How to unlock ancient languages by being a fish out of water
Or a "bear out of forest"
I started writing the text of Ōsweald Bera in the spring of 2022, but the idea for the book itself is a lot older, dating back to 2019. The original idea was to write a very loose and generic story of a bear meeting a family and getting up to all sorts of mischievous adventures with them, and use that as a generic script which could be adapted into any number of languages.
(In fact, there’s even a very early draft of the first chapter of a Taiwanese version written in collaboration with Kí Phín-tsì somewhere on my computer…)
I thought that the device of having a bear protagonist would be helpful for introducing cultural aspects of the language, because a bear is by nature an outsider to any human society. This is also the position that language learners are in, to some extent at least, with respect to the society where their target language is spoken. And so much the more so when the language is a historical one.
But, the more I worked on the story, the more I realized that introducing readers to the England of AD 1000 was not something that could be done casually within a “generic story about a bear getting up to adventures with a family.” Ōsweald’s story would have to be rooted in his time and place.
But Ōsweald himself had to be something of an outsider to that time and place.
This “fish out of water” device is a common one in science fiction and fantasy, where it is used to introduce the reader to the world the author has created. It’s also common in a certain type of children’s literature, where the society the reader is being introduced to is the society the reader is preparing to enter. Alternatively, the fish out of water can be used in satire, as a device to make the strangeness of one’s own society more apparent.
Think in this regard of Paddington Bear, who comes to England from “darkest Peru”. Much of the humour in the Paddington stories has to do with introducing him to the peculiar customs of England – customs which the reader may not have even thought of as peculiar until seeing Paddington trying to adapt to them.
Ōsweald Bera is, in a sense, a spiritual successor to stories like Paddington Bear. Like Paddington, Ōsweald is a fish out of water – perhaps I should say a “bear out of forest” – learning about a new society. In the case of Ōsweald Bera the book, however, my intention was not to satirize early 11th-century England but to give a sense of what was going on then.
Who were the people that wrote around the year 1000? What did they write about? And who were the people who didn’t write… or get written about very much?
Ōsweald gets to go on a tour of early mediaeval England, in which he meets a cross-section of society, from farmers and servants to monks and kings – well, one king. All of this is new to Ōsweald, just as it’s new to the reader, who gets to experience this new world through Ōsweald’s eyes.
To make all of this work, you need the right kind of character to be your protagonist in a fish-out-of-water story. Ideally, it would be someone good-natured and curious, so as to be eager to learn about all the things he or she encounters along the way. With a different kind of protagonist, such as a cynic, or someone stubbornly resistant to learning new things, we wouldn’t be able to have such a wide-eyed tour of early mediaeval England.
Besides, there was enough conflict in Ōsweald that I had no need to have him struggling against his new environment out of prejudice or stubbornness.
Suffice it to say that I now had two ingredients: curious and bear. I just needed to add something to set the plot in motion.
Ōsweald’s Adventures
A fish out of water story begins with the fish in water. A bear out of forest story begins with the bear in a forest. And so begins Ōsweald Bera, with a bear in a forest. What comes next? He wants to go out and see the world.
That’s enough to get the story going. The world is a dangerous place, especially that part of it called England in the year 1000. This is in the middle of the reign of Ethelred the Unready, during whose reign the Danish attacks on England resumed in earnest.
So it isn’t long before Ōsweald gets himself wrapped up in the historical events of his day: namely war and political intrigue. What is a good-natured bear to do when faced by the reality that the human world that he wanted so much to see… is not a particularly happy place? The book as a whole is an answer to that question.
I divided the story into four roughly equal parts, each of which is about seven chapters long. Each of these parts has its own focus – but, as I mentioned in the last issue, the focus is not on learning some grammatical form or concept.
Instead, each part focuses on a different genre of literature. Since the first part is concerned with introducing the main characters of the story and establishing basic vocabulary, the genre it imitates is, of necessity, not an authentic Old English literary genre: instead, it imitates folktale and Edwardian children’s literature.
The three remaining parts each serve as an introduction to the concerns and vocabulary of a different genre. Without giving away too much of the story, I can tell you that:
the second part introduces the reader to the vocabulary necessary to read religious prose such as the Wessex Gospels and Ælfric’s homilies;
the third part introduces historical narrative, preparing readers for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; and
the fourth part prepares readers for prose romance (i.e., adventure!), and gives them their first taste of the language of heroic poetry.
This overall structure was of tremendous help in plotting the book, since each of these parts could have its own conflict and plot arc. As a result, I was able to structure the story within this framework and found that conflict and tension were never lacking.
It was important to me that the story have a relentless forward motion – more like a pulp novel than a typical second-language reader. This means characters who are sometimes larger-than-life, villains who occasionally twirl their moustaches, and plot twists and cliffhangers galore.
If the way to acquire a language is to consume a lot of input in the language, how could any book succeed if it were boring? A brilliantly constructed book that people put down out of boredom after the first chapter might as well not have been written, from the perspective of the results it achieves.
There is inherent difficulty and discomfort attendant on reading in a second language – I wanted the story to pull readers in enough so that they persevered despite this.
Given that, my goal was to write a book people would want to read despite the fact that it was written in Old English. Even though I doubt I succeeded entirely in this high aim, in striving after it I believe I have written something that Old English learners at the very least will be able to read through with enjoyment.
But that wasn’t an easy process. In the next issue of The Winged Schwa, I discuss: what challenges I faced writing the book, how using Ōsweald Bera as a live text with students during the writing process changed my pedagogical approach, and some potentially controversial decisions I made... and why.
Oh, and one last thing. I have returned to my old YouTube stomping ground, where I will be releasing two videos a month on how to learn ancient languages, as well as sharing edited segments from some of my old streams. Check out the first episode: How to REALLY learn an ancient language in 2024 if you’d like to meet the face behind the Substack.
The more I read about it the more excited I am!
What a great idea and thanks a lot for sharing your experience here. Whets my appetite for my long-conjectured Ancient Greek reader on Hellenistic Asia Minor.