scot-free.”

So two important things were happening throughout the 700s. Trade throughout northern Europe was exploding, and kingdoms were getting wealthier. And a new official, standardized coinage was facilitating that process.

By the mid-700s, Offa had emerged as the King of Mercia in the central part of Britain in the Midlands. The Mercians were the traditional rivals of the Northumbrians. You might remember the pagan king of Mercia named Penda who fought against those Christian kings in Northumbria like Edwin, Oswald and Oswy. Well, by this point, Mercia had been converted, and it was staunchly Christian just like the rest of Anglo-Saxon Britain. And Offa was actually a relative of Penda within the same ruling family. And in the years after Penda, Mercia had continued to be a formidable power in central Britain.

Offa came to power shortly before Charlemagne emerged as King of the Franks, so they were contemporaries. And both kings had very long reigns. Offa was king for about 40 years, and Charlemagne was king for about 46 years, so they actually had a long history together.

Offa extended the power of Mercia, and he quickly became the most powerful ruler in Britain. He is generally considered to be the most powerful Anglo-Saxon king before the emergence of the Wessex dynasty under Alfred about a century later. He was also the only western European king who could deal with Charlemagne on something close to equal footing. Charlemagne famously referred to Offa as his ‘brother’ in correspondence between the two of them.

70 Unfortuantely, most of what we know about Offa comes from outside sources. Offa became king shortly after Bede died, so he wasn’t part of Bede’s important history of early England. And about a century later, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was started at the direction of Alfred, but by that point, we are well beyond Offa’s reign. So Offa lived in that narrow period between our two best sources of Anglo-Saxon history.

The most well-known legacy of Offa’s reign was the large fortification which was constructed along the entirely of the Welsh border known as Offa’s Dyke. A large portion of that fortification still exists today. And since the Mercians and the Welsh spoke different languages, it was not only a political barrier, it was also a linguistic barrier.

Shortly after he became King, Offa set his sights on Kent – the kingdom in southeastern Britain. That was the kingdom where Canterbury was located. And at this point, Canterbury was home to two things which are important to our story. One was the Archbishop of Canterbury who was not at all happy with Offa’s attempts to control the region. And that will become important a little later in our story. The other thing in Canterbury was that mint where those first official coins were produced.

Well, within the first decade of Offa’s reign, he had assumed effective control of Kent, and that meant that he had assumed control over that mint at Canterbury. And once he got control over it, he had the name and image of the Kentish king removed from the coins, and he had his own name and image inserted in its place. And this is the other important legacy of Offa – his coins. The silver coins produced during Offa’s reign became the standard for Anglo-Saxon currency for the next five centuries until the late Middle Ages. The new coins were of very high quality and very artistic. His coins have been found throughout Europe, and even beyond into the Middle East. The widespread distribution of Offa’s coins indicates how powerful his kingdom was, and it also illustrates how extensive the trade was during this period.

Offa’s silver coins were called pennies, and there is considerable debate about the origin of that name. Many scholars think the name of the penny was derived from the name of Offa’s ancestor Penda who was that earlier King of Mercia. Another theory links the word penny with the word ‘pawn’ thanks to a proto-Germanic word – panda. But the etymology is still a matter a dispute.

And with respect to Offa’s coins, we once again find a connection between events in the Frankish kingdom and events in Britain. During this period, Charlemagne reformed the official coinage in the Frankish kingdom. He decided to tie everything to a pound of silver – or livre of silver in French. A pound of silver was divided into 20 equal parts to create a solidus. And a solidus was divided into 12 equal parts to create a denier.

And that became the standard French currency. The plural form of solidus is solidi. And solidi were used as the standard currency for paying mercenaries and other fighters. And in French, a fighter who was paid with solidi became known as a soldier (/sol-dee-air/) – or soldier today.

71 Now, it is important to note that the decimal system was not in use when Charlemagne reformed and standardized Frankish currency. So they didn’t use the modern increments of 10 that we use today. It took 12 deniers to make a solidus, and 20 solidi to make a pound – or ‘livre’ of silver. So by that math, it took 240 deniers to equal a pound a silver. So the math was little more complicated.

But the Anglo-Saxons apparently decided that Charlemagne had the right idea because Offa’s coins were soon reformed to copy that new Frankish system. Offa’s penny was the equivalent of the French denier. The English shilling was the equivalent of the French solidus. And the English pound was a direct translation of the French livre. And the same increments were used for new English coinage. It took 12 pennies to make a shilling, and 20 shillings to make a pound. And that type of coordination helps to illustrate how close the trade was between the Franks and the Anglo- Saxons. They each had their own currencies, but they were both designed around the same basic formulas, and they were both based on the same fixed silver standard, so the respective coins were somewhat interchangeable. And again, that made trade between the two kingdoms much easier and more efficient.

