ONE OF THE strange things about studying Anglo-Saxon, or ‘Old English’ as we were asked to call it, is that it was quite possible to spend three years working away at it without ever taking a look at the writing itself. When I say ‘writing’ I mean the actual, material stuff. This was in the 1960s and the texts that we looked at were mostly in printed booklets with light-blue paper covers, with light-red writing on the front. Maybe this was to give us the impression that Anglo-Saxon was a light, fluffy sort of language and if we studied it long and hard enough we would become light and fluffy too. Inside the booklets, the piece we were going to study was in what can only be called a hybrid typeface. Modern printers had modified the Old English handwriting into a font. The real thing looks quite different.
Perhaps I missed the lecture where they urged us all to nip off to the British Museum where for free we could take a look at Beowulf, sitting in a glass case in the gallery of specimens of writing right the way up to the Beatles via William Blake, Wilfred Owen and many others. Years later, when I was making a series of radio programmes called Early Versions, the manuscripts had all been carefully moved down the road to the British Library, and I was able to get up close and intimate with this extraordinary manuscript. To this day it bears the signs of having been flung out the window of a burning library. Of course it also bears the signs of the person who decided to write down this extraordinary story.
Why would any English people – generally reckoned to be Christian monks – want to spend weeks and weeks of their lives writing down what is mostly a pagan tale of a warrior-superhero from what is now southern Sweden, fighting a ‘grim and greedy’ monster, then the monster’s mother and then a dragon? When you study this at university, you can easily devote all your time to learning very technical things about, say, the rhythms of the epic verse, the alliterative patterns, the grammar of the words, the meaning of the imagery and so on so I wasn’t given an answer to that question, and I haven’t found one since.
The material the monk has written on is ‘vellum’, or sheepskin. And, when this is pointed out to you, you can see how biological that is. As the Beowulf scholar, Kevin Kiernan, put it, ‘Before Beowulf could slay his monsters, someone had to slay a lot of sheep.’ A small flock of sheep was killed in order to make up the pages of the book; a large flock of people got to work preparing the sheep’s skins. These had the flesh scraped from them and were then washed, limed, de-haired, scraped, dried, washed again, stretched on frames, scraped again to remove marks and blemishes, smoothed, polished and softened with chalk. The sheets were then folded into ‘gatherings’ of eight or sixteen pages, and marked up with lines and margins. We do something like this ourselves when we fold up a sheet of paper to make a little booklet.
But wait a minute: do you write your letters and words on what was the hairy side of the sheepskin or the body side? Or both? The Beowulf scribes (or are they poets?) did both. On occasions, in particular the second of the two scribes squashed his writing up to fit it all into the page. Monks wrote with quills, feathers plucked from the tails of geese, swans or crows, that had been boiled and cut. Ancient inks were made from mixtures of wine, soot, blackthorn wood, oak gall and even cuttlefish ink. I’m not sure which recipes were used by the Beowulf scribes but we know for certain, as we look at the manuscript, that a thousand years ago, someone breathed on every page, dipped his quill into an inkhorn probably made from a stag’s antler and scraped the quill across the sheepskin.
But what lettering did the monks use? Here we have to bring in two terms: Carolingian, and Uncial.
Carolingian was Europe’s first agreed standard handwriting, circulating from the the ninth century onwards. It was in what we would call now ‘lower case’, or more properly when it comes to handwriting, ‘minuscule’. It’s called Carolingian because it derives from the court of Charlemagne, who, ironically, was not thought to be fully literate himself. He was presumably too busy becoming a soldier-king to worry about learning how to write.
Uncial was an older handwriting, written in capital letters, or ‘majuscule’, found in manuscripts from as early as the third century. One form of it was imported into England from Ireland as the Anglo-Saxons converted from the Norse religion to the Irish form of Christianity, roughly between AD 500 and 700.
