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of ‘manly women’ in the Anglo-Saxon lives of the saints. St Agatha, for example, loses her physical breast, but retains her metaphorical breast as the seat of her faith. She reaches transcendence in this state of being without breast (masculine), and is later restored. To paraphrase Lees (1990), ‘woman’ is fine as long as she is not really a woman.
As a final example, we should note, in underlining the fact that the linguistic gendering of personifications of abstract qualities is not simply a ‘language process’ divorced from its cultural context, that there are instances where Anglo-Saxon scholars made gender choices which differentiated their translations from Latin originals. For example, Alfred reconfigures the feminine personification of Philosophy in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy as a masculine-gendered abstraction. Thus, Philosophy becomes ‘divine wisdom’ (se wisdo¯m), which is gendered masculine, and Reason (gesceadwisness), though it remains feminine, ‘is a much more shadowy figure; barely personified’ (Lees and Overing, 2001: 160–1). The gender changes are deliberate – the Latin original provides a particular model and as instanced in the Collectanea, there was an Anglo-Saxon clerical tradition of personifying wisdom-as-woman. Lees and Overing (ibid.: 160–1) point out that the feminine personifications frequent in the Latin tradition were not regularly kept in Old English translations, which means that both their occurrence and non-occurrence in the latter were deliberately crafted.
Overall, in both feminizing and ‘monsterizing’ that which can be (and needs to be) controlled, and in masculinizing culturally positive, abstract virtues, such textual representations contribute in no small part to the ‘denial, silencing and elision of women’s agency in the cultural record’ (ibid.: 161) which is still a concern for modern feminists in all disciplines, including linguistics.
3.6Study Questions
1.The following short excerpt is taken from Aelfric’s Cosmology (completed around 993). Here, the author details God’s creative work on days four–seven.
On a¯ m fe¯ or an dæge gesceo¯ p God twa¯ miccle le¯ oht æt is sunne and mo¯ na and betæ¯ hte æt ma¯ re le¯ oht æt is se¯ o sunne to¯ a¯ m dæge and æt læ¯ sse le¯ oht æt is se mo¯ na to¯ æ¯ re nihte. On a¯ m ylcan dæge he¯ geworhte ealle steorran and tı¯da gesette. On a¯ m fiftan dæge he¯ gesceo¯ p eal wyrmcynn and a¯ micclan hwalas and eal fiscynn . . . On a¯ m sixtan dæge he¯ gesceo¯ p eal de¯ orcynn and ealle ny¯ tenu e on feower fo¯ tum ga¯ and a¯ twe¯ gen men Adam and
¯
Euan. On a¯ m seofo an dæge he¯ geendode his weorc and se¯ o wucu wæs a¯ aga¯ n.
(from Burnley, 1992: 44)
On the fourth day made God two great lights that is [the] sun and [the] moon, and assigned the greater light that is the sun to the day and the lesser light that is the moon to the night. On the same day he made all the stars and established the seasons. On the fifth day he created all the race of creeping things and the mighty whales and all the race of fish . . . On the sixth day he made all the race of animals and beasts that on four feet go, and the two humans Adam and Eve. On the seventh day he ended his work and the week was then past.
a.What words and structures in the OE extract are recognizable to a modern English reader? Which are opaque? On balance, would you say that the OE extract has a great deal or very little in common with modern English?
Old English, 500–1100 101
b.What markings of case, gender and number are evident in the following phrases? In phrases that contain adjectives, what inflectional declension (that is, strong or weak) is used?: a¯m fe¯or an dæge, se¯o sunne, a¯m dæge, a¯m ylcan dæge, a¯ twe¯gen men, se mo¯na, æ¯ re nihte, se¯o wucu.
c.Which principal part of the verb paradigm do the forms gesceo¯p, geworhte, geendode belong to? Is each strong or weak?
d.What inflection is the verb ga¯ carrying?
2.As we have seen in Section 3.4, in OE, the graph sequence sc came to be pronounced [ʃ] (as in fisc ‘fish’). Yet OE also made use of words such as scathe, scorch and scrub in which sc was pronounced, as in modern English, [sk]. Similarly,
g before front vowels was pronounced [j] (as in year) and k in the same environment as [ ] (as in cild). Yet OE also has [g] in gear, geld, gill, and [k] in kick, kindle, kilt (examples from Pyles and Algeo, 1982: 300). In all three cases, why might such exceptions exist?
3.In Section 3.4, we looked at the suppletive paradigm of the verb to be. Another English verb with such a paradigm is to go (preterite went). What are the etymologies of these forms? (A good dictionary will be useful here.)
4.The following place names are found in the county of Yorkshire, England: Shewsby, Kirkby Fell, Foggathorpe, Fridaythorpe, Coneysthorpe, Askrigg, Goodmanham, Oswaldkirk, Halthorpe, Flaxby, Lastingham, Wigginton. Using a good place-name dictionary, such as Ekwall (1960), Fellows Jensen (1972), or Mills (1991) work out what such names can tell us about the settlement history of these areas.