So all of that means that a British pound once equaled a pound of silver. It also meant that the silver penny was the basic unit of English currency. And just like in France, penny math was done in increments of 12. 12 pennies was a shilling, and 240 pennies was a pound. And since it took 12 pennies to make a shilling, half a shilling was ‘six pennies’ or sixpence. And the sixpence became its own coin in the 1500s.

The term pence as the plural form of penny really emerged in the Middle English period. You might have six individual pennies. And collectively, they would be worth ‘six pence.’ And both sixpenny and sixpence found their way into Modern English. Since ‘six pennies’ were half of a shilling, the term sixpenny came to mean something cheap or low quality. Meanwhile, sixpence was used as a standard unit of currency – again half a shilling.

Of course, in American English we know that term sixpence primarily through a nursery rhyme:

Sing a song of sixpense a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. And so on.

That nursery rhyme dates from the 1700s. But that particular rhyme didn’t coin the phrase ‘sing a song of sixpence.’ It had actually been around for a while. Shakespeare had used a variation of it in the 1600s. It was used in the context of giving someone a sixpence coin in exchange for a song.

By the way, have you ever wondered why that nursery rhyme says ‘four and twenty blackbirds’ instead of ‘twenty-four blackbirds’? Well, here’s the answer. Because that’s the way the Anglo- Saxons counted.

72 As we’ve seen before, the Anglo-Saxons used the same basic words for numbers that we use today. They just used an older pronunciation. But instead of twenty-one, they would say ‘one and twenty.’ And instead of thirty-five, they would say ‘five and thirty.’ So they would put the smaller number first. This was actually the standard Germanic way of formulating those numbers, and it’s still the way those numbers are formed in many modern Germanic languages. But after the Normans arrived in 1066, English was influenced by French which puts the larger number first and the smaller number second, and so ‘four and twenty’ became ‘twenty-four.’ But it took a long time for that Old English formulation to die out. And it was apparently still lingering around in the 1700s when ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ was composed.

So that was the sixpence. But let’s go back to Offa’s pennies. I noted that his pennies were of a very high quality, and that was especially true for the designs of the coins. They often contained an image of Offa – or at least a rudimentary design which was supposed to be him. They were usually inscribed with “Offa Rex” which meant ‘King Offa’ in Latin. Latin was still considered the international language of Europe. But the ‘x’ in Rex was sometimes rendered in the form of a Christian cross. It was sometimes moved to the other side of Offa’s image to stand out. So the coin would say ‘Offa R-E’ on the right side – and the X was rendered as a cross on the left side. And that may not seem impressive by today’s standards, but that type of artistic design was really unusual in the 700s. Remember, official coins were still a relatively new concept for these kingdoms.

Offa also issued coins in the name of his wife – the Queen of Mercia. And those were the only coins minted during the entire Anglo-Saxon period with a queen on them.

His coins also give us a sense of the limitations of language in the 700s. That growing international trade was bringing in coins from Arab traders in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Offa’s minters were apparently fascinated by those exotic coins because they decided to issue their own copies. They just added the standard ‘Rex Offa’ to them. But apparently very few Anglo-Saxons had any knowledge of Arabic because the Arabic coins contained an inscription written in Arabic. And the Anglo-Saxons either didn’t care what it said, or they just thought it was decoration because Offa’s version of the coins included the same inscription. And the inscription reads, “There is no God but one and Mohammed is his prophet.” And those coins were actually issued during Offa’s reign. Modern scholars are in pretty much universal agreement that this was an oversight. No Christian King of that period would have knowingly issued a coin with an Islamic inscription on it. But ultimately, it was a case of ‘no harm, no foul.’ The Anglo-Saxons apparently weren’t bothered by it because they couldn’t read it, and they didn’t know what it meant.

As I noted earlier, Offa’s very advanced and very widespread coinage suggests that there was a considerable amount of wealth flowing into Britain during this period. Much of that coinage was being used to buy goods from foreign traders, especially those from Scandinavia and the Frankish kingdom.

73 With the growth of trade, new trading centers were also starting to pop up throughout the region. In Britain, a trading center of this type was usually called ‘wic,’ and thanks to that Old English sound shift where a ‘K’ sound sometimes became a ‘CH’ sound, that type of trading center was also sometimes called a wich. So wic and wich were variations of the same word. This was an Old Germanic word which meant ‘harbor,’ but as traders began to arrive in increasing numbers, those harbors emerged into trading centers. And many of those early trading centers in Britain use wic or wich as part of their name.

