I’ve often been asked to give some recommendations for people who want to get started studying linguistics without having to resort to enrolling in a formal university programme.

So far, I’ve tried to help by including a reading list at the end of each paid post, which acts like a mini-curriculum for someone wanting to get into that particular topic. But I’ve never given a general reading list for someone who is interested in language and wants to understand how it works more deeply.

I should stop here to explain why on earth you might want to understand how human language works more deeply. There are many reasons — don’t discount being able to fact-check etymologies on social media — but the most interesting to me is that language provides a window onto human nature, one that can be studied rigorously.

Language, after all, is one of the things that is unique to Homo sapiens.1 If we understand how it works, we’ll come to know more about what it means to be human.

At least that’s what we thought for a long time. In the world of LLMs, the “language is unique to Homo sapiens” claim is now up for debate in a new way, with some linguists claiming that LLMs do not have language in the human sense at all — only a convincing imitation of it. Other linguists disagree — and strongly, although I haven’t heard of any instances of chair-throwing at conferences over the question.

If all this is starting to sound interesting, you’ll want to read on.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 88,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and my most in-depth work, including longer essays that trace the mysteries of English to their source, practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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What follows is my attempt to guide you into the dark forest that is linguistics, where the jargon is bizarre, the concepts often obscure, and respectable scholars whip themselves into a frenzy over whether the “human language faculty” exists.2

Don’t worry — it’s not actually that bad. Like the water of a cold lake, you get used to it after a while. Unlike a cold lake, however, I don’t recommend plunging into linguistics in the deep end. Here, the shock may kill any desire you had to study the subject in the first place. Wading in gradually is the much better option.

We begin, therefore, with pop linguistics books, and progress only gradually into more technical territory. After a healthy helping of textbooks (and online lectures), you will emerge on the other side able to get something out of academic books and papers.

Of course, linguistics is an enormous discipline, filled with many subdisciplines and subsubdisciplines. I’m going to focus here on what you need to understand “general linguistics”, or the study of the core phenomena of language itself: sounds, grammar, and the relationship between the two.3

I will, however, include a slight detour to show you the historical side of linguistics, because that’s what this Substack is all about.

Not a lot of people know this, given the kind of writing I do here, but my doctoral training actually isn’t in historical linguistics per se, but in theoretical linguistics.4 So I’ll include some things from the world of theoretical linguistics as well.

Understanding the basics of linguistic theory helps you with whatever kind of linguistics you want to pursue, whether your tastes run more to etymologies, language learning, or arguing about human nature on the internet.

Level one

First, get yourself a popular history of the English language. There are several out there, all doing in book form more or less the same thing we do every week here on Substack: tell the story of how English became the language it is today.

These books tend to begin with Old English, either the migration of Germanic-speaking people to Britain in the 5th century, or with Old English as a written language in the 7th and 8th centuries. I’m writing a book that starts earlier than that, but you’ll have to wait a couple years to read it.

If you’ve been reading the Dead Language Society for a while, you’ll probably know some of the main beats of this story: Beowulf, the Norman Conquest, Chaucer, the printing press, the Great Vowel Shift, Shakespeare, and so on.

But it’s worth hearing it all in a single volume, woven together by a great storyteller. Any of the following three will do. If you read all three, and note the similarities and differences in emphasis, you’ll get a good sense for what is important in the field and where some of the debates are.

Read more

It is the last day of September, when a young man’s fancy quickly turns to corn.

But what plant, precisely, is he imagining?

If he is in North America, Australia, or New Zealand, it’s probably Zea mays — also known as sweetcorn or maize. This is the plant whose yellow kernels come on cobs, eaten boiled or grilled, or dried and popped, or ground finely into flour, or in a thousand different other ways. This corn is a versatile plant.

If the young man is British, however, he may — having been raised on American films — think of corn in the same way. But if he’s not so young, or perhaps if he lives in the countryside, he may have a different plant in mind.

In England, corn traditionally referred mostly to plants in the genus Triticum, that is, wheat. In Scotland, however, corn once referred primarily to Avena sativa, or oats.1

Recent generations of English speakers around the world have largely converged on the idea that corn means maize, but the fact that corn could once refer to three completely different plants raises some questions.

Whose corn was the original? And why did the meaning of corn ever split into three?

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 88,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and my most in-depth work, including longer essays that trace the mysteries of English to their source, practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Subscribe now

To see a World in a Corn of Sand

I hate to disappoint anyone hoping that maize, the most common meaning of corn today, is the original, but it’s actually the most recent.

This makes logical sense — English speakers only encountered the plant Zea mays when they began to colonize North America, because Zea mays is indigenous to the Americas, not to Europe.

Since the word corn was present in English already in Old English (450–1100) times, it could hardly have originally referred to maize.

But partisans of “team wheat” and “team oats” will be disappointed as well. When the word corn was used to refer to plants at all in Old English, it referred to cereal crops in general, without an attempt to differentiate exactly what plant it referred to. The best translation for Old English corn in this sense is the Modern English word grain, a cover term for a variety of crops.2

But Old English corn also meant ‘grain’ in another sense. We still speak of grains of salt or grains of sand. These were also called corn in Old English:

swā fela welena swā þāra sondcorna bēoþ be þisum sǣclifum.
‘as much wealth as there are grains of sand by these sea-cliffs’3

This is grain in the sense of ‘a small, hard particle’ — and this is the core meaning of corn in Old English. It could apply to grains of sand, salt, ice — the Old English Rune Poem tells us hæġl byþ hwītust corna ‘hail is the whitest grain’ — or the seeds of crops like oats, wheat, and barley.4

Evidence for this older meaning of corn can be found preserved in some otherwise mysterious phrases. My favourite of these is corned beef, which has nothing to do with maize, wheat, or oats. Instead, it refers to the fact that the beef was preserved with large grains — corns — of salt.5

But other examples are easy to find: a barleycorn is a grain of barley, and a peppercorn is a grain of pepper.

Even the word kernel, so linked to corn in the maize sense, is a derivative of the same corn root — just a diminutive version. A kernel is a corn-le, a little grain of something.6

So corn meant — and, in some cases, still means — grain, not any particular plant.

This warms my heart, in a way that only a particularly tasty etymology can. You see, it’s entirely appropriate that we should treat grain as a synonym of corn. They are, on closer inspection, actually the same word.

How big is that trench coat?

An anonymous internet joke describes English as “three languages in a trench coat”. In the realm of vocabulary at least, this is a good description.

Huge quantities of English words were not inherited directly by English from its ancestors but came in through borrowing. The two languages English has borrowed the most from — presumably two of the languages in the trench coat — are Norman French and Latin.

Norman French and Latin could also be thought of as two stages of the same language, since French, Norman or otherwise, developed out of the spoken Latin dialects of Gaul.

Both of these languages are distantly related to English, through an ancient common ancestor, a language scholars have given the ungainly moniker Proto-Indo-European.

The details of these relationships aren’t as important as the fact that a single word in the ancestral language — say, *bʰréh₂tēr, the Proto-Indo-European word for ‘brother’ — often appears in English in three forms, corresponding to three routes of entry: inheritance, borrowing from French, and borrowing from Latin.7

Inheritance is when a word is passed down through the generations in an unbroken chain. This is how the word *bʰréh₂tēr passed down into English as brother.

To understand the other two routes — borrowing from French and from Latin — you need to know that Proto-Indo-European had many more descendants than just English.

Latin was one of these, and the word *bʰréh₂tēr was passed down into Latin as it was passed down into English, changing as it was handed down across the generations. It surfaced eventually in Latin as frāter — and, after further changes, the same word became French frère.

Because English borrowed extensively from both Latin and French, we have other descendants of *bʰréh₂tēr represented in English vocabulary: fraternal, fraternize, fraternity, etc., from Latin; and friar — a monastic brother — from French.8

Corn and grain have the same relationship as brother and friar. Both descend from a Proto-Indo-European word *ǵr̥h₂nóm ‘grain’, although the French word had a stopover in Latin grānum.9

The sound changes that turned *ǵr̥h₂nóm into corn and grain are complex, but systematic. They produce regular correspondences between inherited English words and their Latin/French cousins.

The c-to-g relationship is particularly robust. Alongside corn vs. grānum we have cold vs. gelidus ‘icy’ and kin vs. genus ‘kind; family’. This last example shows us that sound, rather than spelling, is the key thing.

Now we know where corn came from — what happened later to turn it into a word used for not one, but three, plants?

Food fit for pigs

It’s easy to understand how corn changed from its original concrete meaning ‘a small, hard particle’ to its later meanings ‘the type of plant that produces corn’ or ‘harvested grain in general’. Its French cousin grain made the same shift, both in French and when borrowed into English.

The divergence into the three separate plants is more interesting.

The word corn never stopped meaning ‘grain’ in general, but it began to specialize, and did so differently in different regions, because different grains were grown in different places. Corn came to mean whatever the most important grain was.

In Southern England, wheat was the predominant cereal crop, so corn came to be used primarily for wheat. In Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland, oats were more common, so corn specialized to mean ‘oats’ there.10

In the Americas, when English-speakers encountered the new (to them) crop maize, they categorized it as a type of corn:

It pleased God..to moue the Indians to bring vs Corne, ere it was halfe ripe. (1608; John Smith, Works)11

When being more specific, the colonists called maize by the name of Indian corn.12 Eventually, however, just as corn on its own came to refer to wheat in the south of Britain, and oats in the north, corn came to stand in for what had earlier been called Indian corn.

All of these shifting meanings cause no end of confusion when reading books from other times and places.

For example, if you read about 19th-century Britain, you’ll read about the Corn Laws — tariffs and trade restrictions used to prevent the importing of grain. But maize was not the main issue here. The Corn Laws were trying to protect British farmers, who farmed mostly wheat, rye, barley, and oats — though the law applied to maize too.13

If I had written this article 70 years ago, I could have pointed to a living dialect distinction between the meaning of corn on either side of the Atlantic. But, in the 20th century, the North American meaning of corn spread across the English-speaking world, propelled by Hollywood, breakfast cereals, and Saturday morning cartoons.

Funnily enough, the majority of dictionaries are out of date on this question — most repeat the older state of affairs — that corn refers most often to wheat in England, oats in Scotland, and maize in North America. These need to be updated — in my experience, there are many, many people in the UK (and Ireland!) who use corn to refer to maize.

This seems to be borne out by the unscientific poll I conducted last week on Notes:

Now, even in southern England, the homeland of corn-as-wheat, many young — and not-so-young — people only know the originally American meaning of corn. This is natural enough, of course, but I can’t help but feel a sense of nostalgia for this little piece of dialect diversity that English is losing.

Unlike other “weird words” in this series, the ultimate origins of corn are no great mystery. What’s weird about corn is the path this ancient word took to meaning what it means today.

So, to end, I feel compelled to ask: What does corn mean to you?

Leave a comment

Works Cited

• Buck, Carl Darling (1949). A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages.

• Cassidy, Frederic G. & Joan Houston Hall (2001). “Americanisms.” In The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 6: English in North America.

• de Vaan, Michiel (2008). Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages.

• Fox, Samuel, ed. (1864). King Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon Version of Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae.

• Kroonen, Guus (2013). Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic.

• Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. corn, n.¹.

• Smith, John (1884). Works, 1608–1631. Ed. Edward Arber.

I’m not sure what your inbox looks like lately, but mine is stuffed full of reflections on the Bayeux Tapestry, which is now on display — but, alas, sold out for the time being — at the British Museum. This is the first time it has ever been shown outside of France.

The Bayeux Tapestry is 70 metres long and dates to the 11th century, shortly after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.

Its subject matter is the Norman Conquest itself, and the surrounding events: the death of the heirless English king, Edward the Confessor; the invasion of William of Normandy, and William’s victory over his English rival Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings.

In the standard biography of English, the Norman Conquest is the great dividing line in the language’s history, marking the end of the Old English period and the beginning of Middle English.

This is when the hitherto purely Germanic English language first fell under the influence of French, which had been brought over by the Norman conquerors.

I’ve complicated aspects of this history in earlier articles. For example, English had lots of Latin loanwords long before the Norman Conquest. And the Normans did bring French, but it took more than two centuries before French words started to appear en masse in the English language.1

These complications notwithstanding, the Norman Conquest was a big deal for the English language. If William the Conqueror had not won at Hastings, English would be a lot more like German: a language which has plenty of words from French, but comparatively little borrowed until around 1600.2

The French words in this alternate-history version of English would have been later, more transparently French borrowings. We’d still have words of obvious French origin, such as ballet, champagne, and souvenir, but we’d have missed out on words like cattle, warden, and faith — words that barely betray their French origins.

We owe this most ancient layer of French loanwords in English to the Normans. And some of their peculiar, not-so-French-looking characteristics are the result of their specifically Norman origins. Compared to the French spoken in Paris — the dialect that gave birth to French as we know it today — Norman French was different.

Just how different? And how did these differences affect English?

In other words, what have the Normans ever done for us?

Read more

What if Substack had been around 500 years ago?

It was the 16th century. The Renaissance was sweeping through England, and it was a time when new technology (print), coupled with social and economic change, was rapidly changing the way people wrote.

Sound familiar?

This was a time when many English men of letters, who adored writers like Cicero — Tully to his fans — were importing thousands of new Latin words into English, attempting to remake the language along classical lines.

Not everyone was pleased with these new words, like condisciple (classmate), dominical (lordly), and revolute (revolve). Critics called these new words inkhorn terms — not as a compliment.

An inkhorn was the stereotypical scholar’s tool: a container for holding ink; an inkhorn term was therefore a word only an academic could love.

Many of the inkhorn terms didn’t survive, but many did: frivolous, celebrate, and clemency were once condemned as inkhorn terms, but are now core parts of the English language. The controversy over which words should be let into the language raged in English literature for a hundred years.

The following is — with apologies to Chris Best — my impression of a post that might have graced the feed of that 16th-century Substack. Read on and see how much you understand (and how much you agree with!). If you get lost, there’s a full explanation of all the strange words and spellings in the appendix.

September 16, 1553.

Of late it is become all the harder to telle what be written in Engliſh upon this Platfourme.

A reader of a Subſtacke publiſhed, ſtamped, & printed theſe few years paſt muſt ſurely wonder if it be in deed a Work of Cicero which he readeth, or of Ouidius, for the muchneſs of Latin wordes, the which he findeth on euery page.