But, of course, nothing in language is as cut and dried as this (apart from vellum), and when it comes to specific manuscripts we see various kinds of blends of these two scripts. So, the modernizers, writing in the Europe-wide Carolingian, often chose to hang on to some of that old-fashioned Uncial stuff – but which letters? ‘A’, ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, ‘R’, ‘S’, ‘C’, ‘O’ and ‘Y’. On reading this you have already undergone a part of the training to become a paleographer, someone who can decipher manuscripts. One tool in the paleographer’s toolbox is a mnemonic to remember these Uncial ‘retentions’: ‘“Deaf grass” may be “coy”,’ they mutter to themselves as they pore over an ancient piece of literature. Or, in the letters concerned: ‘dheaf ghras’ may be ‘coy’, i.e. an anagram made from those letters ‘A’, ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, ‘R’, ‘S’, ‘C’, ‘O’ and ‘Y’.
So is Beowulf a ‘“deaf grass” may be “coy”’ manuscript? No, it’s a different blend: it’s a manuscript that uses Uncial ‘F’, ‘A’, ‘D’ and ‘G’. In paleographers’ slang it’s a ‘FADG’ manuscript – with a bit of doing the ‘s’ in both Uncial and Carolingian – even on occasions both in the same word.
At one level, uncovering and describing all this may seem like dusty, scholarly work, conducted in the soft sifty atmosphere of ancient libraries, far removed from reality. Yet, in truth, this is what has revealed the human and material stuff of putting letters on pages, much of which involved what are now lost or rare skills. And if you look at the Beowulf manuscript, these are not the only lost things. There are unfamiliar letters sitting there, apparently doing the job that letters do: telling the reader to make a specific shape with his lips, tongue and teeth and a specific effort with his lungs and throat. They are unfamiliar because they have disappeared. So, though this language (according to the way I was taught) was called ‘Old English’, and though you and I were taught that our alphabet has twenty-six letters, and this ‘fact’ is a fixed point in our intellectual landscape, over time this matter has been more fluid.
So here are the disappeared letters:
The noise you make when you see this letter could be the first sound of the word ‘thorn’, or the sound you make for the ‘th’ in ‘this’ and ‘then’. You’ll notice that you make the same movement of the tongue to make the two sounds, but at the outset of ‘then’ you use your voice-box; at the outset of ‘thorn’, you don’t (in the terminology: this is ‘voiced’ and ‘voiceless’). Incredibly, the letter ‘thorn’ still hovers, ghostlike, over our high streets, in ‘Ye Olde Fishe and Chippe Shoppe’. As ye know, the word ‘ye’ is a way of writing one of the many different ways people pronounce ‘you’. But this ‘ye’ is not ‘You Old Fish and Chip Shop’, it’s a ‘the’. And that’s because it’s a memory of trying to write one form of the letter ‘thorn’. Blame the old ‘gothic’-style printers for that, who made the letters ‘y’ and ‘thorn’ look almost identical. The French printers didn’t have the letter ‘thorn’ in their box of tricks anyway, and it became common to replace the ‘thorn’ with a ‘y’. Thus ‘ye’ for ‘the’. At some point, when people wanted their signs to look olde, they retained that ‘ye’ instead of writing ‘the’. It’s a kind of retro inside retro.
Later, when we get to ‘V is for Vikings’, we’ll read the runes and see that it’s even more retro than that.
2. WYNN
The first word in Beowulf is one that many translators translate as ‘Lo!’ but it could be any exclamation to announce that I am about to begin, such as: ‘Hey!’ or ‘Right!’ – or even rappers’ ‘Yo!’ Even so, when you hear the sound of it, as deduced by scholars, it sounds like someone with a Geordie accent saying ‘What!’ rather pedantically by sounding the ‘wh’ with a blowy sound. Lectures were optional at Oxford in 1966, so I went along to my first lecture on Beowulf and, appropriately enough, the first lecture was on the first word in Beowulf; a whole hour on the word I might write in modern letters as ‘hwaet’. I confess I wasn’t gripped. Somehow or another, I just couldn’t sustain an interest in ‘hwaet’ for much longer than about twenty minutes.