The major trading center in Wessex was Hamwic – later known as Southampton. In Northumbria, the major trading center was Eoforwic. And that name may seem strange, but it was later shorted to York.

London also started to emerge as a major trading center, it was called Lundenwic in the late 600s.

Most of the other trading centers used the other version of the word – wich. The port at Canterbury was called Fordwich. The major trading center in East Anglia was called Ipswich.

The town of Sandwich also emerged as a trading center in Kent on the Southeastern Coast. Sandwich was literally the ‘sandy trading center,’ or the trading center built on sand. And since the sandwich that you have for lunch was supposedly named for the Earl of Sandwich, it means that that Old English word for a trading center is still a part of our modern diet.

But there is another interesting aspect of that word wich – or wic – meaning a harbor or trading center. As I said, it was an old Germanic word, and the Scandinavians had their own version of the word, which was vik. The word vik had a meaning which was similar to the original Old English meaning which was a harbor. In Scandinavia, it meant an inlet or small bay. We see that Norse ending in the name of the Icelandic capital Reykjavík. The first part of the name meant ‘smoke’ in Old Norse, and it is actually cognate with the Old English word reek which originally meant the smell or stench which came from something that was burning. The original settlement of Reykjavík was built near natural hot springs which produced steam. So it was called Reykjavík which meant ‘bay of smoke’ or the ‘smoky cove.’

But Reykjavík was just one of many viks throughout Scandinavia. And the people who inhabited those viks were called the Vikings (/veek-ings/), or as we know them today – the Vikings.

And this little linguistic note is important to our overall story because the Scandinavians were also benefitting greatly from all of that increased trade in northern Europe. And that was largely because Scandinavian furs were in demand throughout Europe. They had been trading furs for centuries. Even Tacitus had mentioned the Scandinavian fur trade. But all of that economic growth and new money in northern and western Europe meant that those furs were in even greater demand.

But the Scandinavians didn’t just trade with other northern Europeans. They traveled down the rivers from the Baltic through Eastern Europe all the way down to the Black Sea. A group of Swedish traders established a settlement around Kiev in the 800s. These settlers were called the

74 Rus from an Old Norse word meaning ‘to row’ as in rowing a boat. And the Rus gave their name to the new trading settlements which started to pop up in that region, which became known as Russia (/roo-see-ah/) or Russia. So the Russian state actually owes its ultimate origins to the Vikings.

But the key to this Scandinavian trade is that those traders actually needed stuff to trade. And most of those traders weren’t really artisans or manufacturers. They got most of their furs and other inventory from raiding, piracy, threats and extortion. So for example, as the Scandinavians traveled through the Baltic and Eastern Europe, they would threaten to destroy settlements and farms along the way unless they were paid off. And very often, they were paid off in furs. And they would then take those furs and trade them far and wide for money or luxury goods. So now, we can start to see these pieces coming together.

In order to continue and expand their trading networks, and in order to obtain more wealth, they needed new places to plunder and raid, and they needed new people to extort.

Now the traditional view has been that the Viking expansion was the result of population growth in Scandinavia. And other theories attribute expansion to the fact that the oldest son inherited his father’s wealth, so that left the younger sons without wealth or inheritance. And those were also important factors here. But the key to the expansion was the growing trade networks. Whether it was due to overpopulation, or just the bad luck of the being the younger brother, those trading networks created new opportunities for those young Vikings. They could make their wealth through trading and plunder.

Those traders were coming into contact with new centers of wealth, especially in Britain and the Frankish kingdom. And they had access to lots of new wealth in those regions, as well as lots of old wealth. They gave then new people to trade with and new places to plunder. And plunder gave them new goods to sell elsewhere. And so on. So it became a general way of life. It was how they made their living.

Within Scandinavia, Denmark was quickly emerging as the wealthiest and most powerful region because of those trading networks and because of Denmark’s strategic location between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. But while the Danes kept one eye on those trading networks to the north, they kept the other eye on the increasing power of Charlemagne to the south. The Frankish kingdom was still expanding to the east into Germany. So the Danes were concerned about that threat to the south. But between the Danes and the Franks were the Saxons who had remained on the continent in what came to be known as Old Saxony. So Old Saxony was essentially a buffer- zone between the Danes and the Franks. But the Charlemagne was busy trying to conquer the Saxons.

