Paying attention to historic languages while writing fiction takes time and experimentation, a slow process as James Paz noted in his translation of The Order of the World. I take courage from his confessional:
“One poem in particular – The Order of the World – has led me to contemplate what it means to convey an ancient poem slowly, across a long stretch of my own lifetime but also across a long stretch of historical time. What can be gained and what gets lost through the act of ‘slow’ translation? What happens when my own time – however you want to understand that ambiguous phrase – is expanded?”
James Paz, “Slow Words: Translating The Order of the World in My Own Time,” in Slow Scholarship, ed. Catherine E. Karkov (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 31-51, at p. 34.
In the same volume as his essay, I reflected on an early stage of my historical fiction project, based on a paper delivered in 2012, when this blog began, and then published in the Slow Scholarship volume in 2019, and here we are in 2022. . . .
Like Paz, my own time spent on this project over ten years, which itself is a culmination of earlier studies as well as continuing research, changes what I write and how I write about Aldred. It is not just a problem of discontinuities developing in the novel’s timeline, or weaving back new characters into earlier, or earlier written, chapters—although that is a big deal, too, meaning that about once a year I have to read through all of the chapters to see what is going on.
The most recent chapter is set in the year 975 with a comet, but serendipitously its writing intersected with my transcription of Aldred’s glosses on St. Michael and his angel thegns (see previous blog post), so I connected St. Michael’s feast day to the comet and other events in Aldred’s life. Along the way, a new character named Owun emerged as Aldred’s spiritual brother, so the story of that relationship needs to be told earlier. Meanwhile, another character developed early on who disappeared from my narrative shows up—Culfre, the little girl silent and bookish now becomes a spiritual leader at Easington when Bega, Aldred’s sister and Culfre’s mentor, dies.
In this same chapter, I have also experimented with language use, refining my method for creating “authentic” dialogue between characters. Here is where I return to Paz’s inspiration, to play with words and see what works, how it sounds. Or as Paul Kingsnorth says about The Wake,<a href=”http:// “I couldn’t make the words fit, and I gradually began to see why: the language that we speak is so utterly specific to our time and place.” Unlike Kingsnorth, who invented his own anglisc to make it work, I am highly self-consciously trying to use modern English words rooted in the languages spoken by the historical figures whom I am fictionalizing. This experiment is also an outgrowth of another Leeds paper-turned-essay, about which I blogged earlier (Reimagining Early Medieval Britain I, II: Emerging Insights, and Re-imagining Re-imagining). The essay, “Reimagining Early Medieval Britian: The Language of Spirituality,” is soon to appear as a chapter in Old English Medievalism: Reception and Recreation in the 20th and 21st Centuries, ed. Rachel A Fletcher, Thijs Porck, and Oliver M. Traxel, pp. 135-53.
Back to the recent chapter, “975 Comet,” written primarily this last summer: recently I have gone through all of the dialogue to evaluate the word choice and phrasing for that elusive “authenticity.” I developed a premise and procedure, with some caveats, that resulted not just in selective word changes but rethinking what the characters say as well as how they say it. Granted, much of the novel is in the voice of an omniscient narrator, so I feel less obliged to choose only early medieval vocabulary there, hence my focus on the spurts of real-time dialogue.
The starting premise for checking all conversations: We will assume all characters are speaking to each other in English but with some of them sprinkling in Latin words, which I put in italics as “not English.” All the rest of the dialogue words not italicized have to be modern English derived from or with roots in early medieval Englishes (including Scandinavian or other loan words). This meant excluding modern English vocabulary that came from post-Conquest French, later Latin, or other post-medieval language importations. In cases where Aldred or others threw in a Latin word or phrase, I debated whether to decline/conjugate it appropriately or just use the English equivalent in italics to show their clerical habit of macaronic speech interweaving Latin and English.
