An Historic Tongue

Studies in English Linguistics in Memory of Barbara Strang

Graham Nixon, John Honey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000156119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume, first published in 1988, represents in its papers the wide-ranging yet coherent linguistic interests of the late Barbara Strang (1925-1982). For her, the history of English and its current state were two sides of the same coin, and the principle theme of this collection is that neither one may be properly understood without invoking the other. It is a 'real-data' collection, in that its contributors share the view that the facts of language, patiently gathered, recorded and collated, must govern the theory within which they are described, and not vice versa. This philosophy may be seen to operate in all the contributions, and to result in a truly three-dimensional picture of English: data; distribution (temporal, geographical, situational and social); and description. This book will be of interest to students of English language and linguistics.

PART I
Old to Middle English Period

1
The Difficulty of Establishing Borrowings Between Old English and the Continental West Germanic Languages

E.G. Stanley

Pembroke College, Oxford

Barbara M.H. Strang, in A History of English (London, 1970) § 184, provides her readers with a succinct account of linguistic borrowing within the West Germanic group of languages. She had a special interest in linguistic contacts of different periods, and that emerges from other passages of this book and from various other writings.

In § 184 she follows a long line of scholarly speculations on the history of OE heretoga ‘dux, comes, ealdorman, eorl’, and its West (and thence North) Germanic equivalents. The word in West Germanic had been the subject of a protracted controversy between E. Schröder and R. Much, neither of them really sufficiently at home in the Old English material some of which they used.¹

Barbara Strang (1970: § 184) sums up what she accepts of the arguments for English:

Occasionally borrowing can be traced between the Germanic languages. One of the most interesting cases is here-toʒa (literally, ‘one who draws the army [after him]’, ‘a general’, also used to translate L consul). This was first used by Alfred, then in later poetry (where it is one of the survivals into ME). The source of this is WG, and it may have been brought to England by one of Alfred’s Continental aides. In turn, WG got it from EG, where it was used in the Gothic Bible as a calque of Greek strategos, ‘army leader’. Having adopted it, OE characteristically used it as a model for a new formation, folctoʒa, in which the first element is translated as people (folk) or army, and means ‘the whole people considered in its capacity to form a (national) fighting force’.

In fact, no such calque occurs in the Gothic Bible, but was invented by Schröder as a link in his chain of argument, involving the hypothesised East Germanic origins of the calque.² It is said, Germanic strategoi, roughly contemporary with Wulfila, fought in Imperial armies; the invented Gothic calque is irrelevant to the problem of establishing borrowings between the early West Germanic languages. For the history of the relationship of Old English to Old Saxon the distribution of OE heretoga/ OS heritogo and OE folctoga/ OS folctogo is important. Schröder suggested that OE folctoga was modelled on heretoga, and that furthermore the Old Saxon poet of Heliand borrowed OS folctogo from the folctoga of the Old English poets, and used the word once for Herod and three times for Pilate (both of whom he more often called heritogo).

As Schröder knew from the dictionaries more or less as fully as we know it from the concordances now,³ OE folctoga occurs only in poetry (fifteen times), heretoga occurs rarely in verse (twice in Alfred’s Metres of Boethius and once in the Exeter Book Gifts of Men) but often in prose (161 times, according to the Venezky–Healey Concordance). The occurrence in Gifts of Men 76 is of interest because the word is varied by the unique fyrdwisa, which confirms that the Anglo-Saxons who used them fully understood the elements from which such compounds are constructed.

The compound folctoga comes in verse most of which would not generally be accepted as of the time of King Alfred or later, including, Genesis A, Exodus, Daniel, Beowulf, Andreas, Juliana, Guthlac B, as well as Judith and Solomon and Saturn which would be more generally accepted as late. This is not a good basis for Schröder’s suggestion that OE folctoga was coined on the model of heretoga:⁴ if, in the ninth century, the Heliand poet had an ear for Old English poetry he may have known that the Old English poets did not use the word corresponding to OS heritogo but had a word that would correspond to an OS folctogo for which he quite happily used heritogo more often. On the other hand, it seems no great stroke of poetic genius to coin folctogo if one had heritogo in ordinary use, and an Old Saxon would not need to go to Old English verse to coin it, quite independently. Schröder’s other assumption, that OE heretoga is from West Gērmanic words such as OS heritogo, was not, as he thought, strengthened by finding the rare form heretoha,⁵ and Much lost no time before he pointed that out.⁶