In the last episode, I mentioned that Charlemagne’s great-grandfather Pepin II had become Mayor of the Place in the late 600s about a century earlier. He was the leader who wanted to convert the Germans east of the Rhine to Christianity so it would be easier to conquer them and bring them within the greater Frankish kingdom. And you might remember that he relied heavily upon Anglo-

75 Saxon missionaries because they spoke a language which was very similar to the continental Germans.

Well, those missionary efforts had mixed success. In southern and central Germany, the people were converted without too much difficulty. But it was a different outcome in the north in places like Saxony. Some of the missionaries there were killed and became martyrs. When Charlemagne became King of the Franks, the missionary activity was still ongoing in this region. And the Franks were still relying upon the Anglo-Saxons for much of that missionary work.

Shortly after Charlemagne became king, he was able to bring Frisia under Frankish control, but Saxony continued to be his nemesis. His initial effort to conquer the Saxons began in 772 just four years after he became king. And the invasion of Saxony was largely successful at first, but a couple of years later, there was a Saxon resurgence. And this would establish a theme for the next thirty years of so. The Franks would invade and put down an uprising, and they would bring in the missionaries, and as soon as the Franks were distracted by events elsewhere, the Saxons would rise in rebellion. A second invasion led to a third invasion, and a fourth, and a fifth, with additional smaller incursions after that. During the early part of this period, the Saxon rebel leader would flee to hide in Denmark while the Franks invaded. And as soon as the Franks let up pressure, he would return to lead another uprising. As I noted, the Danish king was consumed with the Frankish threat, and the Saxons provided that convenient buffer. So the Danes continued to let the Saxon rebels hide in Denmark waiting for the next opportunity for an uprising.

And we get a sense here of just how brutal Charlemagne could be. After that fifth incursion, he had 4,500 Saxon prisoners beheaded. And after that, Saxony was officially annexed into the Frankish Empire. There were still some uprisings, but for the most part, Saxony was finally brought under Frankish control.

The conquest of the Saxons, combined with the conquest of Bavaria and a large part of northern Italy, helped Charlemagne to emerge as the most powerful leader Europe had seen since the Roman Empire. His kingdom eventually encompassed most of central and western Europe. But for our purposes, the most notable legacy of Charlemagne was the so-called Carolingian Renaissance. And the origins of that intellectual renaissance really began with the attempts to convert the Frisians and Saxons. And it had a direct connection to the Northumbrian Renaissance in Britain.

Those Anglo-Saxon missionaries may have shared a more or less common language with the Germans, but that language was not the language of the Church. The language of the Church was Latin. And the missionaries realized that the native German clergy had to be educated in Latin if the missionary work was to have any permanent success. That was the only way the clergy could read the scriptures and interpret the Scriptures to the people. So the German clergy had to be taught Latin.

But it wasn’t just the new German clergy that was the problem. Even within the Frankish kingdom, much of the clergy there no longer spoke Classical Latin. As we saw last time, the Gallo-Roman dialect had diverged greatly from Classical Latin. And when Charlemagne came to

76 power, he realized that many of the clergy in his own kingdom didn’t read or speak the Classical Latin used by the Church. Most of them either spoke the local Vulgar Latin dialect or the native Germanic language of the Franks.

So what Charlemagne needed was a scholastic revival to train the clergy in Germany and re-train the clergy in the Frankish kingdom. To carry out this revival, he began to establish new schools throughout the Frankish kingdom. Monks and abbots were directed to establish places within the monasteries so the clergy could be educated there. The most prominent school established by Charlemagne was a Palace School established for Frankish nobles at his court at Aachen.

But those new schools needed teachers, so he invited famous scholars to his court to help establish the schools and to help develop the curriculum. And perhaps the most important person which he invited was an Anglo-Saxon scholar named Alcuin. Alcuin quickly emerged as an absolutely essential figure in the emerging Carolingian Renaissance.

Alcuin had been a student of Bede in Northumbria. He was apparently in charge of the library at York, which had emerged as the center of scholarship in Northumbria. It was one of the great European libraries at the time. Alcuin had also been actively involved in the missionary efforts in Frisia and other parts of Europe. While assisting the missionary efforts there, he met Charlemagne. And Charlemagne invited him to join the other scholars at his court.

Once he joined the other scholars, he became the virtual head of the palace school at Charelemagne’s court. And he also attracted other Anglo-Saxon scholars to join him at the court. Alcuin helped to develop the curriculum in all of those new Carolingian schools. In keeping with the Northumbrian tradition, he played a critical role in introducing the seven liberal arts to the curriculum. So the education mixed secular studies with religious studies. And he later became a prominent advisor to Charlemagne himself.

Charlemagne continues to fascinate scholars of Medieval history because he was a very effective military and political leader, but he also placed a such a strong emphasis on education and scholarship. He was considered a very well-spoken leader, and by all accounts, he loved books. But interestingly, most historians think that Charlemagne was illiterate.