Such is the lot of the man which would read Engliſh letters to daye. In place of beſeech, he readeth obteſtate; when he looketh for tire, he findeth fatigate; & his eyes muſt be fatigated in deede, when that they are caſt vpon ſuch monſtrous nouelties as adnichilate in ſteade of ſuch a rowe of homelye words as broughte to nothing.

I maruayle that ſuch Subſtackes as these, whoſe Authors I ſhall, for properneſse, not name, haue been found ſo plauſible to vulgar eares, while mine own writing, plentiful though it be, hath lain vnread, but ſuch ill hap, I fear, muſt be ſuppoſed in this fallen world.

Many wiſe men yet complayn theſe Inkorne Termes, as they haue lately been called, & not few haue priuatlye confeſsed they would forſweare Subſtackes for euermore, saying that they would ſooner read Latin books than theſe writyngs full wyth Latin words but half Engliſhed. I for my part could happilye liue out my dayes reading naught but Tullie & the verſes of Vergilius & die in my appoynted hour in perfect bliſs.

Ye may ſaye, what careſt thou? Let the vulgar ſort reade what they liſt! Yet is it Charitye to allow the vnlearned to be ſo deceiued by words in Roman rayment, that they read in them ſuch wiſdom as procedeth from the mouthe of Cicero? Fools are they, for they read not the wordes of Tullie but the vain ſcryblings of hys modern Imitators.

And yet, reſignation being no fit Virtue for an Engliſhman, I haue deuiſed a remedy by which the vnlettered reader may iudge whether the wordes, the which he readeth, be right Engliſh, or if they be doubtfull and forayne.

Firſt, let the reader pronounce the word; which thing, if he cannot do, ſhould be a ſign that before him lieth an Inkhorne Term.

Secondlye, let hym wonder if he euer heard the worde vttered by a fiſhmonger or another of the baſe vulgar people; which queſtion anſwered, Nay, he ſhould likewiſe be driuen to reiect the word as forayn &c.

And thyrdly, let each writer of Subſtackes include in the ſame, as poſtſcript, vnder the title How I dight this, an explanacion of his craft, & a thorough Apologetique of the inbringing of ſuch Latin wordes he hath vſed.

In fine, Cicero hath much to teache, but when that I would read Cicero, I ſhall reade Cicero & not a Ciceronian.

But here an ende.

The wicked will refuſe to heare,
but the good cannot
but liſten.

Sir Thomas Barleygrowe

How I dight this

My goal in writing this parody was not to compare the use of AI in writing today to the use of inkhorn terms in the 16th century.1

My goal was to use a familiar genre — the “what is going on with writing today?” post — to introduce you to the language and literary culture of the English Renaissance.

As for how I dight — i.e. made — this, the answer is like the punchline to the old joke:

Q: How do porcupines make love?
A: Very carefully.

First, I glanced through some of the works criticizing inkhorn terms, especially Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetoricke (1553) to get a flavour of the style, and to steal some turns of phrase. Then, after determining what I wanted to write, I tried to write it in as Renaissancey a way as I could on my own.

Finally came the hard part: many trips to the Oxford English Dictionary website to ascertain whether the words and phrases I’d used were indeed present in the English language at the time.

I chose 1500 as the cutoff, even though the piece is dated 1553, since our writer is specifically complaining about novelty.

I imagine that his implicit motto — as for so many of his ilk — is something like: “Any language change that happened before I was born is the natural, inevitable evolution of language; anything afterwards is barbaric degradation.”

Spelling

The most obvious difference between 16th-century writing and our own lies not in vocabulary or grammar, but simply in spelling.

First, you’ll notice a letter that looks like an f being used sometimes in place of s, as in Engliſh or Subſtacke: this is long s. It is a variant form of lowercase s, which was used in English printing up to around the year 1800.

The rules governing where to use long s were complex, and varied from century to century. Put simply, however, you used long s everywhere but at the end of a word.2 So, instead of success, you would write ſucceſs.

Now that you’re in the 16th-century mood, let me introduce something subtler: the use of u and v. The letters u and v were not thought of as distinct until the 17th century.

Instead, they were considered two variants of the same letter, used, like long s, in different positions within the word. The v letter shape was used where we would use u or v today at the beginning of a word, as in vgly visions. The u letter shape was used in the middle of a word, again, for sounds we would write either u or v. For example, euil purposes.

The letter j was not used either: where you expect a j you will find an i. So prepare yourself for ioy and iudgement, not joy and judgement. This is for the same ultimate reason that u and v were not distinguished — the Romans didn’t distinguish them and this, after all, is their alphabet.

You will also see y used where i would be today, as in complayn or wyth, silent final -e aplenty, and little consistency in the spelling of individual words: read stands unashamedly alongside reade on the same page.

I hope you’ve found it fun to inhabit, however briefly, the head of the curmudgeonly fictional 16th century writer Sir Thomas Barleygrowe.

The Early Modern Period in English literature is justly famous as the home of Shakespeare. But I highly recommend reading other works from the era, beyond the Bard.

Outside of poetry, the difficulty of the language in most Early Modern texts is similar to what you’ve read above. If you want to learn more about the language of the era — Early Modern English — I’ve written a guide here.

Part of the fun of writing this has been realizing that the “state of writing today” article is the latest incarnation of a centuries-old genre of English prose, one that dates back to the early days of print.3 Though the issues and the language have changed, this peculiar institution has remained constant.

English has never had a Royal Academy to regulate language. Instead, it is the self-governing community of English readers, writers, and publishers who decide the fate of English writing, through books, pamphlets, letters to the editor, and, yes, Substack posts.4

Long may that tradition continue.

Appendix: Hard words and other curiosities

in deed. in fact.

Ouidius. Ovid, author of the Metamorphoses, among other works.

the which. which.

muchneſs. quantity.

when that. when.

obteſtate, fatigate, adnichilate. Glossed accurately above as beseech, tire, brought to nothing. These terms in particular were mocked by Thomas Wilson in The Arte of Rhetoricke (1553).

rowe of… words. The concept of a phrase, a sequence of words in place of a single word, had only recently appeared in Scots, around 1550; our writer would surely not approve. I’ve used rowe here, as sequence doesn’t mean a series of things until later in the 16th century.

homely. Not ugly here but humble, simple, unsophisticated.

properneſse. propriety.

plauſible. popular. The word originally meant ‘deserving applause’. The phrase plauſible to vulgar eares appears in a later text, Hooker’s (1593) Of Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. I couldn’t resist using it here, especially since all the words of the phrase were well established by 1500.

ill hap. lack of success.

ſuppoſed. expected.

complayn. The meaning is the same as it is today, but it could take a direct object in the 16th century: complayn theſe Inkorne Termes means complain about these Inkhorn Terms.

Inkorne Termes. The inkhorn was a vessel for holding ink, originally made of horn. In the 16th century, the inkhorn was a symbol of the stereotypical scholar, much as pocket protector stands in today (or at least it did in the 80s) for the stereotypical nerd.

but half Engliſhed. only half translated into English.

Tullie. This name for Cicero comes from his full name Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Vergilius. Virgil, author of the Aeneid, among other works.

what they liſt. what pleases them. A verb derived from the noun lust ‘pleasure’.

right English. genuine English.

doubtfull. dubious, worthy of doubt.

How I dight this. Dight means make, especially in the sense of literary composition. It descends from Latin dictāre ‘to dictate’.

Apologetique. A written defence.

inbringing. import, which does not appear in the meaning ‘bring in from another country’ until the late 16th century.

But here an ende. A direct quotation from the end of Book III of Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetoricke.

The wicked… the good. An adaptation of the end of Book II of Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetoricke. The visual motif of the lines decreasing in a triangle is used by Wilson at the end of Books II and III.

Fair warning: Skip this first scene if you don’t like hearing about bad things happening to horses.

Rome. October 15, 275 BC.

The driver steps down from his chariot onto the muddy soil of the Field of Mars. The slight chill on the October breeze feels like mercy as the air dries the sweat on his brow.

He won. Or, the horses did. Better to give the credit to the horses, especially in light of what happens next. His job, however, is done, and he could use a drink.

The attendants have reached his chariot now. He helps them with the harness.

“Well done,” says one of the attendants.

“Thanks,” he says. Then his eye catches a look in the crowd that he doesn’t like. “You might want to hurry.”

“They’ll wait,” says the attendant. “Besides, we’re going as fast as we can.” He finishes loosing the right horse from the yoke. “There.”

The crowd grows louder and more boisterous — on one side are gathered the men of the Sacra Via, near the Forum; on the other are the men of the Subura, a neighbourhood to the northeast. They’re still gathered around the edge of the field, but it’s obvious that the moment they’ve been waiting for is close at hand.

The attendants lead the right-hand horse away to the altar of Mars. He leads the left-hand horse in the other direction, off the field. He’s joined by the other drivers.

“That was pure luck,” says one of his defeated rivals.

“I call it the will of Mars,” he says back, with a chuckle.

Now he’s reached the edge of the field. He turns around just in time to see it happen: the spear is cast and the horse falls. For Mars.

The attendants immediately begin the butchering. First the head comes off, then the tail. One of them takes the tail and sprints towards the city. He’s making for the Regia, the house of the king, back when Rome still had one. No king rules there now, but tradition is tradition. The tail must be brought to the Regia.

The crowd reverently lets the runner through with the tail. But now is the moment. They must have the head. They rush onto the field. By the end of the afternoon, there will be a fair few injuries to treat, and the head, garlanded with loaves of bread, will be nailed up — to the Regia, if the men of the Sacra Via win, or to the Mamilian tower in the Subura.

The driver turns away. It’s time for that drink.

Not since The Godfather have I seen such a fuss over a horse’s head. This was the Roman ritual of the Equus October, or ‘October Horse’.

It is an ancient ritual with roots more ancient still. Scholars of comparative religion connect it to other rites from across the Indo-European world — the cultural world inherited, at least in part, by the speakers of the early Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. Even English is a distant descendant of an early variety of Indo-European speech.

There seems to have been a tight connection in the Indo-European imagination between horses and kingship or sovereignty, a link that was reinforced by strange and disturbing rituals such as the Equus October.

Given how central horses were to the Indo-Europeans and their linguistic and cultural descendants, it’s surprising that their word for horse — *h₁éḱwos, which you might pronounce something like heck-woss — has been almost totally erased from the modern Indo-European languages.

So, Indo-European languages: If you like horses so much, why did you lose their name?

Read more

There’s a dream people report having all over the world. Maybe you’ve had it too. It goes something like this: you’re in your own house, everything is as you’re used to, with one exception. There’s a door you’ve never noticed before. Behind it, there’s an whole room full of treasure.

For someone who reads English, that dream is a reality.

It so happens that a room full of treasures is waiting for you in real life, just within arm’s reach: an entire library of medieval books.

They’re medieval, but don’t let their age fool you. Many of the genres are still popular today: battle-of-the-sexes comedies, romances with otherworldly beings, and fan-fiction sequels to hugely popular franchises.

In other words, they’re the perfect beach reads. And you can read them today — yes, today! — in the original Middle English (or Middle Scots!).

Middle English, you see, is not really a foreign language. It’s not like Old English, which you can’t read at all without special training. Instead, Middle English often looks like weirdly-spelled Modern English:

Himself he lerned forto harp,
And leyd theron his wittes scharp;
He lerned so ther nothing was
A better harpour in no plas. (Sir Orfeo 29–32)

There’s no word in there that isn’t also in Modern English, although some meanings have shifted a bit: for example, we no longer learn ourselves, we teach ourselves.1 And nothing means more like in no way.

There’s often an additional challenge: alongside the strange spellings and uses of familiar words, there comes a sprinkling of words that are utterly incomprehensible:

The vousour was avowed al
Of ich maner divers aumal. (Sir Orfeo 363–364)

But beyond hard words like vousour ‘vault’, avowed ‘adorned’, and aumal ‘enamel’, the rest is pretty easy: divers ‘various’ and ich ‘each’ are bit tougher, but the, was, al, of, and maner are all familiar friends.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had help just for the words which are totally foreign, or have changed in their meaning significantly? You could read the Middle English as it is, without recourse to a translation.

Well, I have some good news for you.

Where to begin

Allow me to introduce you to the library full of treasure you didn’t know you had: The Middle English Texts Series, aka METS.2

This is a collection of Middle English and Middle Scots literature in exactly the format a reader wants: the original text, along with glosses — short Modern English translations — of all the difficult words.

There are also the right kind of notes: the kind that explain cultural and historical context, rather than litigating old academic feuds.

Without these notes, you may understand all of the words and nod vaguely along with the plot, but you haven’t had anything like the experience you’ve come looking for. And, best of all, the METS texts are all available online, absolutely for free.

This is exactly the format of text that you, as a reader of Modern English, need when approaching Middle English. The glosses give you the help you need at exactly the point you need it and nothing more, leaving your experience of the original text relatively unmediated.

And better still, it’s all in a format you can actually take to the beach with you, which means no need to worry about spilling your mojito on a dictionary you’ve balanced precariously on your leg as you try to slog your way through untranslated 14th century romances.

So, where to begin?

Sir Orfeo

Sir Orfeo is the best place to start. It’s 600 lines of Middle English verse, and we’ll read the first four together in a moment, so you’ll have a head start!

Sir Orfeo is a retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, except in this version Orpheus is an English king and his queen is stolen, not by death, but by the king of Faerie.

Orfeo gives up his throne, wanders the wilderness for years, and unlike the Greco-Roman original, actually ends up bringing her back home.

It dates from the late 13th or early 14th century, so it’s a bit earlier than either Chaucer’s works or Gawain.

When you go to the METS website and open the text, this is what you see:

The text is on the left. On the right, in italic type, are the glosses for any hard words on the line. When there are multiple hard words, as is often the case, the glosses are separated by semicolons. Whenever a line has a note, you’ll see a link. If you click this, a note panel opens up at the bottom of the screen.

How to read a glossed text

If I’ve sold you — I hope I have! — on the idea of reading Middle English and Early/Middle Scots texts in the original using glossed editions let me offer some guidance, as it isn’t always obvious how best to use this tool.

My method uses a three-step process. First, read a chunk of the text. I usually like to go up to a full sentence at a time, although that can sometimes be difficult depending on the type of text.