The procedure: Online Bosworth-Toller (BT) is my friend. The advanced search allows us to enter a modern English definition lacking an early medieval root and reverse engineer it to find an equivalent that still had a modern form. I also made liberal use of the Thesaurus in Word for alternatives, as well as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for historic linguistics. Admittedly, our knowledge of Old English speech is limited to the written texts of elites and churchmen, as well as Latin-English glossaries that may not reflect actual use. Heck, even Aldred’s glosses are suspect as a source for Northumbrian Old English because he makes up the preponderence of known Northumbrian vocabulary and isn’t even writing syntactical Old English in sentences, just putting English words above Latin ones.
Why go to all this trouble? Hitherto I have used my gut-level instincts as to words that “sound” right. But I am no Tolkien—my knowledge of early medieval languages is much more limited and not as philologically aware. So I have to make it a conscious process, rather than rely on intuition.
The bonus is that I have had to rethink what some of the characters are saying because there was in fact no equivalent. This is a level of incommensurability that I have to take seriously in order to achieve some kind of authenticity that is both readable (unlike The Wake, which is too much work for some readers) and yet also challenges the reader to hear different ways of thinking and speaking about the world.
Some examples:
1. A conversation on the road:
“Have you ever seen Satan or his thegns?” Aldred asked Owun abruptly. …
Owun rode thoughtfully for a bit before answering Aldred. “I have seen men slaughter innocents. That looked like the devil’s thegns to me.” Owun used the Norse word for slaying, slahtr, that had become common in the north after the coming of the vikings, and not just in reference to their taking of cattle, but also the way they slew people like animals. His use of innocents also brought to mind cilda mæsse-dæg, the slaughter of the children by King Herod after the birth of the Savior, the Hælend or Healer.
Owun uses the Latin for innocents because I did not really find an Old English equivalent, but also because he is invoking Childermas, or the festum innocentium on Dec. 28. Note also that the narrator uses italics for Latin and Old English words, unlike the dialogue rule I just established, but gets a bit pedantic with Savior/Hælend/Healer.
The omniscient narrator also expands on the word choice I was forced to make in the use of “slaughter” instead of massacre, which allowed me to bring in the comparison with butchering. The OED locates the origins of slaughter in Old Norse slahtr, a likely enough Scandinavian loan word in Northumbria, although similar words exist in OE for smite, slay, strike, etc.[1] I am not a linguist and have not done a secondary search for insights, other than Sara Pons-Sanz discussion of the infinitive “slaa” (slay, strike) as a possible Scandinavian loanword in the LG glosses, which she doubts.[2] So is the OED right that slaughter is a Scandinavian loan word?
If you look at the footnotes, you will see that this was quite a labyrinthian research rabbit hole with inconclusive results.
2. About Aldred’s sister Bega’s death:
Gytha murmered to him. “She did not thole much or long. After taking the corpore et sanguine of our Hlaford at the Mass, she sank down on her knees and bowed forward. We thought she was overcome by the Spirit [Spiritus sanctus, or Holy Ghost, halga gast?]. Perhaps she was.”
She paused and then went on, “but when we saw her shaking, we lifted her up and brought her here to her bed, where she lay with a crooked smile on her face, her eyes fast on the angel of the Lord.”
For “suffer,” I stole “thole” (OE geþolian) from Seamus Heaney. This insider readerly joke may or may not work well for those unfamiliar with Heaney’s Beowulf and his discussion of this word choice bridging his Ulster upbringing and his “right of way” to translate an Old English epic.[4]
This passage also shows how a religious laywoman might incorporate familiar liturgical Latin (corpore et sanguine) along with OE Halford, understandable as Lord and used frequently enough in the novel to be understood.
But I am debating what she might say about being “overcome by the Spirit” (which resonates with contemporary Pentecostal and African-American religious experiences). Gytha probably would know the Latin, spiritus sanctus, and the Modern English Spirit in italics shows its Latin origin. But maybe to express such an intimate spiritual experience, she might use the English halga gast, Modern English Holy Ghost. I am inclined toward the latter.
3.a. A later passage wrestles with how to describe the crooked smile and dimple on Bega’s face.
They [Aldred and Owun at her coffin] gazed at her face, peaceful but with that crooked smile.
Aldred reached out with his other hand, touching the small dimple on one side of her face, and smiled.