He reportedly had books read to him during meals. And he tried to learn how to write, but he was too old to learn. He actually slept at night with a slate containing the letters under his pillow so he could learn them by osmosis. But it didn’t work. I should note that some historians dispute these claims, and they assert that he could actually read Latin on some basic level, but regardless of his actual ability to read and write, it does appear that he was frustrated by the level of his own education. And that was probably a big reason why he felt education was so important and why he became such a major proponent of education.

So I know what you’re thinking – what does all of this have to do with English?

77 Well, if you read and write English, you can thank Charlemagne and Alcuin for the letters which you use – at least the lower-case letters. We know that the uppercase letters came from the Romans. But all of those lower-case letters, which is what we mostly use when writing, they came from Charlemagne’s court.

When Charlemagne became king of the Franks, not only had the Classical Latin speech of the Romans largely disappeared, the Classical Latin script had also fallen out of use. There was no standard script in the kingdom anymore, and writing had become increasingly illegible. So one of the items on the reform agenda was the development of a new standardized script. The new script needed to be easy to read and write, and it needed to be made standard throughout the kingdom. And Alcuin was a key figure in developing that new script. He turned to the script which had been used in Northumbria. And the new script combined the Anglo-Saxon version with an earlier Roman version. And the result was the script which came to be called – appropriately enough – the Carolingian script.

The key to the new script is that it allowed the letters to be written very easily and quickly. Most of the letters could be written in one motion without lifting the pen. Compare the old Roman uppercase E with the Carolingian lowercase E. Uppercase E requires four distinct strokes, whereas lowercase E only requires one stroke. Think of uppercase E as a little line in the middle surrounded by a box on three sides. Well, the new script would begin with that little middle line written from left to right, and then curve the line around in a ‘c’ shape to represent the surrounding box. And that’s how we got from old, blocky, uppercase E to the newer, quicker, more efficient lowercase E.

And that type of simplification was important to all of those scribes who were busy copying books by hand. So not surprisingly, book production exploded after the new script was introduced. And these educational reforms, and language reforms, and script reforms meant that there was a brand new generation of literate and educated scholars, including poets, historians and philosophers. And all of this is really the essence of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance.

But that renaissance sometimes created its own problems. As I noted, part of the educational reforms involved getting the clergy to speak proper Classical Latin, not the local Vulgar Latin. And to facilitate that process, Alcuin developed his own textbook on Latin pronunciation. All of this education meant that the clergy started to speak proper Classical Latin, which was just fine in the palace school and all of those monasteries. But what about the actual people who they were supposed to be preaching to?

When the clergy began to conduct services in Classical Latin, the congregations couldn’t understand it. So the French Church began to have the same problem that the Anglo-Saxon Church had once had. The people couldn’t understand the message. So in the last episode, I noted that the Council of Tours had to issue an edict encouraging priests to deliver sermons in “the rustic Roman language,” by which they meant the regular language of the people. So in essence, they actually had to backtrack on some of those reforms because the reforms were moving the language of the Church away from the language of the people.

78 By the end of the eighth century, the Carolingian Renaissance was well under way. Over the next few years, the literary power of the Frankish Kingdom began to eclipse to scholarship of Northumbria in Britain. The death of Bede was a huge loss for Northumbria. And Northumbrian scholars like Alcuin had started to relocate to France. So there started to be a general decline in scholarship in northern England. Northumbria was also starting to experience a political decline. Internal political divisions and feuds sat in. The Picts in the north started to experience a resurgence, and that drained additional resources and energy away from the kingdom. But one of the biggest factors in the decline of Northumbria was the rise of Mercia under the leadership of Offa.

Mercia had always been a rival of Northumbria going all the way back to Penda and his battles against the Northumbrian kings. So as Mercia became richer and more powerful under Offa, the relative political power of Northumbria began to decline.

Having expanded into Kent in the southeast, Offa later assumed control of Sussex in the south and East Anglia to the east. He effectively ruled all of England except Northumbria and Wessex in the southwest. And when he later married his daughter to the Wessex king, he had indirect power and influence over that kingdom as well.

Offa’s predecessor Æthelbald had declared himself ‘King of all South England,’ but Offa took that title one step further. He was described in some charters as ‘rex Anglorum’ – King of the English. But he was never actually the King of Northumbria, and he only had indirect control over Wessex. So we’re almost to a leader that we can call the first King of England, but we’re not quite there yet.

Very little is known about the overall quality of scholarship in Offa’s kingdom, but modern scholars have noted that the scripts used by scribes in Mercia during this period were actually very advanced and well-practiced. The scripts from some of the other regions were very crude by comparison. So from that, scholars have concluded that the Mercian court was actually quite advanced.