I am not going to let this deter me from trying to interest you in two things: the ‘w’ and ‘ae’ bits of the word. When you look at the manuscript of Beowulf you’ll see that these are both disappeared letters or nearly. The ‘w’ doesn’t look anything like a ‘w’. It looks more like sawn-off ‘p’ but difficult though it is to force yourself to say it, the sound we should make when we see it is the ‘w’ sound at the beginning of ‘win’, and ‘wynn’ is what it’s called. This is followed by an ‘a’ and ‘e’ seemingly stuck together and this is the ‘ash’, which I’ll look at in a moment. The reason why the Old English scribes needed to use a letter for the ‘w’ sound was because the Roman alphabet that they worked from didn’t have a specific letter for that sound, for example the word ‘equus’, written by the Romans as ‘EQVVS’. This was probably pronounced at the time something like ‘ekwoose’ but, as you can see, the ‘w’ sound is carried by the first ‘V’ while the second ‘V’ is the ‘oo’ sound. Old English had plenty of ‘w’ words – the next word in Beowulf is a word we still have: ‘we’ – so the ‘wynn’ was a useful letter. In the end it became ‘double u’, but of course should have been, as the French call it, a ‘double v’.
This is the ‘yogh’ and it asks us to make the sound that most Germans make when they say ‘ich’, which most Scots people make when they say ‘loch’, which Welsh people make when they say ‘bach’, and which some Liverpudlians make when they say ‘back’. As the Old English said this kind of sound a good deal, it was very useful to have a letter for it. They had the Roman ‘g’ which we see in the first line of Beowulf. The ‘yogh’ was used in the ‘Middle English’ period (late 12th–15th centuries) to represent the ‘ch’ sound, perhaps as ‘g’ had other work to do.
Why did it disappear? It seems as if we can blame the French printers again. They weren’t very keen on the English people’s non-Roman lettering and decided that they would represent that sound with a ‘gh’. It reminds me of spelling lessons at school where I wondered why in heaven’s name it was ‘night’, not ‘nite’? But what if it was once pronounced ‘nichte’ with the ‘ch’ sounding like the ‘yogh’? Indeed, it was – in which case, what we should be lamenting is that we lost the ‘yogh’. Bring back the ‘yogh’, I say. Oh no, we don’t pronounce it as ‘nichte’ any more. OK, scrap that suggestion then. As you can see, spelling reform is not easy.
Dumping blame on long-dead French printers is easy and ultimately lazy of me. The truth is that the years between the Norman invasion and, let’s say, the 1390s, when Geoffrey Chaucer was writing, are an incredible period of language change for what we call ‘English’. In 1066, as William’s army defeats Harold’s, Old English and Norman French were two different languages almost entirely mutually incomprehensible apart from a cluster of words of Latin origin which had been incorporated into both as part of Christianity. By the 1390s, Chaucer writes his Canterbury Tales in what is essentially a ‘creole’, an elegant amalgamation of aspects of both languages. The core grammar is English with some Scandinavian touches (English acquired ‘they’, ‘their’ and ‘them’ from the Vikings: see ‘V is for Vikings’), though some vocabulary (‘beauty’, ‘courage’, ‘gentle’, ‘pork’), and some systems of turning one kind of word into another (‘morphology’), like adding ‘-able’ on to the end of words, were incorporated from Norman French.
Picturing this is not easy. At the outset, the court and those aristocrats rewarded with land for their endeavours in winning the Battle of Hastings spoke French. However, you can’t rule over a people for ever without learning their language. And if you serve masters who speak another language, you start to acquire their language too. After a while, some masters fell on hard times and had to hang out more with servants, and some servants did pretty well and ended up being masters.
Meanwhile, a new class of people emerged, buying and selling to both sides of the class divide (‘merchants’ – a French word), some working as professionals in the offices of the state or the church: taxmen, customs officials (like Chaucer), spies, clerics, teachers and the like. In this mix of people, the languages also mix. However, it’s not an even blend. The most Frenchified ways of speaking and writing English belong in the main to those uses of language which are to do with ruling, making and administering laws, the expression of ideas and religion, and most literature. The least Frenchified ways of speaking and writing belong in the main to those uses of language which are to do with the activities and ideas of the labouring classes and their domestic life, of small-time shopkeepers and lowly officials like sextons. To this day, the language-use of an English building worker and his or her family is likely to contain fewer words of French origin than the language-use of a lawyer and his or her family.