He said softly, “she always had an uneven smile,with this one little hole-pit on the right cheek,” his finger resting in her dimple. “As a small child, I loved to touch it when she smiled down at me.”
Smile is not attested in Old English but has roots in Middle High German, Scandinavian languages, and North Frisian according to the OED. BT “smile” definitions lead to smearcian, which has a pejorative meaning in Modern English smirk. So I left “smile” in their conversation.
I could find no word for dimple, so I invented hole-pit combined with cheek, which comes from OE ceace. If anyone has an alternative for dimple in Old English, let me know!
3.b. The conversation continues, with Owun and Aldred mixing Latin with English.
Removing his finger from her cold face, he [Aldred] went on more soberly, “Who will call to mind such things, or anything, about her?”
“Look around at Easington,” Owun said. “These women and children, safe and beloved. They know. Not only that, but she has geared and girded them up to carry on loving one another amidst their sorrow. Even today, they shoulder the undertakings she gave them to do, in imitation of her love for each other, welcoming anyone who comes to the gate, as one poor family did this morning. That is Bega’s memorial.” He said this while staring at the dead woman’s face.
Aldred nodded, “and not just the offspring of her life, but that of our mother Tilwif and our godmother Bega, who together founded this refuge.”
He sighed. “Unless I write their story, I fear no one will know. Not even the bishop of Chester-le-Street, much less the archbishop of York, name Bega an abbess, which she surely was. Even I called her mother at times!”
Owun smiled. He thought of Bega as a spiritual mother himself, even though they were about the same age.
“Maybe,” he said, “but I believe she intercedes even now on our behalf and that of every woman and child here.”
“You think,” said Aldred, “that she is a saint already purged and seated in Paradise?” Eagerly Aldred leaned forward toward his sister’s face. “Would she bring miracles in our midst if we ask?”
“I think,” Owun replied slowly, “that we should keep speaking to her as we did while she was alive in this world, and she will keep bidding God for us as she did when she walked with us here. Surely she will provide answers in our hearts.”
Straightening, Aldred waited a moment, and then said, “Gytha told me something that Bega said lately, that she might miss when she takes her last breath because she will just keep seeing the eyes of Jesus looking into her as she fares forth from earth to heaven.”
Owun nodded. “Look at her face. Is that not true?”
He added, “whether she answers our bidding for miracles or not, the true signal of her holiness is all around us. What greater wonder-sign is there than these folk whose lives she gladdened, even or most of all our own?”
Aldred agreed, “we should imitate her imitating Christ and teach others. That will be her memoria, whether her gravestone, this church, and this tun-land last many generations or not.”
Initially in this passage, I used the Latin word in italics (imitatio, refugium, miracula, etc) but then I had to figure out whether to decline the nouns in the English sentence and decided that putting the Latin rooted Modern English word in italics to indicate its relation to the Old English worked well enough.
The other word that gave me difficulty was Bega’s “legacy”: what “successors” would remember and continue her work? I had a modern English word there that I cannot remember now, because I rewrote the sentence to say the “offspring” (OE ofspring) of her life.
4. As in other places, Aldred and Culfre engage in Latin-English wordplay:
Via Divina Franciscan Way Walk 3 Clare Contemplation and Community
Aldred took her left hand and held it in his open right hand, looking at the creases and ink stains on her fingers. “Your scribal hand. You were always wiðerweard.”
Culfre smiled, despite her sorrow. “It is my wyrdto be contrary,” she played on the words.
Then she sighed. “I know what you have come to ask.”
“You could keep silentio…” Aldred said softly.
“Such was my oath,” Culfre replied, “then and now.”
Culfre is a left-handed female scribe, as revealed in an earlier chapter where she is a small child rescued by Aldred. Here Aldred uses wiðerweard in a humorous way to refer to her character, and she plays it back with Latin-rooted contrary. Both wyrd and wiðerweard are OE words I have used elsewhere in the novel. I hope they have enough archaic resonance in Modern English for readers to feel the word play.
5. Aldred encounters Owain, a younger son of King Dyfnwal whom Aldred had met many years ago when on pilgrimage with Cathroe.
