Hengest and Horsa

One of my long standing pet peeves about Anglo-Saxon studies is the absolute dearth of study of Hengest and Horsa, reputed to be the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain. The usual excuses — that there isn’t enough information on them and they are not historical– are utter rubbish. Since when does a character need to be historic for primarily literary scholars to deal with him? There is more known about Hengest and Horsa than most of the figures in Beowulf, about whom there is endless ink spilled. Even Vortigern has his defenders , where are those who study Hengest?

So lets start with the supposed lack of sources:

1. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People is the first to mention Hengest in his relation to the Kentish royal family and in listing him within their royal genealogy.
2. Historia Brittonum (825, alas the link is a poor cobbled together translation) gives a very long and detailed account of Hengest and Horsa, including the first description of battles between Hengest and Horsa and the Britons from the British viewpiont. Also a different version of the Kentish royal genealogy. It also includes the first references to Vortigern and Hengest’s daughter and the ‘night of the long knives’ motif.
3. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 875-900) also list Hengest in genealogies and a variety of dates, including battles with the Britons from the English viewpoint.
4. Anglican Collection of genealogies dates from about 850, a couple generations after the genealogies of the Historia Brittonum.
5. Armes Prydain Fawr (‘The Great Prophecy of Britain’) Welsh poem from the time of Aethelstan. Mentions Hengest and Horsa in its recounting of the marks against the English, section II out of IX.
6. Beowulf and the ‘Fight at Finnsburg’ give accounts of Hengest before coming to Britain.
7. Welsh triads refer to Hengest and Horsa, if I recall correctly.
8. The Matter of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, (Welsh) History of the Kings, Wace’s Roman de Brut, and Layamon’s verison, etc.

I just don’t get the lack of interest. There are far more sources in different types of texts (chronicles, genealogies, poetry) than most other early English figures. The Kentish genealogy starting uncharacteristically with Hengest is one of the best to track the development of royal genealogies (Bede, HB, and Anglican collection, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in that order of age). You can track the development of a legendary and literary figure from Bede to modern Arthuriana. Oh..perhaps that’s the rub… you might get an Arthurian lurgy (or cooties).

Æthelthryth, Etheldreda, and Audrey

You may have noticed that multiple names are often used for the saint of Ely — Æthelthryth, Etheldreda, and Audrey, and that I tend to favor the last.

I can see calling her Æthelthryth as that was the Old English name she was actually known by. The problem with this name for a saint that is still actively known at Ely and elsewhere is that few know who to pronounce it and most can’t spell it. It would be helpful if an Anglo-Saxonist would comment here on the how it should be pronounced.

Etheldreda is derived from the Latin version of the name Æthelthryth. The Life of Wilfrid spells her name Aethiltrythae* and Bede spells it Aedilthrydam*! The Liber Eliensis gives her name as Æđeldređe*. We seem to have a process of the đs being converted to ‘d’s and converting the ‘try’ of the Life of Wilfrid to ‘dry’. This is probably wrong but perhaps some nice Latinist will correct me (please do!). Anyway, Etheldreda evolved from these Latin forms. As Latin was the language of the church for nearly a thousand years, this is the form of her name used in liturgy. Unfortunately, even though the Anglican liturgies are all now in English (or the vernacular language of the area), Ely Cathedral still uses Etheldreda as the form of her name. When it comes to modern pronunciation and spelling, Etheldreda isn’t much better than Æthelthryth. It also forms a distinct disconnect between St. Æthelthryth and the modern form of her name, Audrey.

The name Audrey first appears, as far as I know, in Marie’s Vie Seinte Audree. It is unclear though if this is necessarily a French adaption. The South English Legendary (14th century) spells her name Aeldri*! The hardest part for me to see naturally occurring is the Æ/Ethel to Aud but such things did seem to happen, perhaps from Edri? Anyway, Audrey is the form of the name that evolved from Æthelthryth. I prefer it because it is pronounceable, easy to spell and the version given to girls today. Not many Americans know that a St. Audrey exists, much less that she is the source of the name.

* Spellings come from quotes in Blanton’s Signs of Devotion previously reviewed.

Linguistics in Nature

I was over at the library earlier this week looking up an article in the actual print copy of Nature (a rare thing these days) and I noticed a few linguistics articles. Hard to miss as it was splashed all over the cover… Now, linguistics is definitely not my thing but some of you may be interested. I haven’t read them fully; I’m just passing them on. I will say though that when the use the word ‘evolution’ they mean in a biological, Neo-Darwinian way. Most academic libraries should have electronic access to Nature as it is one of the two most popular science journals.

News and Views (Commentary)

W. Tecumseh Fitch (11 October 2007) “An Invisible Hand: Quantitative relationships between how frequently a word is used and how rapidly it changes over time raise intriguing questions about the way individual behaviours determine large-scale linguistic and cultural change. Nature, vol 449, p. 665-667.

Letters

Mark Pagel, Quentin Atkison and Andrew Meade. (11 October 2007) “Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history.” Nature, vol 449, p. 717-720.

From the abstract:

“Here we use four large and divergent language corpora (English, Spanish, Russian, and Greek) and a comparative database of 200 fundamental vocabulary meanings in 87 Indo-European languages to show that frequency with which these words are used in modern language predicts thier rate of replacement over thousands of years of Indo-European language evolution. Across all 200 meanings, frequently used words evolve at slower rates and infrequently used words evolve more rapidly. …We propose that the frequency which which specific words are used in everyday language exerts a general and law-like influence on their rates of evolution…”

Saving the best for last, in my humble opinion…

Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptist Michel, Joe Jackson, Tina Tang and Martin Nowak. (11 October 2007) “Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language.” Nature, vol. 449, p. 713-716 (with supplementary data available online).

Entire abstract: “Human language is based on grammatical rules. Cultural evolution allows these rules to change over time. Rules compete with each other: as new rules rise to prominence, old ones die away. To quantify the dynamics of language evolution, we studied the regularlization of English verbs over the past 1,200 years. Although an elaborate system of productive conjugations existed in English’s proto-Germanic ancestor, Modern English uses the dental suffix, ‘-ed’, to signify past tense. Here we describe the emergence of this linguistic rule amidst the evolutionary decay of its exceptions, known to us as irregular verbs. We have generated a data set of verbs whose conjugations have been evolving for more than a millennium, tracking inflectional changes to 177 Old-English irregular verbs. If these irregular verbs, 145 remained irregular in Middle English and 98 are still irregular today. We study how the rate of regularlization depends on the frequency of word usage. The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularlizes 10 times as fast. Our study provides a quantitative analysis of the regularization process by which ancestral forms gradually yield to an emerging linguistic rule.”