Using Sir Orfeo as an example, I’d begin with the first four lines. They end in a colon, close enough to a full sentence.

We redeth oft and findeth y-write,
And this clerkes wele it wite,
Layes that ben in harping
Ben y-founde of ferli thing: (Sir Orfeo, 1–4)

I like to read out loud, especially for poetry. If your goal is to acquire some ability in the language rather than just to get through the text, it’s best to remember that spoken language is much older and more fundamental than written language.

We have amazing abilities to acquire language from hearing. Hearing the text spoken also allows you to take advantage of things like meter, rhyme, alliteration, and other “sound effects”. If you’re curious how to read Middle English, I have written a guide for you.

Now let’s return to those first four lines. Unless you have extensive background in Old or Middle English, you probably don’t know some of these words. This is where the glosses come in handy. The editors have tried to guess the words that you will have trouble with and given you modern English translations of them off to the side. Now you need to match the glosses to the hard words, but that usually isn’t very difficult.

In the second step of the reading process, I like to take those glosses and mentally substitute them for the hard words. In the case of the lines from Sir Orfeo, it would look like this, with the glosses in italics:

We redeth oft and findeth written,
And these scholars wele it know,
Layes that are in song
Ben composed about marvellous things: (Sir Orfeo 1–4)

The few differences that remain after you’ve applied the glosses in this way are differences of spelling or grammar. The editors expect you to handle these differences on your own.

In this case, the plural ending -eth may give you pause at first, but you’ll have ample opportunity to get used to it throughout the poem because it will be a constant companion. During this second phase, I do not read out loud. I simply try to understand the meaning.

In the third and final step, I’ll read the original text again, letting what I now understand infuse into the original words. This creates a small, weak link between the Middle English words that I see on the page and the meanings as I understand them in Modern English.

These links are weak at first, but as I read and see the same kinds of words occur over and over again, the links start to get stronger, and I start to need the glosses less and less.

At this point, when I feel I understand the meaning of the original text, only then do I look at any notes, to catch any meaning outside the literal words.

And that’s more or less the process. I continue through the text like this, breaking into chunks and doing this three-step reading process as I go.

This, by the way, is more or less the same technique that I use with students when they are intermediate-level readers of a language I’m teaching them. It’s also the technique I use for myself, as I am an intermediate-level reader in a few languages that I’m studying. I find a text that has a good reader-friendly edition and then proceed.

If there is no such edition for a text I really want or need to study, I make one myself. I did this when I was first beginning to read Beowulf seriously: I looked up all the difficult words, made my own glosses, and compiled notes from commentaries into a makeshift reader’s edition. It ended up being about a year-long project. I don’t recommend this path unless you’re seriously obsessed with a text.

Have I mentioned Scots?

But for many Middle English texts, you don’t need to worry about clearing your calendar for a year. You have METS!

METS doesn’t have every Middle English text, but it has so many that you’re not going to run out this summer or the next or the next.

Excitingly, METS offers not only Middle English, but also Early and Middle Scots.3

Early Scots corresponds in time to the last phase of Middle English (1375–1450), while Middle Scots is contemporaneous with Early Modern English (1450–1700). If you haven’t encountered Early, Middle, or any Scots at all, I highly recommend starting to read it in the METS format.

This Scots is still accessible to a reader of Modern English: the METS team have often glossed Scots more extensively than Middle English, where Scots is more distant from Modern English.

And it’s uniquely delightful. Here’s an excerpt from Robert Henryson’s Fables:

Henryson’s Fables may look hard and teuch — that is, tough — on the outside, but they hold a kirnell which is sueit and delectabill: they are adaptations of fables from Aesop and from the medieval tradition of stories of the trickster Reynard the fox, here called Lowrence. And they are merie sport — great fun — indeed.

You can see that each line of Henryson’s Fables is much more thoroughly glossed than Sir Orfeo was.

Often whole phrases need to be glossed into modern English. Nevertheless, the text is accessible in the original and you can actually start to learn these historical forms of Scots as a reader of Modern English with nothing more than a quick visit to a website.4

And if you’ve already read some Middle English, you’ll recognize some words — clerkis ‘scholars’ is a Scots spelling of the word clerkes you read in Sir Orfeo. The more you read, the easier it gets.

The starter pack

Here are three more poems to fill out the starter pack, and one bonus. Each of these comes in a great glossed edition, but is still an enjoyable text to read in its own right.

If you’re dreaming of Chaucer or Gawain, they’re not in METS. But get some experience with Middle English using the METS texts first, and you’ll find the rest so much the easier when the time comes to read them.

This is a poem written in Middle Scots by Robert Henryson. He was one of a group of 15th-century poets called the Scots makars, literally, ‘makers’, a word which came to mean ‘poets’ just as the Greek word ποιητής poiētḗs ‘maker’ did.5

These Scots makars absolutely loved Chaucer. The Testament of Cresseid is a kind of fanfiction sequel to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the tragic story of two lovers during the Trojan War.

Henryson manages to make the ending even more depressing than Chaucer’s original. Read it here.

In this poem Sir Gawain gets to appear in a comedy. Like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it includes another challenge.

King Arthur is given a year to come up with an answer to a difficult question: whate wemen love best? (91) A hideous woman, Dame Ragnelle, agrees to help, on the condition that she be allowed to marry the flawless Gawain. Slightly bawdy hilarity ensues. Read it here.

Here we have another Arthurian tale, but this one is more fantastical.

Sir Launfal, one of Arthur’s knights, falls out of favour at court and into poverty. He’s rescued by a fairy princess who showers him with wealth on one condition: that he keep her a secret. Of course he can’t — you know how these kinds of stories go. Read it here.

This text is a bonus. It is very early Middle English indeed, from around 1200.

Because this text is older, it comes with a translation rather than glosses. But it’s well worth the read, because it is hilarious.

It’s a comic debate poem in which two birds go after each other with increasingly petty insults. They fight over their singing, their usefulness, their morals, and who, in the end, is the bigger disgrace to birdkind. Read it here.

These are just a few of the treasures awaiting you in the library you didn’t know you had. And, since it’s summertime (in the northern hemisphere at least), any of these poems would be just the thing to take with you on a trip to the beach.

The website looks great on a tablet, though the more heavily glossed texts will require landscape mode. Or, if you prefer the hard-copy experience, there’s a button on each of the pages that allows you to download a beautifully typeset PDF. Print it out and take it to the beach, to enjoy alongside a drink with one of those little umbrellas in it.

References

• Fein, Susanna, ed. (2022). The Owl and the Nightingale and the English Poems of Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II).

• Hahn, Thomas, ed. (1995). Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales.

• Kindrick, Robert L., ed. (1997). The Poems of Robert Henryson.

• Laskaya, Anne, and Eve Salisbury, eds. (1995). The Middle English Breton Lays.

• Middle English Texts Series (METS). https://metseditions.org

Equal-Mind, son of Well-Persuaded, is the boldest of them, and the first to die. He is lifting a golden cup to his lips when the arrow goes through his throat. He dies kicking the table over, spilling bread and roasted meat onto the dirt.

The hall erupts. A hundred young men spring to their feet, groping for weapons on walls where there are none.

In the doorway stands the old beggar they have been mocking for three days. He’s holding a bow.

He’s no beggar. The master of the house has returned.

Wide-Fight tries to reason with him.

“It was all Equal-Mind’s doing,” he says. “But the guilty man is dead. We’ll pay you back twenty oxen each, for what we’ve eaten and drunk here, and gold and bronze besides.”

The second arrow takes Wide-Fight in the chest. He doubles over the table and dies without a fight, wide or otherwise.

Dwelling-Around draws his sword and charges. He gets a spear between the shoulders from Far-Fight, the master’s son.

Then, chaos. Arrows. Spears. Men scrambling behind overturned benches until, at last, the survivors rally at the far end of the hall.

Their names read like the roster of a war band: Army-Leader, Wide-Ranging, Ruling-Around, People’s-War, Man-Persuader, Rich-in-Cattle.

But they are no war band. They are simply men who have eaten too much of their neighbour’s cattle, and made themselves too friendly with their neighbour’s wife.

An old serving woman named Wide-Fame comes in, sees the men dead who had dishonoured her master’s house for so long, and opens her mouth to raise a cry of victory. But the master stops her.

“Be joyful in your heart,” he says, “but keep silent. It is not right to boast over the slain.”

By nightfall, the hall is quiet. The bodies are stacked on the porch like a fisherman’s catch. By morning, nothing is left of them but their names.

What you just read is a loose adaptation of Odysseus’s fight against the suitors from Book 22 of the Odyssey, with one odd choice: I translated the Greek names literally.

So Antinous, the chief suitor, becomes Equal-Mind, Eurymachus becomes Wide-Fight, and Demoptolemus becomes People’s-War.

So too does Odysseus’ son Telemachus become Far-Fight. The master of the house is, of course, Odysseus himself, although I left Odysseus untranslated and unnamed. His name is different from the rest: first, no one really knows where Odysseus comes from.1 But, more importantly, it can’t be broken down into two parts like the other names.

It’s this two-part structure of names that I want to talk about today. It’s not just something you find in Homer. In fact, your name has a good chance of breaking down into two parts in exactly the same way as a Homeric hero’s, especially if you’re a George, Philip, Richard, or Roger.

This pattern, grafting two meaningful elements together, is extremely ancient, and extremely widespread: you see the same pattern not only in Ancient Greek names like Tele-machus ‘Far-Fight’ but also in medieval Germanic names like Æþel-stān ‘Noble-Stone’. It shows up in Celtic and Slavic languages too, as in Gaulish Catu-rix ‘Battle-King’ and Vladi-slav ‘Power-Glory’.

It lies behind some of the most famous names of history, such as Old Persian Xšaya-ṛšā ‘Ruling-Heroes’, which you probably know better from its Greek version: Xerxes. If you’ve read Indian epics such as Mahabharata or Ramayana, you may recognize names like Yudhi-shthira ‘Battle-Steady’ or Shatru-ghna ‘Enemy-Slayer’.

Even more interesting, the elements that make up these two-part names are often the same in these different languages and traditions. You see the same kinds of words over and over again: words meaning ‘fight’, ‘battle’, ‘glory’, ‘fame’, ‘man’, ‘hero’, ‘ruler’, ‘king’, etc.

In many cases you could translate a name from one of these languages to another and it would sound completely natural: the Greek name Theodoros means ‘God-Gift’, as does the Sanskrit Devadatta, and the Old English Godġiefu.

These names are so similar they come from one single naming tradition, inherited by all of these diverse languages and cultures. In fact, the English names we use today inherit this tradition too, even though two-part names are now just one kind among many others.

The key to this tradition is that names meant something. And not just any old something, but something grand and impressive.

And yet, if you ask a hundred Richards or Audreys what their names mean, you’ll be lucky to find one who knows. Somewhere between the Bronze Age and the modern birth certificate, the system broke down.

The names survived, but their meanings were lost. Although not forever. With a little etymological know-how we can reconstruct this ancient naming tradition, and see just how many of our own names are part of it today.

Read more

Now that the ink has dried on the contract, I can at last share some news that I’ve been sitting on for a while: I’m writing a new book!

Unlike last time, this book will be non-fiction, and written in Modern English (for a change!) It will be published by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

As you can see from the Publishers Marketplace screenshot — that, by the way, is where book deals get announced — the working title of the book is Before English. That’s likely to change by the time the book is published. Nevertheless, it gives you a pretty good idea of what the book will be about.

When we tell the history of the English language, we usually focus on a few big events, dwelling on things like the Old English literature of the Anglo-Saxons, the Norman invasion and subsequent French influence on the language, the effects of the printing press on how words are spelled today, or the influx of learned Latin vocabulary that flowed into English during the Renaissance.

All these developments are extremely important, but they occurred after English was first written down in the 7th century AD. They represent only the most recent act in the long story of the English language: a mere fourteen centuries. But by this time, three quarters of its story had already been told.

In the millennia before a single word of English was written down, it already had its key features: the core grammar, almost all of its sounds, and most of its everyday vocabulary.

To uncover the rest of the story, the deep inner logic of the language, we need to travel back in time to before English was even English.

But there are no clean boundaries in the history of a language: what we call English today was transmitted from one generation to another in an unbroken chain that goes back thousands of years, long before English had differentiated itself from its relatives

If you follow the chain of transmission back 2000 years or so, English will slide imperceptibly into its ancestor: Proto-Germanic, a language once spoken on the shores of the Baltic and North Seas. This language gave birth to all the Germanic languages, so it can just as easily be called “really old German” or “really old Danish” as “really Old English”.

Go back even farther, and you’ll find a language spoken on the steppes of modern Ukraine and Russia, one that would give birth to most of the languages of Europe, and many of Asia: a language which is simultaneously “really really Old English” and “really really Old Spanish” and “really really Old Russian”. This is the common ancestor of them all: Proto-Indo-European.

From the 18th century to the present, the nature of these early, unwritten ancestors of English has gradually become clearer, due to the work of generations of historical linguists.

In more recent years, their findings have been joined by those of archaeology and, even more recently, archaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA.

We now have an unprecedented view of the earliest reconstructable ancestor of English, as well as the people who spoke it: we know much more than ever before about where and how they lived, the kinds of stories they told, and how they saw the world.

Specialists have frequently disagreed, not only across disciplines but also within them; however, a picture has emerged that allows us to see the whole history of the English language in a new context.

Much of this research is so new, especially in the field of ancient DNA, that it hasn’t yet percolated out of the academy.1 The linguistic side of the story has been much more stable, but has traditionally been presented in impenetrably technical ways.

This book is meant to fill that gap, and will tell the story of the English language in an accessible way — the whole story, beginning six millennia ago with Proto-Indo-European. I’ll trace the evolution of this language alongside the lives of the people who spoke it, as it gradually became something we’d recognize as English.

Since this newsletter is about the history of the English language, there will be some overlap in topics, but the two projects are separate. The book will tell a single, integrated story across the entire span of the history of the English language and its ancestors.

It’s the kind of project you need a book’s length to do justice to: you can show long-term trends and themes much better over 80,000+ words than over the length of one of these articles. This newsletter, on the other hand, will continue to highlight individual events and topics from a more self-contained perspective.

There’s no firm publication date yet for the book, but these projects tend to have long timelines, so I’m not expecting to hold the book in my hands until 2028 at the earliest. Of course, I will keep you posted if I have any updates on the timeline.