The use of heretoga in the Vespasian Psalter Gloss of the middle of the ninth century was overlooked by Schröder as well as by Much.⁷ Before any Alfredian text, the gloss has Ps. 67:28 (the earliest of many similar Old English psalter glosses):

ðer se gungesta in fyrhtu aldermen

Ibi Beniamin adulescentior in pauore principes Iuda

heretogan heara aldermen 7 aldermen

duces eorum principes Zabulon et principes Neptalim.⁸

Also highly relevant, and overlooked by Schröder and Much, though recorded in Bosworth–Toller, s.v. teón (from teóhan), II, is a use in the Old English translation of Bede of teon + here ‘to lead an army’: ‘þa he þæt þa longe tiid dyde, þa gelomp þætte Penda Mercna cyning teah here 7 fýrd wið Eastengle 7 þider to gefeohte cwom’,⁹ not a slavish translation such as might involve unidiomatic calquing: ‘Quod dum multo tempore faceret, contigit gentem Merciorum duce rege Penda aduersus Orientales Anglos in bellum procedere’ where it would be unwarranted to see teon here 7 fyrd as arising from the double title of Penda dux rex Merciorum.¹⁰

The distribution of the word heretoga in the Anglo-Saxon charters is puzzling. According to the Venezky–Healey Concordance it comes only seven times, each time as part of the opening formula in documents by Oswald Bishop of Worcester and later Archbishop of York, each time with reference to the permission or leave granted by Ealdorman Ælf(h)ere of Mercia in addition to that of the king (and others): in Robertson charters 34, 42, 46, 55, 56, 57, and 58, all of them in Hemming’s Cartulary (in the case of Robertson 46 also British Library Additional Charter 19792), in that part of Hemming given the letter G by N.R. Ker.¹¹ The documents have reference to transactions datable as follows: 34 AD 962, 42 AD 966, 46 AD 969, 55 AD 977, and 56, 57 and 58 AD 975–8.¹² In the Latin charters in Hemming’s Cartulary Ælf(h)ere’s rank is given as dux or comes, and in English ealdorman (Robertson 36; and from Cotton MS Claudius C.ix Robertson 51 twice, from Textus Roffensis Robertson 59 twice; in a will British Library Additional MS 15350 of AD 968–71,¹³ and in the legal text ‘IV Edgar’, 15.1).¹⁴ Wulfstan the homilist, in the annal in Cotton MS Tiberius B.iv, AD 975,¹⁵ assigned to him on grounds of style, calls him Ælfere ealdorman. Why did seven of Oswald’s charters call the ealdorman heretoga? I do not believe that the reason is recoverable, and regard it as too easy to shrug it off as mere whim or fashion, as Schröder does.¹⁶

If we had more early West Mercian texts like the Vespasian Psalter gloss and more texts from the area of the West Mercians, though the texts may be West-Saxonised as the Bede and the Oswald Charters are, we might have evidence for the use of heretoga and teon here that might lead us to look to pre-Alfredian Mercia rather than to the continent for the use in English of heretoga for dux, a use with abundant parallels in the cognate West Germanic languages, but not necessarily borrowed from them into English. We have not the evidence to assert with Schröder that heretoga was not indigenous in England and was never truly naturalised, especially not for the first half of that assertion. For the second half, it is significant that the use, particularly frequent in Ælfric, of heretoga for biblical figures, for Moses above all others, and for other non-Germanic army-leaders was well established in ‘classical Old English’ prose; but it is rare for English generals.

OE heretoga and its relationship to OS heritogo may serve as an introduction to the more complicated problems of the dependence, if any, of Christ III on the Old Saxon Heliand (or perhaps on the source of Heliand). Some treatment has recently been given to the subject of such dependence by Roland Zanni in a work with a serviceable bibliography and also an account of the scholarship of the subject, but without perhaps sufficient evaluation of and discrimination between the various contributions and their methodologies.¹⁷ The problem of the indigenousness of Christ III is more complicated than that of heretoga because it at once got entangled with the now settled problem of the unity of Christ, as a single poem by Cynewulf or in three parts of which Cynewulf wrote (and ‘signed’) only the second. Some of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Foreword
• In Memoriam Barbara Strang
• Part I: Old to Middle English Period
• Part II: Middle to Modern English Period