There is also a popularly-held belief that Beowulf was composed in Offa’s court. The best evidence for this is that fact that the poem features a digression about a distant ancestor of Offa who was king of the Angles back on the continent, and who was also named Offa. The poem praises this earlier Offa in a passage that doesn’t really have any other purpose in the poem. And so some scholars think Beowulf may have been composed by a poet in Offa’s court, and this passage was intentionally inserted as indirect praise of the Mercian king. The time frame works, but there is no way to know for certain if the poem was actually composed there.

As I noted earlier, Offa had extended Mercian rule into Kent very early on. That’s where he took control of the mint at Canterbury. And I noted that the Archbishop of Canterbury was none to happy with those developments. The Archbishop apparently hated Offa, and the feeling became mutual. The Archbishop continued to oppose Offa’s excursions into Kent, and he remained a thorn in Offa’s side. In addition to this problem, Offa was getting older and he saw how other kingdoms had fallen apart when the king died as the king’s heirs battled each other for power.

79 So in the year 786, a great church conference was held in Britain, and Offa used that conference as an opportunity to solve some these problems. Papal delegates traveled from Rome to attend the meeting, and Anglo-Saxon dignitaries from other kingdoms were also in attendance. One item on the agenda was to get the Church in Rome to sanction Offa’s son Ecgfrith as his successor. This had been done on the Continent, but no Anglo-Saxon king had ever had his heir consecrated in advance by the Church.

The other item on the agenda was to weaken the power of the Archbishop of Canterbury down in Kent. So Offa announced the establishment of a new archbishopric to be created for Mercia at Lichfield. This was intended to deprive the archbishop of Canterbury of some of his standing and power.

Unfortunately for Offa, both of his objectives at the conference ultimately failed. When Offa died a decade later, his son only survived him by five months, and his son didn’t have any children. So all that advanced planning for an orderly and long-term succession went out the window. And Mercia experienced the very succession problems which Offa had sought to avoid.

And that new archbishopric at Lichfield was established, but it only had one Archbishop. And when he died, it completely was abandoned.

But let’s go back to that religious conference for a minute. It was apparently a really big deal at the time because a short time later there was correspondence between Charlemagne’s court and the Pope about the conference. And the reason why that correspondence is important to our story is because it mentions the languages which were spoken at the conference. Specifically, it says that the Anglo-Saxons spoke “þeodice.” And this reference is actually kind of important.

Note that the correspondence doesn’t say that the Anglo-Saxons spoke “English.” They spoke “þeodice.” And that’s because “English” wasn’t a widely-accepted term yet, certainly not outside of Britain. So what was “þeodice”?

Well, þeodice was the general term used during this period for the language of the Germanic peoples. So it was used to refer to the language of the people east of the Rhine, and it was used to refer to the native Germanic language of the Franks which was still spoken in parts of the Frankish kingdom. And here we see that it was also applied to the Anglo-Saxons. So this really illustrates how similar all of those languages were at the time.

From the perspective of Charlemagne’s court and the Church in Rome, the Anglo-Saxons spoke the same language as all the other Germanic peoples on the Continent. It was all þeodice. So this suggests that the various Germanic languages were still intelligible to each other throughout most of Europe, including Britain.

The Anglo-Saxons also used the term. In Old English it was called þeodisc. So we can say that the Anglo-Saxons spoke the English dialect of þeodisc. But the reason why that term þeodisc is kind of important to our story is because it eventually evolved into the words Deutsch and Dutch.

80 The history here gets a little bit complicated, but within most of modern-day Germany, the term evolved from þeodisc to Deutsch which is still the name for the German language in German. And of course, Deutschland is the name of Germany in German.

In Northern Germany and the Netherlands, the word þeodisc developed different pronunciations over time, and those variations were sometimes applied to specific Germanic dialects. But one of those variations was Duutsch (/doo-tch/) which passed into English as Dutch in the 1300s. By that point, þeodisc had largely disappeared from English having been replaced with - well - English. But now English took in this new word Dutch which was really just a later version of þeodisc.

At first, Dutch had the same general sense as Deutsch or þeodisc. In other words, it meant German. And that original sense still survives in the name of the Pennsylvania Dutch who settled in the United States from Germany – not the Netherlands. So Pennsylvania Dutch really means Pennsylvania Germans using the original meaning of Dutch.

So how did Dutch come to refer to the language and people of the Netherlands specifically?