This has been a very busy and exciting time, one which has taught me a great deal. Even in these early stages of the project, I’ve learned so much about the process by which non-fiction books are made that I can no longer see them in the same way: What does the length of this book’s chapters say about its target audience? How does this author acknowledge scholarly debate without bogging down the book in endless argument? How does this one transition between historical narrative and conceptual explanations?

All that to say: I’ve been enjoying the process tremendously!

Finally, I want to take a moment to thank all of you reading for being part of the Dead Language Society. It’s a privilege to be able to share these stories with you every week.

It’s thanks to you that we’ve carved out this corner of the internet, dedicated entirely to the history of the words, sounds, and even the grammatical rules that the English language is made of. And it’s thanks to you that I have the opportunity to bring some of these stories into the real world as well.

Special thanks go to three readers in particular: Natasha, Andrew, and Megan, who believed in this project and have helped so much in bringing it into being. None of this would be happening without you!

But, in the meantime, I will see you, dear reader, back here next week for another story drawn from the near-endless library that the history of the English language provides.

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Has ever a letter been imbued with such significance as the humble h?

If you’ve seen the musical My Fair Lady — or read Pygmalion, the Shaw play it’s based on — you’ll know what I mean.

In both versions, our heroine, Eliza Doolittle, is a Cockney flower girl. Her opposite is Professor Henry Higgins, a phonetician who bets that he can pass Eliza off as a duchess simply by changing the way she speaks.

In order to achieve such a transformation, one of Henry’s most important tasks is to address Eliza’s complete lack of h-sounds. Eliza’s h-lessness is a major mark of her humble origins: they out her as a street merchant, rather than an heiress.

In the musical adaptation, the issue of h is even more prominent, using a song to dramatize the moment when Eliza finally acquires the upper-class accent Henry has been trying to instill in her.

The song is one of the most famous from the musical: The Rain in Spain. The lyrics consist mainly of phonetics drills, one of which shows that Eliza can now pronounce the h-sound:

HENRY: In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire…
ELIZA: …hurricanes hardly happen.

If you grew up in North America, where h-dropping is rare in most regions, My Fair Lady may have been your only encounter with this anxiety over h-dropping. But in England the pronunciation of your “aitches” was, and still is, a major social signal.1

And then there are the words that flip the association between h and “correct speech”: pronouncing the h in heir, hour, and honour shows that you’ve only ever seen the word written.

And no one would judge you for an honest day’s work — there, the use of an, rather than a, shows that the h of honest is silent. If anything, you’d get strange looks if you said a honest day’s work.

Some words are still live battlegrounds: is it an herb or a herb? a historic or an historic?

It’s small consolation, then, that the seeds of all this confusion and controversy were planted many centuries ago.

The h-sound is an ancient inheritance dating back to before English was even English. But the story of h-dropping is not as simple as the loss of that inheritance.

The h-sound has never been a normal part of English: it has been pronounced weakly, and inconsistently, throughout the entire history of the language.

That inconsistency shows up in unexpected ways. For example, many words which have an h today — at least, in the standard forms of English — got it only recently: words like humble, humour, and hospital were once said without the h-sounds they have today. And they were h-less in the mouths of all English speakers, regardless of their social standing.2

So why all this fuss over h in particular?

The answer begins long before English was English, and ends much more recently than you might imagine.

Read more

Weird is one of the most commonly used words in the English language. Chances are, the word will pass through your lips (or be tapped out by your fingers) today.

You’ll use it when you need to describe something out of the ordinary: a weird coincidence, a weird smell in the fridge, or — heavens forfend! — that weird guy at the office.

We say weird all the time for the little everyday oddities we encounter.

But weird wasn’t always such a casual word. A thousand years ago, it was one of the heaviest words in the English language: the ancestor of weird was the Old English word wyrd, which meant ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’

Wyrd haunts Old English poetry. It shows up in the bleakest and most fateful moments of poems like The Wanderer and Beowulf.

The Beowulf poet puts it on the lips of the hero of his poem, who mentions wyrd after detailing his requests for what should happen if he perishes in battle: don’t worry about burying him, send his armour back to his uncle. Then comes wyrd, in what sounds like a proverb:

Gǣð ā wyrd swa hīo sċel.
‘Wyrd always goes as it must’ (Beowulf 455b)

Or, as the narrator of The Wanderer puts it, in the middle of an account of how he’s forced to sail the sea, utterly alone:

Wyrd bið ful ārǣd.
‘Wyrd is totally inexorable.’ (Wanderer 5b)1

Wyrd comes from the same root as the verb weorþan, pronounced roughly WEAR-than, which meant ‘to happen’ or ‘become’.

So wyrd is ‘that which happens’.

Poets praised above all the man who could face whatever happens — to face wyrd — “without flinching”.2

So how did a word for the inexorable logic of the universe end up describing things as mundane as that rather peculiar smell in your fridge?

The answer is, oddly, a literary one, and one in which destiny itself seems to have taken a hand: but for the choices of two or three people, we might not have had the word weird in English at all.

Wyrd happens

The story of wyrd’s transformation into weird begins in the later Middle Ages, in the period we call Middle English (AD 1100–1450).

The dividing line between Old English and Middle English is the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Normans, who spoke a form of French, gained political power in England, and for a while, French displaced English as the language of prestige among the higher classes of society.

Eventually, however, even the nobility came to adopt English, but they brought many of their French words with them when they did. As a result, French words started pouring into the English language around AD 1250.

These included words that meant the same thing as wyrd, namely, fortune and destiny. They were later joined by the Latin word fate. Once these new, fancy-sounding French and Latin words had entered the language in the 13th and 14th centuries, the native English wyrd became superfluous.

As a result, wyrd is missing from the Middle English record, at least, in the south of the English-speaking world. It was in the north, particularly Scotland (the really far north!) that wyrd survived. There, in the Scots language, it came to be spelled weird rather than wyrd.

These Scots origins are the reason weird is spelled so, well, weirdly. After all, it is one of the classic exceptions to the rule “i before e, except after c”.

Given its pronunciation, we would expect it to be spelled with ee, ie, or ea, to match how the ee-sound is written in weed, field, or beard. But it’s not.

Weird is spelled weirdly because it follows the rules of Scots, not English.

Featuring the latest advances in necromanticall science

Like Old English wyrd, the Scots weird meant ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’, as in this quotation from the 14th-century Scots poem The Brus:

Bot Werd that to the end ay driffis // The varldis thingis
‘But Fate that to the end always drives the world’s affairs’ (The Brus, 4.148–149)

Just as fate was often personified in classical mythology, so too could weird refer to the personified agents of destiny.

The classical idea was of three supernatural sisters — in Greek, they were called the Moirai: Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis — who measured out the thread of each person’s destiny, and cut it where fate decreed. The Romans had an equivalent trio called the Parcae.

Norse mythology also records the Nornir, or Norns, who had a similar function to that of the Moirai and Parcae. Their names were Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld. The name Urðr is simply the Old Norse equivalent of wyrd.3

Scots authors used the phrase weird sisters to refer to the Fates of classical mythology:

The thre sisteris fatall callit Cloto, Latis & Antropus thre werd sisteris
‘The three fateful sisters called Cloto, Latis, and Antropus, three weird sisters’ (1515; The Asloan Manuscript)4

Later, the term weird sisters was applied to the three women in the story of Macbeth who prophesied his rise to the throne. When Shakespeare tells the story, these are three witches. But Shakespeare isn’t the only one who told this story, nor was he the first to do so.

Shakespeare’s source was a work called Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, published in two editions in the late 16th century.

In Holinshed’s account, Macbeth encounters “three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world”. After they make their prophecies, Holinshed reports:

afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, bicause euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken.5

Holinshed helpfully glossed the term weird sisters for his English-speaking audience as goddesses of destinie. When Shakespeare took this scene into Macbeth, he kept the phrase weird sisters but left out the explanation.

In the First Folio text of Macbeth, printed 17 years after the play was first performed, the word is spelled weyward or weyard rather than weird, for example:

The weyward Sisters, hand in hand (Macbeth 1.3.30)

The use of weyward for weird is usually thought of as a mistake by one of the compositors — the typesetters who assembled the printed pages — of the First Folio.

Weird was not a common English word at the time, which is why Holinshed defined it for his readers. Weyward, on the other hand, standing for wayward ‘having gone astray’, was a much more common word, one often used by Shakespeare.6

The mistaken word wayward is distantly related to weird, or at least the -ward portion is. Both -ward and weird come from the same ancient root, one that meant ‘to turn’.7

Just as fate — weird — is the way things ‘turn out’, someone going homeward is ‘turning home’.

The obscurity of weird was what made it so prone to miscopying. Some later folio editions of Shakespeare even changed it to wizard!

In modern editions of Macbeth, however, the spelling of the phrase has been normalized to weird sisters, often spelled weïrd to indicate that the word must be pronounced with two syllables rather than one.

This change was made by Lewis Theobald (1688–1744), the first rigorous textual critic of Shakespeare’s works. He did so based on how weird was used in Holinshed, Shakespeare’s likely source for Macbeth.8

Once weird was established in subsequent editions of Macbeth, it stuck. In fact, weird has done more than stick. It has downright flourished in the English language since then.

But the same obscurity that had troubled the compositors of the First Folio meant the meaning of weird was a blank slate upon which those hearing it could project whatever they wanted. But many more changes were in store for weird.

The turns of fate

For many years, the only place most English speakers ever saw the word weird was in the phrase weird sisters or weird women in the play Macbeth.

The word weird shows up six times in Macbeth, and in no case is it clear from the context alone what it means.9 Weird simply named the three women who foretold that Macbeth would become king.

This gave listeners and readers latitude to ascribe to the word weird whatever meaning seemed appropriate given the context.

It wasn’t even clear that weird was originally a noun: the weird of weird sisters could just as easily have been an adjective. If it were an adjective, what could it mean?

The weird sisters were three strange, uncanny, supernatural women telling the future. Perhaps weird simply meant ‘strange’, ‘uncanny’, or ‘supernatural’.

This appears to be what enough people thought to change the meaning of the word. Uses of weird simply meaning ‘eerie’ or ‘supernatural’ — with no connection with the weird sisters of Macbeth — began in the early 19th century with the Romantic writers.10 Shelley, for example, was fond of using weird in this way.

Some said I was a fiend from my weird cave,
Who had stolen human shape (Laon and Cythna 9.8; 1817)

In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness. (Alastor 29–30; 1816)

Almost as soon as weird began circulating outside of Macbeth, its meaning broadened too, from ‘eerie’ and ‘uncanny’ to ‘odd’ or ‘unusual’. Dickens, for example, used weird simply to mean ‘odd’:

He was a man with a weird belief in him that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge twice, and make the same number of them. (Holly-tree Inn: Guest in Household Words; 1855)

This broader usage is the one that has exploded in popularity, especially in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Oxford English Dictionary reports the frequency of the adjective weird rising from 2.3/million words in 1960 to 6.1/million words in 2010.

These frequencies are computed from Google Books; when the internet is used instead, we see that weird is even more frequent still: the OED’s online corpus, covering 2017–2025, shows the frequency of weird hovering between 15–17/million words.

That makes weird one of the most common words in the English language. Quite the journey from a Scots word so obscure that people misunderstood its meaning on hearing it!

Weird is now a fixture of the contemporary English language, but its destiny hinged on the decisions of individuals: if Holinshed had not written weird sisters into the story of Macbeth, if Shakespeare had not found that story interesting enough to turn into a play, if Theobald had not emended weyward to weird, if the Romantic poets hadn’t found the word just perfect for expressing an uncanny mood, we wouldn’t have weird today.

And I’d have had to give this “Weird Word” series an entirely different name.

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Works Cited

Scots quotations have been drawn from A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, English quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary.

• Barbour, John (1997). The Bruce. Ed. A. A. M. Duncan.

• Bek-Pedersen, Karen (2022). ‘Macbeth and the “Weird Sisters” – on Fates and Witches.’ Scottish Studies 39: 58–80.

• Braunmuller, A. R. (ed.) (2008). Macbeth (The New Cambridge Shakespeare).

• Craigie, W. A. (ed.) (1925). The Asloan Manuscript.

• Dickens, Charles (1855). “The Holly-Tree: The Guest.” Household Words.

• Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork & John D. Niles (2008). Klaeber’s Beowulf. 4e.

• Holinshed, Raphael (1587). Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

• Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1816). Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude.

• Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1817). Laon and Cythna.

• Oxford English Dictionary: weird n., weird adj., -ward suffix.

Northern Burgundy, around 500 BC.

They buried her in a wooden chamber,. her body carefully laid to rest inside a wooden cart. The wheels had been removed, as befit a woman’s grave. Around her neck they placed a torc of gold, adorned with flying horses and lion’s paws. Fine things, yes, but they were nothing compared to what stood beside the wagon.

A bronze krater, a bowl for mixing wine and water, rose to the height of a man’s shoulder. It had taken six men to carry it down into the grave. It had come a long way to get there. Cast far to the south, decorated with the images of fantastical beasts, and hauled north in pieces along the wine roads to a country its makers had probably never heard of.

They closed the mound over all of it. Over her. She was only 35 years old.1

We have no idea what her name was, or even precisely what role she played in her society. But we know more about her world than you might think possible.

For example, we know, near enough, what language she spoke. And we know that one of its words made a journey even farther north than her bronze krater. It travelled, passing from lips to ears until it reached a foreign people, who adopted it as their own.

These new owners taught the word to their children, and they taught it to theirs, down through the generations, until you learned it from whoever taught you English.

The distant descendant of this word is the English word rich. But when it came into the language, English couldn’t rightly be called English. At that time, English was still centuries away.

Instead, it was in one of English’s distant ancestors that the word found a new home. Much about that time is a mystery to us: no one was writing yet, not in that ancestor of English or the language the word had come from.

We don’t even know what either language was called. We give them clumsy names beginning with Proto- as a signal that everything we know is reconstructed rather than recorded. English’s ancestor we call Proto-Germanic. The other language, the original source of the word rich, we call Proto-Celtic.

And yet, we can know more about that distant world than you might imagine.

We know that a linguistic transaction took place: the word that would become our word for rich passed into Proto-Germanic sometime in the 1st millennium BC, more likely in the middle than at the end.