Here Owain turned to Aldred. “Do you not know me?”
Aldred answered, “I recall your father well on that peregrinatio with Cathroe. He was a good king who tried to do well by all, slaves and freemen, even an outsider like myself.”
Owain looked down, “I am ashamed to say I was one of those over-mod wæpnedmen who besmeared nidlings. One you took with you was a young theow with a shriveled arm. My father’s chiding stayed with me, and I bettered my deeds. What became of the cniht?”
“Frith.” Aldred said, and his eyes grew misty. “Cathroe freed him and gave him to me as a son. He was baptized here soon after, and then became a thane of Earl Thored of Brandsby, where he died shielding the Crayke folk during a viking onslaught, leaving behind his wife Beonna and unborn child, a son.” Aldred thought about his godson Aldfrith, a young man with a family of his own at Crayke, caring for his mother in the same house where as a new priest he had blessed the young couple so many years ago.
“So,” Owain said, “he died a bolder wæpnedman than most of those who held him in thrall and besmeared him.”
I had several difficulties in this passage.
One was how Aldred might identify himself as feeling like a foreigner or stranger, so I used newcomer, but then thought about “outsider,” both components rooted in OE but not attested, although “outlaw” is. Most of the OE words for stranger have the prefix el- (ell-þeodig, æl-fremd), but I don’t see a Modern English descendant unless we cheat and use “alien” from Latin and/or Norman French. “Wanderer” is tempting just because of the OE poem so named in Modern English, but its use of anhaga for solitary person doesn’t have an easy modern equivalent (nor do an-stapa or eard-stapa, and wrecca implies an exiled person) . For outsider, BT offers ut-wæpnedmann, which I could use, since here and elsewhere I have introduced wæpnedman, but it seems a bit repetitive.
A second difficulty was something to indicate how the warriors mocked or taunted slaves like Frith. The one OE rooted Modern English word I could find was besmeared (besmearian). Owun’s speech gets overloaded with archaic words (over-mod, wæpnedmen, nidlings, theow, chiding, cniht), but that is in some ways appropriate because his first language is Gaelic (Cumbric), and English a second language.
A third occurred with having Owun “repent” of his earlier behavior. The OE verb is dæd-betan, so I rendered that more clumsily as Modern English “bettered his deeds.” Initially I had “turned” toward better deeds to get my own sense of “repent” as an about-face change of direction, but even “turn” is not OE and the OE words remain distant.
6. And more Latin-English wordplay, reflecting a recent article I read with great interest:
After the Mass, sitting in the cloister walk, Aldred asked Owun. “What did you see when the cup was lifted up?”
Owun smiled. “You will think it outlandish, but I saw angels over the altar as you consecrated the bread and wine. Circumvolant, hwearfiað.” Spinning his fingers in the air, he used the Latin and the English to indicate that the angels were dancing.
“Perhaps,” Owun added, “I saw only motes of dust playing in the sunlight.”
Aldred nodded. “I had in mind the vision of the archangel Michael slaying the dragon. But I like your hwearfian angels better.”
Owun said, “I was calling to mind what I heard as a child, a priest who said that the angels are present at the consecration,circlingover the altar.”
Aldred added, “rightly so—it is their angelic hands, not ours, that sanctify and transform the bread and wine into body and blood.”
After a pause, Aldred touched Owun’s hand, “so let’s call your dust motes angels, since we know they are all around us even when we have no light to see them by.”
I did create “outlandish” from two OE-rooted words, instead of “odd” or “strange” (which circles back to the problem of stranger, see above). It took me a while to settle on “dust motes.”
However, there is a famous painting “Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams” by Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi Ordrupgaard (1900, “Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne”).
The idea that OE “hwearfiað” suggests circling in dance-like fashion over the consecration comes from Thomas D. Hill, “The Eucharistic Dance of the Angels: 1 Cnut, IV, 1-2.” [5] Thanks, Tom!
So this is how what I am transcribing from Aldred and reading in contemporary scholarship ends up intersecting in what I am writing, and how I am more self-consciously wrestling with language. Suggestions more than welcome!