Well, in the 1600s the distinction between the language of the Netherlands and the language of Germany began to be better defined. Of course, there was no such nation as Germany yet, just a bunch of independent provinces and city-states. So there was no standard word for the region. And that’s why the name of Germany varies so much in other languages today. In French and Spanish, the name is based on the Allemanni tribe. In Finnish, the name of Germany is Saksa based on the name of the Saxon tribe. In modern English, we use the name Germany ultimately based on the old ‘Germani’ tribe and on the Latin term Germania. But the name Germany wasn’t really used in English until the 1500s and 1600s.

Prior to that, it was still Dutch. But around the 1600s, several different terms started to emerge to distinguish the dialects of the region. It was around this time in the 1600s that Deutsch and Dutch really began to become distinct. Also, sometimes the Low German dialects of Germany were called nederduytsch. Neder meant ‘low,’ and it’s actually cognate with the Old English word nether – still found in words like netherworld for Hell. So nederduytsch literally meant ‘Low German.’ But the other dialects spoken around the mouth of the Rhine were called nederlandsch which was literally ‘lower landish.’ Of course, that term produced the modern term Netherlands.

In Britain, these high and low distinctions also started to be made. The language of the Netherlands started to be called Low Dutch and the language of German regions was called High Dutch. So High Dutch was basically what we know today as German.

But all of this coincided with the rise of the Dutch Colonial Empire in the 1600s and the 1700s. So the British found themselves in constant contact with the Low Dutch in the Netherlands. They traded with them, they fought against them, and they were rivals for the same territory in the New World and beyond. As you might know, New York City was originally a Dutch fur trading settlement called New Amsterdam. And because of that close contact rivalry between the Dutch

81 and the British, the term Low Dutch started to become simply Dutch, and from that point on, the term Dutch became associated exclusively with the Netherlands. And with respect to the rest of the Germanic regions, the term High Dutch just fell out of use, and it started to be replaced with the newer word German.

So English basically narrowed the meaning of Dutch over time to this one specific region.

The rivalry between the British and the Dutch during this period was actually reflected in the English language. Dutch became a negative word in English. And during the 1600s and 1700s, English speakers began to invent a lot of new expressions with the word Dutch, and most of them had a negative or pejorative connotation. Double Dutch was double talk or gibberish. Suicide was called the Dutch Act. A Dutch bargain was a one-sided bargain. Dutch courage was courage or bravery inspired by liquor or booze. Dutch luck was undeserved luck. Dutch praise was a euphemism for condemnation. And Dutch treat was a date or outing where you had to pay your own way. So a Dutch treat wasn’t really a ‘treat’ at all. A Dutch uncle was a very critical person. If you were in Dutch, it meant that you were ‘in trouble’ – probably ‘in jail.’ And that is just a few of the common expressions at the time.

This pejorative use of Dutch in English wasn’t lost on the Dutch themselves. They spoke English well enough to know what was going on. And in the early 1900s, Dutch officials were so aware of this connotation that they ordered the government to stop using the term Dutch altogether. It was decided to use the official term Netherlands instead.

So I hope you found that interesting. But the main point is that Dutch was once a general term for ‘German,’ and it is a later version of the word þeodisc which was also a general word for Germanic languages, including English. And it was in fact a term used by Charlemagne for the English language.

So let me return briefly to Charlemagne and Offa. About three years after that big church conference in Britain where Offa tried to deal with some of his local problems, he was contacted by Charlemagne. Charlemagne wanted to show his respect for Offa by trying to arrange a marriage between Charlemagne’s son, Charles, and one of Offa’s daughters. Charlemagne assumed that Offa would eagerly accept the offer, but Offa actually made a counter-offer. He would agree to Charlemagne’s proposed marriage alliance only if Offa’s son Ecgfrith could marry one of Charlemagne’s daughters. In other words – quid pro quo.

Charlemagne was apparently shocked and taken aback by this counter-offer. The warm relationship between the two leaders suddenly became really cold. Charlemagne refused the counter-offer, and the marriage alliance never happened. And going back to our original theme, the two leaders started to quibble over trade. They each imposed an embargo on traders from the other country. It was during this period that Offa drove out the rival king in Wessex and imposed his protégé there. But Charlemagne gave refuge to the rival claimant to the Wessex throne – Egbert. By this point, Offa had become convinced that Charlemagne was trying to disrupt his kingdom.

82 But this is when Alcuin stepped in. Remember Alcuin? The Northumbrian scholar who helped to spur the Carolingian Renaissance and gave us our modern lowercase letters. Well, he helped to mediate the dispute between Charlemagne and Offa. He wrote a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury to try to assure Offa that Charlemagne had no intention to threaten Mercia or the surrounding regions. And it actually worked. Afterwards, the Cold War began to thaw, and the two leaders started to get on again.