We also know that it started out in Proto-Celtic or one of its descendants. And once we’ve retraced the shifts in meaning that rich has undergone through the ages, we can begin to understand the social dynamics that carried it across that language border.

The Celts — and here I just mean ‘speakers of a Celtic language’ — were the ones with the prestige.

Reconstructing these circumstances in such detail seems impossible. And yet we can learn so much just by looking at rich alongside its relatives: What do the different words mean? What vowels do they have? What consonants?

These observations, along with the principles of historical linguistics, are enough to answer all the questions we might want to ask: where rich came from, when it entered the ancestor of English, and why.

The why is the most interesting part. It takes us back into a Celtic golden age, where a messenger sent by a king in Gaul could travel to Spain, Ireland, or even Turkey and meet people there who spoke more or less the same language he did.

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Didao, State of Qin, 250 BC.

Frost still lay on the ground when Heng began his work, but it had melted by mid-morning. By that point, Heng had already cleared the goods of a dozen merchants.

He worked at a plank table in a room attached to the rammed-earth wall that surrounded Didao, a town set at the very edge of the world. Any farther west and you’d leave civilization behind. The road out there was no place to test your luck.

Why would you leave, anyway, when the barbarians brought everything they made or gathered — or stole, for all Heng knew — into the central states. He didn’t care how the barbarians got their goods. His only job was to tax them once they crossed into Qin.

Grain came in, and went straight into the bronze measure. Hemp was counted by the bolt, hides by the bundle. Horses brought down by the Rong barbarians were graded by the teeth. Everything was counted, assessed, and written down.

It paid to be quick, but it paid much better to be correct. Everything Heng wrote down was a little wager. If a measure of grain was later found to be wrong, or a horse improperly graded, he would pay for it.

Mistakes were paid in armour. A small error would mean Heng owed the state a shield. A larger error would mean a full suit. And a man who could not pay his debt in armour would pay it in hard labour. The granaries were full of men like that.

But Heng had never been one of them. He vowed he never would be.

Heng was still turning such thoughts over in his mind when the next trader came in around midday, on foot. He led a short string of pack horses and wore sheepskin on his back. Heng counted his wares while the man waited nervously for the assessment.

It was mostly the usual fare: wool and raw hides. But this time there was something else: jars. Four of them.

“What is in these jars?” he asked slowly, gesturing with his hands.

The barbarian answered in surprisingly good Chinese, “This is mit.”

“What is mit?” asked Heng.

The man began to explain, but Heng cut him off.

“Open it,” Heng ordered.

The man complied. Once he had loosened the clay stopper with his thumb, the smell hit him first. It was sweet, almost the scent of flowers. Heng picked up the jar and tilted it. The brown liquid inside lurched to the side rather than flowing.

Heng took a bronze spoon from his table and scooped out a portion of the liquid. It wasn’t as dark as it seemed in the jar: more golden than brown.

“It is sweet,” said the barbarian trader.

Heng had never seen this mit before. Perhaps it was some kind of malt syrup, made from a grain they had in the west.

“How is it made?” asked Heng.

“There is a… fly,” said the trader. This conversation seemed to be testing the limits of the man’s Chinese. “Not a fly. But like a fly. Its tail is sharp. What is the word for this?”

Heng realized what he was looking at. “The word is bee,” he told the man.

Mit, the substance in the jars, was honey.

But Heng had a problem. No statute told him how to tax honey. He’d never even seen the stuff before today — almost no one had but kings.

He could just write in “malt syrup” and assess it at the rate for malt syrup. That, at least, was in the statutes. But if anyone ever found out he’d knowingly misassessed something, he’d pay for it, and the price would be more than a suit of armour.

The barbarian looked at him, clearly growing nervous himself.

Then Heng realized the answer. Mit wasn’t in the statutes. So mit didn’t have to be taxed at all!

If the King of Qin had wanted mit taxed, he would have set a tax rate for it. So Heng gave the opened jar back to the trader. No tax was owed on mit.

The trader put the stopper back in the jar, gathered up his things, and was led into another chamber where he’d turn over the portion of the goods the statues demanded.

Heng turned to the next trader. More skins, more hides, and more small wagers against the statutes. As for today’s wager, only time would tell if it would end up costing him.1

Have you drunk any mead lately?

In case you never touch the stuff, mead is an alcoholic beverage made from honey.

It has a long history. The word mead is the oldest word for any alcoholic beverage in the English language. It’s the only one we can reconstruct back to the earliest ancestor of English: Proto-Indo-European.2

The root that gave us mead has been reconstructed as *médʰu in Proto-Indo-European,3 and it’s one of the stickiest words in the entire Indo-European lexicon.

The relatives of mead sit across the entire map of that extremely widespread family. From Old Irish mid ‘mead’ in the northwest to Sanskrit mádhu ‘honey; wine’ in the southeast, words that sound like mead can be found everywhere in Europe and Western Asia.

The shape of *médʰu was relatively stable in the descendant languages, but its meaning often drifted. In some languages it drifted towards ‘honey’, which we see in the meaning of Sanskrit मधु॑ mádhu.4 In other languages, it drifted towards ‘wine (from grapes)’, such as in the Ancient Greek word μέθυ méthy ‘wine’, something the Ancient Greeks enjoyed more often than honey mead.

English has a derivative of méthy, too, which we can see in the word for amethyst, from the Greek ἀμέθυστος améthystos ‘not drunk; not intoxicating’.

This may sound like an odd ancestor for a gemstone, but it was reported — by no less than Pliny the Elder — that if you put an amethyst in your wine as you quaffed the night away, it would act as a remedy against drunkenness.5 Or perhaps, as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, it was because the stone’s light purple colour is the colour of wine diluted past the point of intoxication.6 Either way, a strange etymology.

Stranger still, another one of these mead relatives, the word mit, which so troubled our fictional customs officer Heng, survives in Chinese to this day.

Can it be coincidence?

What I just said — that English mead is related to a word in Chinese — should surprise you a bit. It surprised me when I learned it, not just because of the geographical distance between Chinese and English.

I was surprised because Chinese is in no way an Indo-European language. Chinese is part of the entirely unrelated Sino-Tibetan language family.7

The word for ‘honey’ in Chinese is 蜂蜜 fēngmì.8 The first part, 蜂 fēng, means ‘bee’. But that second part looks familiar, doesn’t it? Our friend Heng would certainly recognize it, give or take a consonant: today it’s 蜜 mì.

Just the mi is enough to make us want to uncover the story behind it.

We should, however, be a little suspicious. All this could, after all, be an accident: Chinese mì and English mead could be look-alikes for no deep reason.

Perhaps this is just a coincidence, the way Japanese has namae ‘name’ where English has name. When you have enough words and enough languages, there are bound to be similarities arising from chance alone.

One way to rule out coincidence is to show that the correspondences between two languages are numerous and systematic. When we see this, we start to suspect common ancestry.

This is how we have reconstructed families like Indo-European. But common ancestry is simply not on the table here: Chinese and the Indo-European family share no systematic correspondences in vocabulary.

With isolated similarities, there’s another possibility: borrowing through contact. But, if we’re to say that one language has borrowed a word from another, there should be some plausible historical mechanism for how this happened.

Speakers of those languages had to be in the same place at the same time. Was this ever the case for an Indo-European language and an ancestor of Chinese?

Honey comes from (Tocharian) B’s

Despite their name, Indo-European languages have been spoken in places other than Europe and India. One of the more obscure branches of the family was spoken inside what is today China.

This branch is called Tocharian. The Tocharian languages were spoken in the Tarim Basin, a desert region in the southern part of today’s Xinjiang, in northwestern China.

There were two attested Tocharian languages, creatively called Tocharian A and Tocharian B. Tocharian A shows no evidence of the *médʰu word, but Tocharian B has the word mit ‘honey’.9

Our earliest texts in Tocharian B date to around the beginning of the fifth century AD.10 The texts in Tocharian A date from the seventh to the tenth centuries AD.11

The two languages both descend from a common ancestor, which we call Proto-Tocharian. The two Tocharians differed enough that they must have been separated by several centuries of development. As a result, most scholars believe their last common ancestor was likely spoken around 500 BC.

The people who spoke Tocharian B lived in cities situated around oases in the Tarim basin, on the northern route of the Silk Road: the most famous are the cities of Kucha and Agni.

These cities, and their inhabitants, were known to the ancient Chinese. China was, after all, just to the southeast, the last stop on the trade route that first stopped in Kucha and Agni.

So when did the 蜜 mì element come into Chinese? The earliest examples of 蜜 mì, or rather, of its ancestor, are found in the Han dynasty (202 BC–AD 220). According to Sinologist Victor Mair, the first securely dated example is in a first-century AD encyclopedia.12

Archaeology adds a second line of evidence: hard evidence for beekeeping in China dates back only to the later Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC).13 Beekeeping implies honey, and a word for honey almost certainly existed in speech long before anyone wrote it down.14 This is a common pattern: the first attestation of a word tends to lag behind its use in speech.

Whenever exactly the word entered Chinese, it was well before the first Tocharian texts, which are dated to the fifth century AD, but close enough that some form of Tocharian was already spoken in the cities of the Tarim basin.

So we have a plausible route of borrowing, and a strong suggestion of contact between speakers of Old Chinese and some early version of Tocharian.

But so far the evidence is just circumstantial. Contact alone isn’t enough; the linguistic details also have to work out. All of it — every vowel, every consonant, the shape of the word — has to fit the precise time and place.

No match? Your borrowing theory has some explaining to do.

The telltale t

To see if the borrowing hypothesis stands up to scrutiny, we need to match up the forms of the word in each of the two languages at the time of borrowing.

Let’s begin with Tocharian. We know the word’s shape well enough, and one consonant matters above all: the -t in the Tocharian word mit.

The first question we need to ask is: what form of Chinese would the word have been borrowed into?

If mit had been borrowed in the 3rd century BC, the language that received the word would have been Classical Old Chinese (500–1 BC). This is the form of the language attested in the most famous Classical Chinese texts such as the 論語 Lúnyǔ or Analects of Confucius and the 道德經 Dàodéjīng (or Tao Te Ching).

This stage of the language has been reconstructed, but I should warn you reconstruction of Chinese is much more difficult than reconstruction of most of the languages we tend to talk about.

The Chinese writing system records sound only very indirectly, which makes reconstruction far harder. So there’s a lot more uncertainty about how things were pronounced during the period of Old Chinese.

Even so, the comparative method, loanwords, and other sources of evidence make reasonable reconstructions possible. And the ancestor of our ‘honey’ word 蜜 mì has been reconstructed as *mit, with that telltale t.15

This is exactly what we would expect from a Tocharian loanword. That final t consonant has been lost in Mandarin, but it remains in many other Chinese varieties, such as Cantonese mat6 (the 6 marks the tone), or Sixian Hakka me̍t.16

The Old Chinese reconstruction *mit is virtually identical to the Tocharian word mit. Working out the precise chronology is still an active area of research,17 but no one doubts the Indo-European origins of this Chinese word 蜜 mì.18

People who live near beehives shouldn’t say “honey”

Why should this one word prove so persistent across the Indo-European family and beyond? Part of the answer is that *médʰu was not just a name for a drink. It was the name for the drink: it’s what was in the cup you raised to a god or a king.

In Norse myth, it’s quite literally the source of poetry: the gods brewed mead from honey and the blood of a wise being named Kvasir, himself originally made of their spittle. It was a complicated recipe. Anyone who drank that gained poetic inspiration.19 As a result, a poet could call his own verses Odin’s mead.

A word with that cultural importance doesn’t get replaced lightly, kind of like how we still talk about living by the sword and the pen is mightier than the sword today, even though swords haven’t been the weapon du jour for centuries. The cultural weight of the word has kept it around.

But there’s an irony here. The form of the word *médʰu has stuck around, crossing thousands of years, and thousands of kilometres, without altering its shape enough to become unrecognizable. But its meaning could not sit still.

The root took three directions which you can divide roughly geographically. In Northern Europe, the forms descended from *médʰu mean ‘mead’, the alcoholic beverage made from honey, as in the English mead.

Farther south, it turned into a word for ‘wine’, the alcoholic beverage made from grapes. This is what happened in Ancient Greek μέθυ méthy.

In the east, it often ended up losing its alcoholic connotations, coming to mean primarily ‘honey’, as happened with the Tocharian B word mit.

There is a certain logic to these developments. In Southern Europe, you can grow grapes and make wine from them. So, there, the word *médʰu started referring to the beverage people drank most often: wine made from grapes. In these languages, the word for ‘honey’ was often supplied by another root *mélit, the word that gave Latin mel and Ancient Greek μέλι méli.

That *mélit root does survive in English, by the way, but not in our word for ‘honey’. It hangs on very marginally in a single word mildew.20

Mildew first meant the sweet substance secreted by aphids feeding on plants, which today we call honeydew. Only later did it come to apply to other diseases of plants, such as the fungal disease we refer to as mildew today.

Our word honey, however, comes from a different source. The main theory about its origin is that it was once a colour word meaning roughly ‘golden’ or ‘yellow’.21

Why all this replacement of words to do with honey? There may be no special reason. Words get replaced all the time. But one suggestion is that the word was replaced because of a lexical taboo.22 People may have been unwilling to say the true name of honey while they were engaged in collecting it.

Remember that collecting honey involves a close encounter with stinging insects. It’s a relatively high-stakes situation, exactly the kind of place where you might expect a little bit of linguistic caution to creep in.

So instead of risking the bees’ wrath by calling the honey by its true name, speakers of some early Germanic language called it by a euphemism ‘the golden stuff’, just as actors will often refer to Macbeth as the Scottish Play for fear of invoking bad luck. Eventually, the name honey — once just ‘the golden stuff’ — stuck.

It’s a strange fate these words have had. The word for the drink proved almost impossible to kill: *médʰu wandered across continents, slipped into a language that wasn’t even Indo-European, and still came out the end still looking more or less like itself.

So the next time you ladle out some honey, consider that the contents of that spoon — the golden stuff — have been known under that name for thousands of years.

And if you’re inclined to pour yourself a glass of mead, know that the name of the contents of that glass would be recognizable to a customs officer in Ancient China as well.

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Works cited

• Baxter, William H., and Laurent Sagart (2014). Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction.