So, my suggestion that French scribes were to ‘blame’ is unfair. They were not free agents. Ultimately they served their masters, masters who belonged to what I’ve called the more ‘Frenchified’ layers of speakers and writers of English. What’s more, though scribes in medieval society look as if they’re an elite in charge of the language, at most they are guardians of its written form. The evolution of speech is beyond their control. If either by consensus or by decree, when a decision like changing the ‘yogh’ to ‘gh’ is made, it is highly unlikely to affect pronunciation. That’s being sorted and re-sorted in the jostling encounters of the populace.
4. ASH
So now we’re back with the third letter in Beowulf, as in ‘hwaet’. I’m calling this a ‘disappeared’ letter but it has disappeared fully only in my lifetime. When I was a child, the books I read usually adopted it for ‘mediæval’, now usually written as ‘medieval’. You might still spot it in the word ‘æon’ or even ‘æther’. However, it was never usually recited as part of the alphabet.
The ash was originally a rune, looking like an ‘f’ with slanting strokes, but in its Roman form it’s a ‘ligature’, tying together ‘a’ and ‘e’.
This letter, which came into Old English from the Irish scribes, is the voiced or voiceless ‘th’ as in ‘them’ and ‘thought’. If you want to know how phoneticians describe what you’re doing with your tongue to make this sound, it’s a ‘dental fricative’. (You may find it satisfying to say ‘voiceless dental fricative’ three times quickly.)
You have to get to line three of the Beowulf manuscript to meet ‘eth’ in what looks like ‘huda’ which translates as ‘how the’ – pronounced, it seems, not a million miles off the way some Scots or Geordie people would say ‘how the’ today: ‘hoo tha’. ‘Eth’ and ‘thorn’ were interchangeable.
6. INSULAR G
This letter crops up twice in consecutive words on the second line of the Beowulf manuscript. The words are ‘gear dagum’ meaning ‘former days’. This ‘g’ is usually called ‘insular G’ or ‘Irish G’ because it too came from the Irish scribes. The matter of how it is pronounced is not an easy one, with the experts deciding that, at various times, it can be pronounced as a ‘g’ as in ‘go’ or as in ‘massage’, as a ‘ch’ as in ‘loch’, or as a modern ‘w’, ‘x’, or ‘y’. In Old English manuscripts you can find it sitting alongside the modern-looking Carolingian ‘g’ doing the same job but also doing these other jobs. Bit by bit, ‘insular G’ combined with the ‘yogh’ and eventually disappeared altogether, though it’s used in writing modern Irish.
7. ETHEL
This Latin ligature of ‘o’ and ‘e’ survived until the 1960s in words borrowed straight from Latin, like ‘fœtus’ and ‘subpœna’. Originally, it did the job of the double ‘ee’, the longer form of the short sound made in the word ‘kin’. Like ‘ash’, it didn’t make it to recitations of the alphabet. ‘Ethel’ is the name of the rune that was sounded as ‘oe’.
Sometimes, people who talk of lost letters add some symbols devised for syllables and words, the most common of which is the ampersand. I think this is what philosophers would call a category shift. That’s to say, though these symbols look like letters being used on the alphabetic principle, they belong in reality to a ‘syllabary’ – the kind of writing system that the ancient Sumerians used: phonological but with signs representing that language’s syllables. So, pedantically and fussily, I’m going to leave the ampersand, the ‘that’ and the ‘eng’ to another time, another place.
Also nudging to take part in this parade of letter-ghosts is the famous long ‘s’ of some early print which looks like an ‘f’ but isn’t an ‘f’ as it has no cross-stroke halfway down its upright, and always indicates an ‘s’ sound, never an ‘f’ sound, even though the letter ‘s’ was available. (See ‘S is for Signs and Sign Systems’).