Notes
1.Reported 20 December 2000, BBC news on-line http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/ 1080228.stm . The research was carried out at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
2.It is worth noting, however, that the supposedly elevated nature of Latin, French or even Greek borrowings is not unequivocal: words such as theatre (Greek), angel (Latin), restaurant, pork, cattle, blue (French) are now well integrated into everyday use, and it is unlikely that any English speaker would classify the use of such items as ‘posh’ or intellectual.
3.Scholars now tend to use Anglo-Saxon to refer to the culture of the period, and Old English to refer to the language spoken at that time.
4.See Mitchell (1995) and Treharne and Pulsiano (2001) for accessible and interesting discussions on the period.
5.The Neolithic settlers are commonly believed to have been non-Indo-European in origin. Baugh and Cable (2002: 45) state that some scholars hold that a modern remnant of this ancient culture is the Basque community in the Pyrenees mountains of Spain. If this is the case, then the Basque language, which does not appear to belong to the PIE family or any other language family now known, may well be a descendant of a Neolithic tongue.
6.The monk Gildas, living in Wales in the sixth century, records it thus in his The Ruin of Britain: ‘To Aetius, thrice consul, the groans of the Britons . . . The barbarians push us to the sea; the sea pushes us back on to the barbarians. Between these two kinds of death, we are
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either drowned or slaughtered’ (quoted in Schama, 2000: 44). See also Bede’s account in Book I, Chapter XV.
7.The actual date of the mission is unclear. Bede states that it occurred about 150 years after the original Anglo-Saxon invasions (approximately 597–599), but there is no concrete evidence to this end.
8.OE burg is glossed as ‘dwelling in a fort, enclosure, fort’ by Mitchell (1995: 373).
9.I am using ‘natural gender’ for want of a better term, and also because it is a phrase found in other readings. The quotation marks signify that the concept of gender being a natural or biological endowment is problematic, as we shall see in Section 3.5.
10.As Frantzen (1993: 447) states, early work in this area constituted the ‘women in’ approach; one in which texts were ‘re-examined in order to discover “the woman’s” point of view’, which often ‘was the only view in question, and it was re-examined merely to assert that women had been overlooked and undervalued as a group’. The perspective has since been widened to include the examination of the masculine construction as well (since neither the concept of masculinity nor that of femininity exists without the other), within the cultural context that produces them.
11.Interestingly, Heaney’s (1999) translation largely avoids this gender ambiguity, referring to Grendel’s mother throughout as female. Its only indication lies in Hro gar’s statement to Beowulf that ‘One of these things . . . looks like a woman’ (ibid.: 45).
4Middle English, 1100–1500
4.1 Introduction
The Middle English (ME) period is typically characterized as one of great change, both social and linguistic: the ancient Germanic structures of Old English and of Anglo-Saxon society were tempered with, or displaced by, the Romance influences of the Norman duchy and the Parisian court; and the seeds of modern English society, and of modern English language usage, were sown. The event often cited as a starting point for this transitional period is the Norman Conquest of 1066, which effectively put England into the hands of new and foreign overlords, starting with William, Duke of Normandy. If putting 1066 at the beginning of a timeline of change for the Middle English period gives the impression that English society was calm and peaceful until the Conquest, or that the ascendance of Norman kings to the English throne was an unprecedented surprise to a free Anglo-Saxon nation, then it is worth noting that this was not the case. As we saw in Chapter 3, England had passed into Scandinavian hands at the end of the Old English period, effectively making it a province in a much larger Viking empire. This displacement of the older Anglo-Saxon ruling families, in particular the line of Alfred, plus the resentment in some circles at being ruled by ‘foreign’ kings (related but nevertheless foreign) meant that England of the late OE and early ME periods was a hotbed of political conspiracy in relation to issues of succession. Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians were not the only ones embroiled in these intrigues – Emma, the widow of the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred and wife of the Scandinavian king Cnut, had originally come from Normandy. She and her sons maintained close relations with her connections there, adding yet another dimension to questions of overlordship in England. Thus, the socio-political turbulence that characterizes the ME period had its roots, in large measure, in the quarrels and machinations of the ruling classes in late Anglo-Saxon England.
In terms of language, we would also be wrong in assuming that English remained fairly static until 1066. It is unquestionable that the English of the ME period came to look very different from its Anglo-Saxon antecedent, and that the introduction of Norman French speakers and scribes to England played a role in this. It is, however, important to remember that change also occurred simply through native intergenerational transmission. Features often taken as characteristic of Middle English varieties had begun to emerge long before the Conquest: reduction of inflectional paradigms, for example, had its roots in the