[1] BT defines slihtan as “to smite or slay,” and cites as origin O. H. German slahton; however, the only example is Matt. 4:9 in the Lindisfarne Gospels where Aldred offers it as an alternative gloss of Lat cadens (falling down): ðu fallas ¬ slæhtas. This is odd for a verse in which Satan tempts Jesus by saying he will give all the kingdoms of the world if he will “fall down and adore me.” Aldred reads cadens as second person you, and equates sliht with falling down (feallan is the verb used in the other Gospel translations, including the MacRegol gloss). The OE noun sliht is more common especially in compounds across the corpus of Old English, most commonly mansliht and wælsliht, murderer. The use of -slæht- with an æ is less frequent, and half are from the Gospel glosses of Aldred or MacRegol. Slihtan may be related to OE slitan, to slit, tear, rend, cleave, etc. Aldred uses -slitan in Durham AIV. 19 to gloss Lat discordare (slitendum, fol. 81rb13);Lat. rumpere (geslita, fol. 86ra14); andLat. disrumpere (toslito, fol. 1r10) or Lat. lacerare (tosliteno, fol. 17v10).See also BT slaga.
[2] Sara María Pons Sanz, Analysis of the Scandinavian Loanwords in the Aldredian Glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels (Valencia: Lengua Inglesa, Universitat de Valencia, 2000), 4.3.3.4, pp. 111-12, citing Björkman and Ross about the disyllabic <a> where <æ> is expected before “h” and the absence of a final “n” in the infinitive. See LG Matt 1:6 marginal note (David ofslaa Uriah), Mark 14:1 (the religious leaders looking to kill, occiderent glossed of-slogon ¬ hia mæhton of-slaa, Jesus) and 14:65 (Jesus beaten by the soldiers, caedere glossed with geslaa ¬ geðearsca); Luke 12:45 (parable of bad servant strking others, percutere glossed miððy slaa) and 22:49 (disciples asking at Jesus’ arrest if they should strike with a sword, percutimus glossed woe gealas ¬ huoeðer moto we geslaa); the latter three are also in MacRegol. Later in life, in his gloss to DAIV19, Aldred uses -slæð glossing occidere (fall, die, kill, slay, knock down) and percutere (strike down, kill).
[4] Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, trans. Seamus Heaney (New York: Norton, 2008), pp. xx-xxi.
[5] In Lindy Brady, ed., Old English Tradition: Essays in Honor of J. R. Hall (Tempe: ACMRS, 2021), pp. 135-41, at p. 137.
Revealing Words 
The OED cites early Old Norse *slahtr as the original etymon of modern English slaughter. The asterisk means it is a hypothetical form. As you will have read in Pons-Sanz medial h had disappeared by the 6th century, so that by the Viking period the Old Norse form was slátr. This, however, is a noun originally meaning butcher’s meat. In “I have seen men slaughter…” slaughter is a verb. The Old Norse verb derived from slátr is slátra, which would fit quite nicely into an Old Northumbrian English sentence. I rather like the idea of a primarily Celtic language speaker contributing to the cross-fertilisation of Norse and English, although it is not quite clear to me which of the Celtic languages Owun’s first language was. Was it Gaelic (Goidelic branch) or was it Cumbric (Brittonic branch)?
By: James Rawson on August 29, 2022
at 4:00 am
Thanks, James. I wrote this section of dialogue a while ago and then tried to recall my thought processes for this post. I may have had in mind “the slaughter of the innocents”. The speaker is Owun, a Northumbrian like Aldred–he is the Owun from Harewood who glossed the MacRegol Gospels along with the Mercian Farman. Owun’s work essentially copied Aldred’s in the Lindisfarne Gospels, so I have a chapter set in 952 explaining how that took place (and they become friends).
The Gaelic speaker in this section is Owain, who would be speaking Cumbric. However, your point about a Celtic language speaker introducing a Norse word into English fits neatly with my efforts to replicate the kind of translingual environment of the era, albeit imperfectly.
By: kljolly on August 29, 2022
at 9:23 am