• Behr, Wolfgang (2001). “Review of J. Ulenbrook, Zum Alteurasischen: Eine Sprachvergleichung.” Oriens.

• Bjørn, Rasmus G. (2022). “Indo-European Loanwords and Exchange in Bronze Age Central and East Asia.” Evolutionary Human Sciences.

• Jacques, Guillaume (2014). “The Word for ‘Honey’ in Chinese and Its Relevance for the Study of Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan Language Contact.” Wékwos.

• Mallory, J. P., and D. Q. Adams (2006). The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World.

• Meier, Kristin, and Michaël Peyrot (2017). “The Word for ‘Honey’ in Chinese, Tocharian and Sino-Vietnamese.” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft.

• Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “mildew.”

• Watkins, Calvert (1985). The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

• West, M. L. (2007). Indo-European Poetry and Myth.

In recent weeks, several people have mentioned to me (quite unprompted) just how much they love Victorian writing. I must confess that I agree with them.

I love to read 19th-century prose. I love to write it, too, at least in the form of the occasional Victorian pastiche.

When reading, say, Bleak House, it’s hard not to entertain nostalgic thoughts, and wonder “Why don’t people write like this anymore?”

Sometimes this nostalgia is coupled with a sense that contemporary writing represents a degeneration from its lofty 19th-century peak, and that the best we can hope for today is a speedy return to these golden days of literature.

Even if you’re not prone to such reactionary sentiments, it’s hard to read Dickens or Ruskin or George Eliot and not come away with the feeling that something of value has been lost, even if something else has been gained.

Compare, for example, the following two literary descriptions of the weather, each of which serves to open a novel, the first from Dickens’ Bleak House (1853)1 and the second from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997):

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill.

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.

Each of these passages is beautiful in its own, very different way. Some of the difference doubtless arises from the peculiarities of these two particular authors and these two particular works.

But if you’ve read a lot of 19th- and 20th-/21st-century literature, you’ll recognize that there’s something typical about each of these passages that makes them excellent stand-ins for literary fiction of the 19th and late 20th century, respectively.

If you look beyond literature, you will find that similar changes occurred in all genres: contemporary essays, journalism, and scholarship are also utterly unlike their Victorian counterparts.

So what is the great difference between the two styles? What changed to make the way we write today so unlike how people wrote in the Victorian age?

You may have heard one style of answer already, which goes something like this:

Modern prose is the cleaned-up version. It’s plainer and easier to read. Victorian ornateness may be pretty but it reads like it was written someone who was paid by the word.2

Modern writers respect their readers time, because they write for the broad public, in other words, for people who aren’t lounging around at their country estates with nothing to do all day. The way we write today is the democratic style.

I’d like to suggest an alternative explanation. Contemporary writing is plainer, in that it’s less grammatically intricate. It packs more of a punch in fewer words. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easier to follow. In fact, the style of writing popular today, which we flatter ourselves is accessible and democratic, is in some ways more demanding of the reader than its Victorian predecessor.

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This time, we covered:

• Does the girdle actually work?

• The Green Knight’s three blows

• What is Morgan’s role in this?

• The meaning of Arthur’s laughter

If you’d like to participate in a future book club, you can do so by signing up as a paid subscriber below.

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AD 1155, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.

The light of a late winter afternoon reaches feebly through a cloister window. The light is thin, but it is enough to illuminate the work of the elderly monk as he writes.

He sits alone. Everything here is new: a new abbot at Peterborough, a new king in England, even the room he sits in smells of fresh lime mortar. His hands stiffen and ache with the chill of the winter wind blowing in from the garth.

The work must be done today. He is old, and Abbot William has little patience for old things. He will certainly not allow an old monk to spend ink or parchment, much less the time of a skilled scribe, on what, for the abbot, is one man’s vain fancy: writing in English.

But is it vain to record the nineteen years of war they have recently endured? Is it merely one man’s fancy to want to continue the chronicle handed down by those who came before through war, fire, and conquest?

I ne can ne I ne mai tellen alle þe wunder ne alle þe pines ðat hi diden wrecce men on þis land

‘I do not know how, nor am I able, to tell all the outrages or all the suffering that they inflicted on the wretched people in this land.’1

He will finish it today and have done with it, even if — even though — he is a poor writer in English. He has tried his best to write properly, the way the chronicle began. Nevertheless, his task is too great to be cowed. He thinks of the words of St Paul: But though I be rude in speech…

He writes on over the hours, the lines above browning and deepening as he writes the lines below. His back hurts, his hand aches, and his eyes squint in the light, which has now almost gone completely.

At last, his task is almost complete. In the final lines, he records the death of King Stephen and the end of the bad times:

Þa þe king was ded, þa was þe eorl beionde sæ; ⁊ ne durste nan man don oþer bute god for þe micel eie of him.

‘When the king was dead, the earl [Henry II] was overseas; but no one dared do anything but good for the great fear they had of him.’2

Like the passing of a sudden sickness, the wickedness departed from the land with the death of Stephen. There was now a new king. Perhaps this Henry will even be a good king. But that will be for some younger man to write about.

No younger man ever continued the Peterborough Chronicle, as this text is known to us today.

The entry for 1154, which described the end of Stephen’s reign and the beginning of the reign of Henry II, is the last entry in a chronicle whose first entries were compiled in the reign of King Alfred (871–899).

Copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as we call the chronicle more generally, were kept, and kept up to date, in several locations in England. We know of nine today. The practice of keeping the chronicles up to date was gradually abandoned in various places around the time of the Norman Conquest, or shortly thereafter. The Peterborough copy kept the tradition alive the longest, but it too died out after the entry for the year 1154.

To linguists, the Peterborough Chronicle is the most interesting version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle because it spans what they consider two separate periods in the language’s history: the bulk of it is written in Old English, but the later continuations, such as the one I dramatized above, are written in early forms of Middle English.

To the scribes who wrote down the continuations, however, they probably didn’t seem like two different forms of the language. For these 12th-century monks, English was English. It’s just that people used to write a bit differently in the old days. Properly. What we see today as a break between two distinct periods, they likely saw as slow change, or, more likely still, degeneration.

Linguistically, at least, great changes are often imperceptible to those going through them. It makes you wonder: are we also at the end of an era without realizing it?

As modern as pleated collars

Like Caesar’s Gaul, the history of the English language is conventionally divided into three parts: Old, Middle, and Modern English.

Old English is said to have lasted from the Anglo-Saxon settlement (around AD 450) until the Norman Conquest (AD 1066), or soon thereafter: AD 1100 is a popular round number. After that, we had Middle English, which lasted until about AD 1450 or so, and, finally, Modern English continues the story into the present day.

As you may well imagine, there’s nothing magical about these dates. From the point of view of the language, things stayed basically the same between December 31, 1449 and January 1, 1450.

Language change doesn’t announce itself as a revolution. Instead, it shows up as complaints that kids say things differently (and wrong), or that old people speak strangely and embarrassingly. Or it appears as a slight cringe at the terminology employed in an old book you’re reading.

Within the three broad periods in the history of the English language, there were big differences between the language as it was at the beginning of a period and at its end. Ask anyone who’s read Shakespeare — written, ostensibly, in Modern English — just how much it can change.

Nevertheless, divisions have to be made somewhere, and the convention is to divide the history of English into these three periods — Old, Middle, and Modern, with boundaries at roughly these three points (AD 1100 and 1450).

But, at the risk of sounding like a two-year-old, why?

Why do we do this? Why three divisions and not five? Why divide them at AD 1100 and 1500, rather than 800 and 1700?

And why does Modern English last so long?

I could have sworn “Goldilocks” was one of his…

Not everyone accepts that the last five centuries of the English language belong under a single label.

For this reason, it’s very common to subdivide modern English into Early Modern English and Present-Day English (or Late Modern English), with a dividing line between them somewhere in the 18th century. I like 1700 as a round number. This gets us around the awkwardness of putting William Shakespeare in the same linguistic category as William Faulkner.3

But even so, Early and Late Modern English are usually treated as subdivisions of Modern English. Modern English, including both periods, is usually understood as the proper overarching category to set in opposition to Old and Middle English.

This schematic rule of three is not given by nature but has a particular birth date and a particular parent. The originator of this organizational scheme is none other than Jacob Grimm, a pioneer not only of the study of folklore but also of comparative linguistics.

In his 1848 work Geschichte der deutschen Sprache ‘History of the German Language’, Grimm split the history of the German language into three periods: Alt-, Mittel-, and Neuhochdeutsch, or Old, Middle, and New High German.

Grimm’s choice to split the German language in this way came not from the facts of the language’s history, but from a general belief he had in a Gesetz der Trilogie, a Law of Threes, which he saw as pervading nature and language.4

This compulsion to find threes everywhere you look seems to be a part of human nature. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called it triadomany, a craze for threes. Grimm seems to have been particularly afflicted.5

Whatever the reason for its origin, the schema was soon applied to English by the philologist Henry Sweet, who also coined the term Old English, to replace the name Anglo-Saxon, which he considered barbarous.6

So before we can really ask when a period begins and ends, we have to notice that the familiar threefold frame for thinking about linguistic history is imposed upon that history rather than arising from it. We are still stuck in Jacob Grimm’s triadomany.

The three-part division works well enough for English, except when it doesn’t. The existence of Early Modern English as a category is a good example of this. Even Sweet, godfather of the triadomaniacal division of English into Old, Middle, and Modern, admitted subdivisions: three each in Old and Middle English, and two in Modern English.

But nevertheless, even if we are to accept the overall validity of the threefold division — as we more or less have to be, since everyone else does — we are still left with the problem of determining where the boundaries between the three periods are. Given that language change is continuous rather than discrete, is there ever truly a way to divide the periods of a language without lapsing into arbitrariness?

This is written in Extremely Late Old English

There are two categories of criteria for dividing periods in a language’s history: Internal criteria, that is, those arising from within developments in the language itself, and external criteria, those arising from factors in history writ large: wars, migrations, technological change, etc.

Linguists, being linguists, have occasionally tried to come up with exclusively internal criteria for the periodization of a language. Henry Sweet, perhaps in a fit of triadomaniacal inspiration, came up with one influential criterion, which has to do with word endings.

For Sweet, Old English is the period of full endings, Middle English is the period of levelled endings, and Modern English is the period of lost endings.

To show what he means by this, let’s take a look at the four words Sweet himself uses as examples: moon, sun, son, stones (in the plural).

When we trace these word forms back through Sweet’s three periods, they show us what he meant by full, levelled, and lost:

• Old English: mōna, sunne, sunu, stānas

• Middle English: mōne, sunne, sune, stǭnes

• Modern English: moon, sun, son, stones (pronounced with no vowel in the ending)7

In Old English, the vowels in the endings of the four words are kept separate: a is distinguished from e, which is distinguished from u. I

n Middle English, all of these vowels are spelled e, and pronounced as schwa (the indistinct vowel in the first syllable of above). This is the levelling that Sweet considered so distinctive of Middle English: the vowels of different endings are pronounced the same.

In Modern English, all of the vowels in these endings have disappeared, leaving only the final -s to mark the plural stones. This is what Sweet means by lost endings.

Sweet also gave examples of authors whose work he considered to fall within each period. For Old English, which he divided into three subperiods: Alfred the Great (c. 849–899), Ælfric of Eynsham (c. 955–c. 1010), and Laȝamon (the late 12th- or early 13th-century author of the poem Brut).8

Unfortunately, Sweet’s internal criterion doesn’t quite work. As the linguist Roger Lass has pointed out, there is levelling of endings even in the work Sweet calls most typical of Early Old English, the works of Alfred the Great.

For example, in Alfred’s preface to the Old English translation of the Cura Pastoralis, fully 5% of the vowels in endings and other weak positions are spelled in a way that suggests the author had confused them with other vowels.9

The problem is that the process Sweet chose to demarcate the phases of English doesn’t line up cleanly with any of his stages. The levelling of endings began in Proto-Germanic and isn’t even complete today: many dialects of English still distinguish Rosa’s and roses, or proven and provin’. Does that mean we still speak Old English? No, it does not.

Even though Sweet’s internal criterion didn’t end up working, we still use his overall schema of Old, Middle, and Modern English. We don’t use Sweet’s exact dates anymore, but there is remarkable consistency in the dates we do use.

Almost everyone divides Old English from Middle English between 1050 and 1100, meaning that the later continuations to the Peterborough Chronicle are written in a different phase of the language than the chronicle’s main body. Likewise, the boundary between Middle and Modern English almost always falls between 1450 and 1500.

So where does this unanimity come from?

What have the Normans ever done for us?

The language itself doesn’t seem particularly keen on giving us clear guidance on when one phase begins and another one ends. So what most linguists and historians do today is use external criteria for determining the boundaries between stages in the history of a language.

These external criteria are political and technological events rather than sound laws. To divide Old from Middle English we have the most famous date in English history: 1066, the Norman conquest, an event whose consequences on the history of the English language cannot be understated — although they can be misdated. Or, if you’re the kind of person who likes a round number, you can use 1100 instead.10

The next great date is 1476, which often serves as the boundary between Middle and Modern English. This is the date of Caxton’s printing press, another event which would have dramatic effects on the course of linguistic history. A good date to use, then, unless you want to round up or down to an even half-century.

If, after all that splitting, you’re still in the mood to subdivide Modern English, 1776 is a good date to do it: this is the year of American independence, which first broke the political unity of English speakers in a dramatic way, and opened the door to multiple standard forms of the language.

For that reason, the Cambridge History of the English Language chose this date to divide its early modern and late modern volumes. Others have chosen 1650 or 1700. Whichever date gets us on the opposite side of Shakespeare seems to do the job well enough.

Of course, the problem of the falsely crisp cutoff remains, whatever date you choose. But at least the problem of arbitrariness is solved to a degree. Choosing an external criterion gives linguists and historians an escape hatch out of the difficulties that we have seen in Sweet’s attempt to find an internal criterion for dividing language periods.

So if we are comfortable with external criteria for dividing language stages, we’re confronted with a new question. Has anything as consequential as the Norman Conquest or the invention of the printing press happened lately?

Or, put another way, has Modern English (1450–) actually ended already without us knowing?

Some changes have wanished

We can only call an end to a period when we realize something has changed. It can only be done in retrospect.

Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that 1776 marked the beginning of Late Modern English. When does it end? Have we experienced any great event since then with reverberating linguistic consequences?

