SPATIAL UNDERSTANDING OF TIME IN EARLY GERMANIC CULTURES: THE EVIDENCE OF OLD ENGLISH TIME WORDS AND NORSE MYTHOLOGY Lilla Kopár Th e Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. Old English has an elaborate lexical scheme to express the notion and measurement of time. Diff erent time words and phrases highlight dif- ferent aspects of time, such as short or long duration, a well-defi ned point in time, the time appointed for a certain action, or a period with a distinct beginning or end. Most of these words and expressions defi ne time with the help of the time-space coordinates, which in itself is not surprising. Time is generally conceptualized metaphorically in physical terms, as if it had physical dimensions and were located in space.1 Th e conceptual metaphor TIME IS SPACE provides a struc- ture for understanding time and for describing it through language. Th e following study of select Old English time words suggests that in Anglo-Saxon England the concept of time was connected with a specifi c space, the house or hall, which adds a culture-specifi c aspect to this otherwise wide-spread conceptual metaphor. Th e intersection of temporal and spatial dimensions in the image of the hall is well illustrated by the use of the hall as a metaphor for human life by King Edwin’s thane in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (book two, chapter thirteen).2 Lexical evidence further reveals that these 1 Murray Knowles and Rosamund Moon, Introducing Metaphor (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 35; on the metaphorical nature of our ordinary conceptual system see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003 (1980)), 3–4. 2 Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, corrected reprint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 182–185. Th ere has been considerable amount of research on the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian hall as a metaphor for community, society, and the world, but little attention has been paid to the relationship between the hall and time. On various aspects of the hall as cultural metaphor see, among others, Kathryn Hume, “Th e Concept of the Hall in Old English Poetry,” Anglo-Saxon England 3 (1974): 63–74; Jennifer Neville, Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 62–69, 146–147; Alvin A. Lee, Th e Guest-Hall of Eden: Four Essays on the Design of Old 204 lilla kopár temporal and spatial coordinates are supplemented by a third coordi- nate of ‘action’ and the three form an inseparable unity. The objective of the present paper is twofold. On the one hand I will explore how time is conceptualized through structure, how temporal structure is reflected in language, and how that relates to physical space. First I will discuss competing medieval notions of the structure of time, which will be followed by an overview of the semantic field of “time” in Old English, in order to understand the place in the lexi- cal spectrum of three specific words, Old English fyrst, hwil, and fæc, which constitute the linguistic evidence for my argument. On the other hand, since conceptual categories are embedded in culture and operate at a deeper level than their lexical realizations,3 in the second part of the paper I will investigate whether the concept of time as reflected in the lexical evidence can be attested outside of language. The findings of the lexical analysis are thus juxtaposed with evidence of a very dif- ferent kind, namely that provided by Norse mythology. Norse myths offer an insight into traditional narratives of time relating to those that the Anglo-Saxons might have had. Such a comparison is justified by the close affinities between certain aspects of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval Scandinavian culture, as well as the common origin of the Anglo-Saxon and Norse cosmologies.4 The approach is of course ten- tative and the use of Norse mythological source material in an Anglo- Saxon context is somewhat problematic. Nonetheless, these narratives English Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 24–26, 178–181; Hugh Magennis, Images of Community in Old English Poetry, Cambridge Studies in Anglo- Saxon England 18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 128–132; Paul Beekman Taylor, Sharing Story: Medieval Norse-English Literary Relationships, AMS Studies in the Middle Ages 25 (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 107–122; Lotte Hedeager, “Asgard Reconstructed? Gudme—a ‘Central Place in the North’,” in Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Mayke de Jong and Frans Th euws with Carine van Rhijn, Th e Transformation of the Roman World 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 467–507, esp. 478–481. 3 Christian J. Kay, “Metaphors We Lived By: Pathways Between Old and Modern English,” in Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Related Th emes in Memory of Lynne Grundy, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet Nelson (London: King’s College London and Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2000), 273–285, esp. 285. 4 As Alaric Hall has recently argued, for example, the early Anglo-Saxon concep- tions of the relationships of human beings to mythological races were fundamentally similar to those attested in skaldic verse. See Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England. Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity, Anglo-Saxon Studies 8 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007)..