The respective trade embargos were dropped. In 796, about seven years after the disputes started, Charlemagne sent a letter to Offa. He once again referred to Offa as his ‘dearest brother.’ He agreed to allow Anglo-Saxon traders to enter his kingdom, and he assured their protection while they were there. His letter indicates that there was a mutual agreement in place, and that Offa was to offer the same protection to Frankish traders. And this is considered one of the first trading treaties between kings in Western Europe.

And this development brings our discussion full circle. We once again see the overriding importance of trade. In the old days, a rejected offer for a marriage alliance might lead to war. And harboring a rival’s political enemy could definitely lead to conflict. But this was the eighth century – the era of traders and tremendous wealth. And all of that political back and forth was fine, but it couldn’t jeopardize those lucrative trading networks. The old Germanic notions of ‘might makes right’ were giving way to notions of diplomacy and negotiated settlements.

And there was another factor bringing these two leaders back together, and that was a common shared threat. During that period of brief Cold War between Offa and Charlemagne, something happened which likely stunned and shocked both leaders.

According to the later Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in the year 789, three ships of Scandinavians arrived on the Wessex coast. An official went out to meet the ships to see what they wanted, but the so-called Northmen killed him. The Chronicle then says that those were the first ships of ‘Danes’ to come to England. Danes was a generic term for Viking in Britain. So the fact that they were initially referred to as ‘Northmen’ has led modern scholars to conclude that these were ships from Norway. And that is all we have from that Chronicle entry – just a couple of lines. But those lines suggest that the era of the Viking Invasions had arrived.

Those Scandinavians had made a living out of trade and plunder, and now they found their way to Britain. They had been trading there for some time, but this type of aggressive activity was usually reserved for their neighbors in Scandinavia and the Baltic. Now it was moving westward. Other sources tell us that Offa began to arrange coastal defenses. The natural conclusion is that those defenses were intended for those Scandinavian pirates. Three years after that first skirmish, the Vikings returned. For the year 792, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives us the following passage:

“In this year, dreadful foreboding warnings came over the land of Northumbria, terrifying the people most woefully. There were excessive whirlwinds and lightning storms. Fiery dragons were seen flying across the sky. These signs were soon followed by a great

83 famine, and shortly after, on January 8th, the ravaging of heathen men destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne through brutal robbery and slaughter.”

This is typically sighted as the first official Viking raid in Britain. And the effect of that surprising attack cannot be overstated. The Lindisfarne monastery was looted. Many of the monks and much of the cattle were killed. The Vikings sailed away with gold, jewelry and sacred items. Though we know virtually nothing about the raiders, some scholars believe that they were Norwegian traders who had been in Britain for a while before they turned on the local populace and attacked the monastery.

But for the people of Christian Europe, it didn’t really matter who they were. They couldn’t that a monastery of all places had been looted. That was considered completely out of the realm of possibility. Down in Charlemagne’s court, Alcuin wrote a famous letter to monks in Britain after the attack. He stated that the Anglo-Saxons had never seen such a terror in their entire 350 years in Britain.

But the terror was just beginning. The next year, the Viking raiders returned, and they attacked Bede’s monastery at Jarrow. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Northumbrians were a little better prepared that time. Some of the Viking war leaders were killed in the attack. And some of their ships were broken up in bad weather. When the Viking sailors from the sinking ships made it to shore, they were promptly killed, but that was little consolation. Another prominent monastery had been looted and plundered. The next year, the raiders returned again and sacked the monastery at Iona on the western coast of Scotland. So the raiders were beginning to focus on the regions around Scotland and Ireland. Offa died the next year, but the raiders kept coming. Three years after Offa’s death in the year 799 – the last year of the 8th century – the first Viking raids took place in Charlemagne’s Frankish kingdom. And now Charlemagne began to fortify river defenses to prevent inland incursions.

Thanks to the Old Norse influence on English, we can describe these Viking raids with their own words. And those words enable us to express the horror of those raids. The words raid and ransack come from the Vikings. Burn, scathe and scorch are Old Norse words. Lift, drag, lug, thrust and take reflect the activity of the raiders. And even though the Vikings took gold and valuables from Britain, they left behind several words which reflect the general sentiment at the time. Those words were scare, shriek and die.

In the next episode, we will explore how the Viking raiders eventually became the Viking conquerors. We’ll examine the rise of Wessex and the beginnings of England. And we’ll look at the how Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, became Emperor of the Romans. And along the way, we’ll see how these events impacted the English language.

So until next time, thanks for listening to the History of English Podcast.

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