Almost certainly.

The English-speaking world has been rather busy over the past 250 years. We’ve had, among other things, two world wars, the inventions of the telephone, the computer, and the internet, and the proliferation, through a sequence of colonialism and decolonization, of many independent countries where English is spoken.

All of these things have changed English. But have they changed it enough to make it useful to talk about a new phase in the history of the language?

We may try to look to histories of the English language for guidance, but they are of no help to us: they typically peter out around 1800. It’s not for a lack of evidence. After 1800, we have more than ever before. We even have audio!

And it’s not for a lack of things happening. Language is in a constant state of change; even as you read this there are multiple vowel shifts, each on the scale of the Great Vowel Shift, at work reshaping dialects of English. Maybe even your own!

But it’s hard to know which of these changes will end up spreading as you’re watching them happen. Some changes which seem of great importance today may end up as footnotes to linguistic history.

Did you know, for example, that there were varieties of speech in 19th-century England that interchanged v and w?11 If you’ve read Dickens, you know. This is Sam Weller’s accent from The Pickwick Papers, in which Dickens depicts Weller as saying things like avay instead of away, and circumwented for circumvented. This sound change never caught on, and, 150 years later, it’s been almost totally forgotten.

On the other hand, one slightly shifted vowel — say, an a that sounded too much like an e — could end up setting off the next Great Vowel Shift.

The reason no one tends to talk about anything after 1800 in the typical History of the English Language textbook is that we’re simply too close to the question to know with certainty what will matter.

And, when we zoom in even more to the present day, historical linguists tend to leave the question of language change in contemporary English to sociolinguists. The two have a relationship like the one historians have to journalists: just as journalists are said to write the first draft of history, sociolinguists capture variation in progress that future generations of historical linguists will write up in about two hundred years.

But, acknowledging the difficulties posed by our lack of perspective, we can still try to draw a line in the sand. The question is: where?

Of course, they would spell it Americanisation

If we’re going to split today’s English from Late Modern English, I think the best place to do it is somewhere between 1900 and 1950.

One of the big stories in the first half of the 20th century is, of course, the two world wars, which created a decisive break in so many ways with the world of the 19th century.

From a linguistic perspective, this new phase of English has been marked by three forces, two of them in competition.12

One is centrifugal: this is pluricentricity, or the shift away from a single standard for the English language.

A pluricentric language is one where multiple standards exist. Think of the different standards as used in Britain and the United States, not to mention Australia, New Zealand, and English-speaking Canada and South Africa. Each of these countries has developed a standard English of its own, which, while not differing extensively from other standard Englishes, may differentiate further over time.13

The second force has been homogenization: the influence of communication technology, such as the telephone and television, and the increased ease and affordability of travel, have tended to make people speak and write more like each other, wherever they happen to be within the English-speaking world.

Couple this with the fact that the centre of cultural gravity in the English-speaking world shifted from Britain to the United States during the same period between 1900 and 1950, and you get a recipe for Americanization (sorry, Americanisation) of non-American varieties of English, something much complained about in the British press.

Alongside these two forces there has also been a third: colloquialization. Simply read a novel from this year alongside a novel from the 19th century and you’ll see exactly what I mean. The gap between speech and writing has narrowed.

While in previous centuries the written word had a standard of its own, which was rather distant from the spoken language, the 20th century brought in a norm of writing more like we speak. Of course, we don’t write exactly like we speak, even now. But that’s a topic for another day.

These differences may lead you to the conclusion that the 20th century beginning sometime between 1900 and 1950 marks a new phase in the history of the English language.

I’m not entirely convinced. I think we’ll only know the true importance of the changes of the 20th century after we’ve had another century to digest them.

There’s a quotation attributed to Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai, who, when asked by Henry Kissinger about the impact of the French Revolution — which had occurred almost two centuries prior to this conversation — is reported to have said, “It is too soon to tell.”14

I feel that way about the changes the English language has undergone in the twentieth century. For now, I’m going to say the same thing the monk in Peterborough would have said. We’re speaking the same language today that we spoke 200 years ago. It’s all English, or, Modern English, in our case. We just speak it a little differently now.

But ask me again after another 200 years.

Works Cited

• Clark, Cecily (1958). The Peterborough Chronicle 1070–1154.

• Lass, Roger (2000). “Language periodization and the concept ‘middle’.” In Taavitsainen et al. (eds.), Placing Middle English in Context, 7–42.

• Mair, Christian (2006). Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization.

• Sweet, Henry (1891). A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical.

On the 3rd of June, we dined at the house of Mr. Uppington, a stationer lately removed to Cheapside, who had, by the enviable combination of industry and frugality, raised himself to a state of respectable ease, a circumstance which he took no small pains to let be known generally.

He had furnished his rooms with a great quantity of books, which he had arrayed, contrary to the usual practice, by the colour of their bindings.

Now there sat at the table, opposite our host, Dr. Barleygrow, whom I had brought thither at Mr. Uppington’s peculiar request, the latter having so long desired the acquaintance of so celebrated a scholar.

The conversation turning upon the education of his son, Mr. Uppington remarked that he had lately corrected the boy for saying I am goin’, and had instructed him that he must always say I am going, for that the termination -ing, being the participle in the present tense of the verb to go, contains three letters, each deserving of its full dignity, and that to leave any of them unpronounced was a vulgarism fit only for the unlettered.

Dr. Barleygrow had listened to our host’s lecture in silence, and at length delivered himself thus:

BARLEYGROW. Sir, you have laboured to plant in your son an error, and watered it with your paternal authority.

UPPINGTON. An error, Sir? Surely the rule, that the g of the termination ing ought to be pronounced according to its full virtue, is well established by the best grammarians.

BARLEYGROW. It is established, Sir, in the manner in which one who settles by intrusion is established upon another man’s land: by disordered habit and not by right. Speech is the master, Sir, and writing its loyal servant. For did not men speak long before any man scratched a mark to record their words?

UPPINGTON. Surely, Sir, but you must confess—

BARLEYGROW. Or are we to believe that there was a scrivener or amanuensis present in Paradise, when Adam named the beasts? Writing, Sir, has no other office than the noble task of recording what the tongue has uttered. Yet your grammarian would have it otherwise. He bids the living speech bow to the dead letter and correct itself by the rule of the page. It is a very Saturnalia of speech, Sir, wherein the master must wait at table upon his own footman, and call it good order.

UPPINGTON. Yet surely, Sir, you will grant that the dropping of the g, as when a man says huntin’ and fishin’ and shootin’, is the mark of low breeding, a condition out of which I am glad to have schooled myself.

BARLEYGROW. Then you have schooled yourself out of the company of dukes, Sir, to keep company with your grammarians. Your huntin’ and your shootin’ have been spoken in the best halls in England by men whose breeding no stationer of Cheapside ought to despise.

UPPINGTON. Can it be so?

BARLEYGROW. Indeed, Sir. The man secure in his station speaks as he pleases. It is the man too eager to improve himself who watches every syllable, as a servant new to a great house watches his feet upon the stair, lest a single slip prove his undoing.

Mr. Uppington confessed that he remained unconvinced. But I could not but observe that he did not, for the rest of the evening, utter a single word ending in -ing.

Excerpt from the Life of Barleygrow.1

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 57,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and my most in-depth work, including longer essays that trace the mysteries of English to their source, practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (currently) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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An overworked suffix

The rest of the evening must have been jolly difficult for our dear Mr. Uppington — nigh on impossible, I imagine.

It’s hard to speak English without the suffix -ing, because it does so many jobs. Not only can it transform a verb into a noun, in the so-called gerund form (swimming is good exercise), but it can also turn a verb into a kind of adjective (the swimming boy), or pair up with to be to tell us what someone is doing right now (I am swimming).

Three jobs is a lot of work for a single suffix. But times are tough in the world of English grammar. Almost every suffix has had to take on multiple jobs, and -ing is no exception.

It wasn’t always like this though.

The three jobs performed by the suffix -ing used to be done by two wholly separate suffixes, with no relationship between them whatsoever.

One of these suffixes was the ancestor of -ing. The other — despite all appearances, entirely unrelated to -ing — was the distant ancestor of -in’, the g-dropping form that Uppington tried to rid from his son’s speech, and which generations of schoolteachers and grammar mavens have tried so hard to rid from the English language.

Ironically, when we say I’m goin’ or the swimmin’ boy, we’re using a form far more ancient than the one the sticklers prefer.

Read more

This time, we covered:

• The three hunts of Sir Bertilak

• The three hunts of Lady Bertilak

• The one temptation Gawain actually succumbs to

If you’d like to participate in a future book club, you can do so by signing up as a paid subscriber below.

Read more

He’s lived too long. He’s sure of that now.

Sea spray flecks his cheek. He’s close to where he found the barrow. Just one mile more, although a mile for an old man bearing a heavy load is no small distance.

He utters no word of complaint — who would he say it to, anyway? — and keeps going.

It wasn’t always like this. Once it was good. He was young and the world seemed to be young with him. The hoofbeat of horses, the screech of hawks flying overhead, the sound of the harp, he can hear them all still when he closes his eyes.

And then there is nothing. Not even the servants who used to polish his armour. They’re all gone now. Taken by death, or bloody battle.

And yet some things still remain. The golden cups, the sword that once won him glory. Things. Just things. There’s no one left to swing the sword, no one to carry the cup.

He has lived too long. A warrior is not meant to walk bent with age. He should have died before, a good death on the field of battle. And yet he lived, when better men did not.

He carries his bag to the barrow. The mound is empty now, but he will fill it. He’ll fill it with a lifetime of treasure, an immense inheritance he would sooner bequeath to his son or his sister-son. But they are gone, so it goes to the earth, the mother of us all.

He stands before the mound, and places the sack down. He takes out a single cup and holds it up before the barrow, as if he were drinking her health. Then he speaks his word of bequest.

“Hold these treasures, Earth, now that men no longer can.” He looks at the cup, and down at the treasures. “These things once came from you. So have them again. The bright helm will tarnish. The sword will grow dull. The coat of mail that even iron could not bite will be, at last, devoured by rust.”

He places each item carefully in the barrow, giving each its place of honour. And, as he sets them carefully down under the earth, he says the names of the friends who once carried them, of those who lived not nearly long enough.

The wind carries his words into the far distance. Whether anyone heard them, not even a wise man can say.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 55,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and my most in-depth work, including longer essays that trace the mysteries of English to their source, practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (currently) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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Why people bounce off Beowulf

What you just read is a prose adaptation of an episode in Beowulf, the foundational poem of English literature. It’s a work of Old English verse composed by an unknown poet sometime between the eighth and eleventh centuries, recounting — among many other things — the heroic adventures of a man named Beowulf.

It is also a miracle of survival. The world it describes vanished centuries before the poem was set down. The poem itself almost vanished too: it comes to us in a single manuscript whose pages still bear the scorch marks of the fire which, in 1731, nearly took it from us.

The episode I adapted above is called the Lament of the Sole Survivor. This passage occupies just 40 of the poem’s 3182 lines,1 features a character who is never named — he’s never even referred to in any other part of the poem. And yet, despite its brevity, I think the Lament is the key to unlock what the Beowulf poet is trying to tell us.

I’ve spoken to many readers over the years who “bounced off” of Beowulf: they came in expecting monster fights aplenty, and ended up reading a poem whose narrator seems distractible, even flighty: unable to hold his attention on what is most interesting about his story. Which is the monsters, right?

Beowulf, you see, has an image problem.

By reputation, Beowulf is a poem about fighting monsters. And it’s not entirely undeserved: Beowulf does indeed fight three monsters in the poem.

As a young man, he fights first the ogre-like creature Grendel, then Grendel’s mother, and finally, as an old man, he confronts a fire-breathing dragon.

These fights are beautifully written and wonderfully cinematic, some of the most thrilling combat scenes ever written in English. Their influence runs directly into the foundations of modern fantasy: J. R. R. Tolkien lifted Smaug from the dragon in Beowulf almost wholesale, and most of the dragons we’ve met since are his spiritual descendants.

But the fight scenes are relatively short: when you combine them, they amount to about 13% of the total poem.2 The remaining 87% of the poem consists of, well, everything else, including a generous helping of digressions, in which we’re treated to legends, lore, and plenty of stories-within-stories.

What makes this frustrating for readers is not just that they came wanting to read about monster fights and ended up having to keep track of the jockeying for position of rival claimants to the Swedish throne. That stuff can be fun too, as any Game of Thrones fan will tell you.

But many of these digressions seem irrelevant to the main story. For example, the poet spends hundreds of lines in the third part of the poem recounting the wars between the Geats3 and the Swedes, which have dubious relevance to the main action of the section: Beowulf’s fight with the dragon.

As a result of all these digressions throughout the poem, many readers never even make it to the Lament of the Sole Survivor, which takes place around three quarters of the way through the poem. It too is a digression, but, if we understand it correctly, it provides the crucial clue to unlocking the rest of Beowulf.

Beowulf is not a story about killing monsters which happens to be told by a distractible poet. Instead, think of Beowulf as a three thousand-line version of the Lament of the Sole Survivor: an extended farewell to a vanishing world. It just happens to be punctuated by three monster fights.

To understand why the poem works — and why it isn’t the mess of digressions it appears to be — we need to understand the world of Beowulf. Fortunately, the poet tells us a lot of what we need to know. We just need to learn how to listen.

The world that was

What we hear, when we listen carefully, is a single theme: strength inevitably declines into nothingness. This pessimistic theme repeats throughout the poem, at various scales, both intimately, in the lives of individuals, and more grandly, in the fate of whole peoples.

The most obvious example is the life of Beowulf himself, who sees his strength flower in his youth and decline in old age. But it is also present in the Lament of the Sole Survivor, and in the dire predictions of the fate of Beowulf’s people, the Geats, which occupy a large portion of the end of the poem.

Even the beginning of the poem closes on a funeral, recounting the earlier great deeds of the Danes. The present state of the Danes, however, is much reduced. They are beset by troubles, principal among them the monster Grendel, but also the unsubtle hints the poet gives of coming strife, both with other peoples, and within the Danish court, between the king’s nephew and his own children.

The constant repetition of this pattern of decline, told at various scales and in various ways throughout the poem, is what leads to the elegiac mood — a mood of lament for what has been lost — that pervades the poem.

What makes this mood so appropriate for Beowulf is that the poet didn’t have to invent a lost world to mourn. The poem’s events take place over a span of fifty years in late fifth-century and early sixth-century Scandinavia. Many of the events are fantastical, of course, but the core setting was a real time and place. And it really did vanish.

The poem itself was composed later — it’s unclear exactly how much later — under circumstances we can’t reconstruct with any certainty.4 But much of the poem bears the characteristic traces of something that evolved out of oral tradition. Through this oral tradition, memories of that era persist in the poem.

Beowulf is set in the era that archaeologists call the Early Germanic Iron Age, from around AD 400–550. It is bookended by two historical events: at the beginning, the collapse of Roman authority in Western Europe (an event in which Germanic peoples played no small role), and at the end, a climate disaster set off by volcanic eruptions in AD 536–540, which caused a large-scale decline of living standards in Scandinavia.

During this period, while Western Europe was undergoing severe decline, Scandinavia entered its Golden Age. You should take the phrase “Golden Age” literally: immense hordes of gold were deposited in Scandinavia during this period. The gold was ultimately of Roman origin, but the wealth flowed north with the decline of Roman power in Western Europe and the rise in the power of the Germanic peoples, who began to organize themselves into kingdoms.

This Scandinavian Golden Age came to an end, in part due to the climate disaster of the mid-6th century, and in part because the wealth of southern Europe had been exhausted. The gold stopped flowing.

This is the background against which I recommend you read Beowulf, a poem which traces the career of a hero living in the final, declining, years of this period. It’s entirely appropriate that a poem written about that time should be a poem of mourning.

But I digress

Even if Beowulf is an elegy, why does the poet seem incapable of telling it without digressions? Why, immediately after Beowulf has defeated Grendel, are we treated to a retelling of two unrelated stories about characters we never meet: a dragon-slaying hero named Sigemund and a wicked king named Heremod? What do they have to do with Beowulf?

Tolkien — yes, that Tolkien — once asked the same question. Before he became famous as the author of The Lord of the Rings, he was a professional Anglo-Saxonist, and a scholar of Beowulf. The consensus in the field when he began his career was that these digressions were defects in the poem, whose only use was as a scrap-heap to be rifled through for historical information.

At least that was the consensus until 1936, when Tolkien gave a lecture that changed the way people saw Beowulf forever. In that lecture, which he called Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,5 he argued that the digressions weren’t a defect at all. They were essential to the structure of the poem, which, by the way, was actually a great work of literature.

For Tolkien, the digressions served to furnish the world in which Beowulf operated. Not only do they maintain the elegiac mood that saturates Beowulf’s world, but they populate that world with other heroes — and villains — who serve as examples of what a man can become.

The digressions show us what was praiseworthy in this world and what was contemptible. For example, let’s look more closely at the two digressions that follow immediately after Beowulf has slain Grendel: the story of Sigemund the dragon-slayer and the story of Heremod the wicked king.

Why these stories at this moment? They serve to place the actions of Beowulf, the character, within the context of what is morally possible in the world.

A hero could rise as high as Sigemund, fighting dragons singlehandedly and freeing its hoarded treasure. Or he could sink as low as Heremod, who refused to distribute treasure to his people. Instead, he kept the wealth to himself, like a human version of a dragon, and like Sigemund’s dragon, he too met his end for it.

The poet does not make the conclusions explicit for you. He simply places the images of Sigemund and Heremod in proximity and lets you work out what it means. As a result, other answers than the one I’ve given here are possible, probably even necessary, which leads me to my final point: Beowulf is one of those few, special texts that, to adapt Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. No matter how much you look into Beowulf, it never seems to exhaust its ability to surprise you.

Because Beowulf is so inexhaustible, I have a word of advice for anyone set on reading it.

You must re-read Beowulf

You’re not going to get everything out of Beowulf in your first reading. You may not even be able to exhaust what Beowulf has to offer in a lifetime, although I’ve not yet attempted this.

My experience has been that Beowulf yields up something different every time you approach it. Depending on the stage of life you find yourself in, you may be more attracted to the boastful energy of the young Beowulf, or perhaps you’ll identify more with the older Beowulf looking back on his long and storied life.

Your interests may change: on one occasion you may read Beowulf with an eye for the monsters and the fighting. Another time, your interests may lie in uncovering the politicking of the Danish court, or untangling the sequence of events that made up the Swedish-Geatish wars discussed in the final part of the poem. You may become fascinated by the balance struck between Christian and pre-Christian elements in the poem, or the folkloric material that several of the episodes in Beowulf seem to have been drawn from. Suddenly, one day, you may be seized by a desire to learn more about what archaeology can tell us about the period.

There are many ways to enjoy Beowulf, and you don’t have to choose just one. If you’re anything like me, different interests and themes will take hold of you on different occasions as you re-read the poem.

But re-read you must. Because Old English — the language Beowulf was written in — is essentially a foreign language, most people will read Beowulf in translation (and here’s some advice for choosing your first translation). The need to read in translation, however, can be a blessing in disguise, because you can simply change your translation and the poem becomes half-new once again.

Of course, if you’ve truly been bitten by the Beowulf bug, you’ll want to read it in the original Old English. If this sounds like it describes you, I’ve written up some (rather comprehensive) advice on how to get started.

If you do want to read the original, I won’t sugar-coat it: Beowulf is a challenging text, even for students of Old English. But you don’t need to be able to read the poem fluently to derive some benefit from knowing a bit of Old English, even when you’re reading a Modern English translation.

Translators always have to make interpretive decisions, and these decisions are often hidden to you, the reader. If you know Old English well enough to pick out which word in the original corresponds to which word in the translation, you’d be wise to have the original open alongside the translation as you read. You’ll be surprised at how a word that you thought was of great significance in the translation turns out to correspond to nothing at all in the original: it’s simply been added to make the Modern English flow better.

You can get the same effect by reading multiple translations, as different translators tend to make different decisions. By seeing where translators differ, you get a sense of what parts of the original give them the most trouble. That’s also where all the fun is, once you learn Old English.

There is, however, one joy that the Old English reader has which is entirely withheld from the reader of a translation: the joy of the sonic texture of the original.

Beowulf was written in alliterative verse, which — if you’ve never heard it recited — has a propulsive energy which is hard to replicate. Many translators have attempted to capture this energy in their Modern English renderings, but none, in my opinion, have truly succeeded. How could they? Keeping the meaning intact while also working within the constraints of alliterative verse in Modern English is virtually impossible.

Whether you end up reading Beowulf in translation or in the original, knowing what to expect is half the battle. If you go in expecting a heroic succession of monster fights, you’ll be puzzled, perhaps even disappointed, by the other 87% of the poem. But if you understand what that other 87% is doing, you’re going into your encounter with Beowulf armed with everything you need to enjoy it.

So go pick up Beowulf. At 3182 lines, it’s something you can read in a few hours. This is a poem that will keep you company for the rest of your life.

In a way, Beowulf is like the Sole Survivor. It too has come through great dangers to stand before us as the last witness to a world that no longer exists. But unlike the Sole Survivor, whose name was lost forever, the glory of Beowulf will never truly die, as long as we keep reading it.

P.S. Want to hear some Old English?

If you’d like to listen to Beowulf — and other Old English texts — in the original, I’ve been working on a way: an app called Ekho, which is an audio library providing definitive recordings of historical texts in the original language, beginning with Old English and Ancient Greek.

My recording of Beowulf is currently available on the app and covers up to the end of the fight with Grendel, with new content added every month.

Full disclosure: I have a stake in the project, so I’m not a neutral party here. But if you’re the kind of person who wants to read Old English literature in the original language, I think you’ll really enjoy it.

What’s especially fun about Ekho is that the voice actors (myself included) use carefully reconstructed historical pronunciation schemes, so you can hear Beowulf and other texts as close to how they would have originally sounded as possible.

They have a rotating free sample text for each language: currently, for Old English, it’s The Wanderer — another fine example of Old English elegy, by the way.

Listen here!

Works Cited

• Fulk, Robert D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. (2008). Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. 4th edition.

• Tolkien, J. R. R. (1936). Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.

It was upon a morning of uncommon brilliance, in the Year of Grace one thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven — a date, dear reader, which shall presently disclose its peculiar significance — that an Englishman of the better sort ventures forth to take the air.

Our Englishman is, you must understand, one of those gentlemen so very emblematic of this our Victorian Era, secure in the conviction that, in taking his constitutional, he is rendering some small service to the Empire. Her Majesty has need of healthy tailors, barristers, sea captains, and the like.

On such a day as this, nothing can disturb his equanimity. Or so it appears to our Englishman, until he passes by a small but uncommonly deep pool, of the kind often to be found in the English countryside, wherein he espies a man thrashing about.

A damnable fuss, thinks our Englishman, the fellow is making. He walks on, quickening his pace somewhat, the better to pass the pool with dispatch.

But the man flailing in the pool catches sight of the Englishman, and cries out, “I will drown! I will drown!”

The Englishman can discern from the drowning man’s accent that he is a Frenchman. Or a German. Some manner of foreigner, at any event.

Our Englishman hesitates. The matter does appear to be of some seriousness. Nevertheless, presently, after a moment’s reflection, he walks on.

“I will drown!” calls the man in the pool a third time. “I will drown, and no one shall save me!”

The Englishman pauses at the side of the pool, an inward conflict stirring within his breast. Ought he to save the man in the pool? After what seems an eternity, the Englishman arrives at a decision. He walks on, and leaves the man to drown.

Later that same evening, the Englishman recounts his encounter with the Frenchman of the pool to his friends at the club, satisfied in the knowledge that he has acted rightly. He is, after all, nothing if not a respecter of persons.

One of his friends, a Scotsman, is astonished. “How could you leave a man to drown, even if he be a Frenchman?”

The Englishman, with great solemnity, returns, “It was no easy matter. Indeed, I was obliged to overrule every natural inclination of brotherhood to do so. But I could not but respect his wishes. As the man himself declared, ‘I will drown. No one shall save me.’”

“But why,” rejoins the Scotsman, with the bluff directness of his race, “did you not heed his petition? Was he not, in plain terms, asking for aid?”

“Certainly not,” observed the Englishman. “As the eminent Bishop Lowth has plainly laid down in his Grammar, will, when predicated of the first person, as in I will, indicates desire. Shall, when predicated of the third person, denotes command or injunction. The Frenchman’s express desire was to drown, and his command to me was precisely that I do nothing. Though it pained me as an Englishman, I was compelled to obey.”

The Scotsman is dumbfounded, and later lays the matter before the local constabulary, who, having weighed the particulars with due gravity, are pleased to certify that no wrongdoing whatsoever has been committed.

You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 50,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.

I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and the content I’m most proud of: practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, honest takes on how language really works, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and (currently) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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A joke like this is first recorded in 1804, mocking the rather bizarre state of affairs that once prevailed in English — or, more correctly, in particular kinds of English of southern England — regarding the use of the words will and shall.

Some of you may have even been exposed to memories of learning a will/shall rule, a bit of prescriptive grammar requiring you to use shall to express future time in the first person (with I and we), and will otherwise. As our Englishman explained, using will in the first person indicated a wish, and use of shall outside of the first person meant a command or prohibition.

This rule, which I believe is moribund today if not utterly dead, caused grief to generations of schoolchildren and learners of English as a second language due to its counterintuitive nature.

That it was equally vexing to everyone can be seen from the fact that the identity of the drowning man differs from telling to telling. Sometimes he’s French, sometimes German, and sometimes even Scottish.

I, for one, do not lament the loss of the will/shall rule, at least in my capacity as a writer and speaker of English.

But, as a linguist, I’ve always found it fascinating. It could only have arisen at a very particular point in the history of the English language, when two different verbs were competing to serve as the substitute for English’s missing future tense.

If it seems strange that I’m saying English has no future tense after about 700 words of discussing will and shall, let me clarify that I mean that English has no single verb form associated with future time, nothing equivalent to the past tense forms was, sang, or waited. The past is a proper tense in English, as is the present. The future is not.

That’s not to say English has no way of expressing the meaning of future time. In fact, it has several: besides the bare present — the verb without any ending at all — such as in we leave at daybreak, we can also use modal verbs such as will and, less often, shall.

Modal verbs, by the way, are verbs like will, shall, can, must, and friends: they express notions of possibility and necessity rather than describing actions or states. They have many special properties, among which is the fact that they never take -s (He sing-s but He can sing; never ❌He cans sing)

There are other options for marking future time in English beyond modal verbs. Probably the most common is the going to construction, as in I’m going to leave at daybreak.

There are some subtle differences between these various ways of marking future time, and restrictions on when each can be used. If you’re a native speaker of English, you instinctively know all this already, even if you don’t know you do.

Future time can be indicated with:

1. The present tense, along with explicit time marking: We leave at daybreak. The sun sets at 7:30pm tonight.

2. The present tense, in a subordinate clause: If you see her there, say hello for me. I’ll leave when I’m ready.

3. The present progressive, along with explicit time marking: I’m actually seeing that movie later today.

4. The modal will, especially when you’re talking about a plan you’re making in the moment: You know what? I will have the cheesecake.

5. The going to construction, especially when describing plans made earlier: I’m going to stop by the supermarket later; do you need anything?

To make matters more complicated, many of these strategies also have other uses. For example, the bare present is also used for habitual action (He smokes.) or proverbial statements (Birds of a feather flock together.) The modal will is also used for suppositions (That’ll be Emma at the door.) or for proverbial statements (Boys will be boys.).

And then there’s the modal shall, which seems at once roughly synonymous with will, yet differing in formality or the precise situations in which it’s used, not to mention the will/shall rule that caused so much grief to our poor German/Frenchman in the pool above.

It’s all a very strange state of affairs. Why did English develop such a baroque system for pointing out when an action has yet to happen?

As is so often the case, this weirdness is a family affair. In fact, we can learn a lot about why English is so strange by looking at its relatives, both near and far. Germanic languages all developed remarkably similar strategies for marking the future.

What’s strange is that they all did so separately, as if each language had been acted on by some outside force, compelling it to come up with a way to express future time. In fact, that is likely exactly what happened.

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This time, we covered:

• The symbolism of the Pentangle, or endless knot

• Gawain’s ride north

• Sir Bertilak’s uncanny resemblence to another hoge hathel

• The agreement between Gawain and Bertilak

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