How Linguistic Resources Impede the Study of History

If you have ever been curious about old languages you have probably browsed special dictionaries — of which many may be found online — that “translate” ancient or medieval languages into modern English. If you have studied J.R.R. Tolkien’s literature in any depth you are undoubtedly aware that Tolkien felt a language preserved the history of its speakers’ experience in its etymological patterns and idiomatic legacies. Hence, understanding our ancestors becomes easier if we study the words they used.

However, most translation dictionaries fail to preserve the true history of the words they document. The translators substitute their own meanings and leave naive readers blinded and misled about the actual uses to which words were put. This process may be due to incompleteness but quite often is bound up with the mode of disclosure. A great deal of linguistic translation has been handed down through generations of scholars who dutifully replicate old teaching resources without thinking about how primitive and inhibiting those resources truly are.

Take, for example, this archive of John R. Clark Hall’s 1916 Concise Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon, 2nd. Edition. The first deficiency of the archive is that the information is presented only in image format (.TIFF or .PNG); hence, the documents are unscannable and cannot be edited. There is, fortunately, a text version of Clark Hall’s dictionary at Project Gutenberg.

The task of transcribing these older resources for the digital environment is complex and beyond most people’s resources, so researchers may be forgiven falling back on scans. But they could just as easily point visitors to the Gutenberg or equivalent versions that are searchable. And yet, sharing these 100-year-old resources isn’t offering much help to curious students of history. Clark Hall was a rather bad historical translator, as his book provided neither context nor literal definition. For example, his entry for helleðegn (hell + thegn) is simply translated as “devil”, which is poetically correct but literally wrong. The literal translation should have been rendered in addition to the poetic version (hell + servant), and the entry accompanied by a source reference or perhaps even a citation.

Admittedly not every dictionary can seek to provide the same level of detail as the Oxford English Dictionary, but given the ease with which these resources are now reproduced and shared across the Internet linguistic scholars are not doing anyone any favors to provide copies of such resources without pointing to more robust alternatives, or at least providing better information than their predecessors.

There are, in Clark Hall’s book, many compound words for which he provided a translation of “devil”. The meaning may be essentially true but the etymological footprint has been completely filled in with modern poeticism, a fallacy that may have been common to that era but it’s not one that should be forgiven in a 21st century reference, even if only a Website.

The Old English corpus that survives today extends to more than 3,000,000 words. This provides a rich sample of the vocabulary and idiom of literate Anglo-Saxon writers from several centuries. But the study of that corpus is restricted only to institutions that can afford to pay for access to the information. The armchair linguist is left to sift through a mirkwood of badly designed Websites that offer a mix of outdated public domain materials and personal essays or lexicons.

A word like helleðegn offers insight into the world-view of the person who compounded the two elements. It’s not like there wasn’t an Old English word dēoful (“demon, devil”). That word simply provides a name for a type of creature that fit the Old English imagination (actually, it was borrowed from Greek through Latin). But the compound helleðegn describes a creature in the terms that were related to the world of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes and other ancient Germanic tribes who believed in a place (hel, helle) that could have servants who behaved similarly to the followers of their own kings and princes.

The compound word may represent a blending of ideas that come from different sources (Judeo-Christian teaching combined with pre-Christian religious beliefs). A ðegn was not merely a servant or slave; he was, in fact, a free man who had sworn a special oath of service to a lord, a warrior. A helleðegn was thus not simply a servant of Hell but a warrior from Hell. Such creatures would have terrorized the mortal world — they would have been seen as monsters. Curiously, there is no surviving Old English word that is literally translated as (or the root of) “monster”. We have to borrow that word from Old French.

The fact that many Old English words that are associated with monsters — such as ælwiht, āglǣca, āglǣcwīf, draca, egesa, eoten, fīfel, fīfelcynn, fīfeldōr, helrūna, mare, nicor, orcnēas, and orcðyrs to name a few — mostly failed to survive into modern usage (we still have nightmares but they are bad dreams, not monsters) suggests that the modern English idea of “monsters” was heavily influenced by the Norman French and Church concepts; the Old English world-view, which embraced monsters as distinct beings who had their own places in the universe, has fallen away from the language for the most part.

Even J.R.R. Tolkien and his son Christopher — and those who follow in their footsteps through literary essays that attempt to explain Tolkien’s world — fall prey to the temptation to slip in a poetic translation for a word whose etymology does not literally support the translation. The metaphor is lost if it is not pointed out.

Another group of Old English words that are poorly treated are compounds built using dryhten. Although this word is translated as “king, ruler, prince” in most sources its etymology is traced to Proto-Germanic *druhtinaz, which is believed to have been derived from druhti-, “war band”. Hence, we have words such as dryhtenbēag (a payment made to a king for killing a freeman, perhaps one of his thegns), dryhtenbealu (“prince” + bealu, “bale: harm, injury, ruin, destruction, injury, evil, mischief, wickedness, malice, etc.”) which is translated as “great misfortune” by Clark Hall but may be better translated as “prince (of) harm”, dryhtendōm translated as “rule” but perhaps better translated as “prince(ly) state or power”, and dryhtenhold which combines “prince” with hold (“gracious, friendly, true, loyal”) and is simply translated as “loyal”.

The dryhten words are almost certainly reserved for warrior leaders and their followers and aspects of their relationships to each other and the rest of their societies. We have a modern word, captain, which may serve a similar purpose (“captains of industry”, “(military) captains”, etc.). The word captain is borrowed from Old French, thus representing another legacy of the Norman Conquest, but an easily understandable one since the old Anglo-Saxon aristocracy was suppressed or wiped out.

The Old English word heafod (“head”), which comes from the same root as captain (Proto-IndoEuropean *kaput-), has survived to this day (“head of the class”, “head of house”, “head of state”, etc.). Since the word was not used for military purposes its usage was not discontinued. The loss of Anglo-Saxon titles or poetic names for war-leaders simply implies that no such leaders survived the Norman Conquest, a fact attested to by known history.

Although we cannot say that the dryhten words represent institutions, they undoubtedly identified social conventions that gave rise to Anglo-Saxon institutions that were wiped out. And yet, you would not know this simply by looking at an older dictionary of Old English terms that translates dryhtenweard as “lord, king”. To a man living in Anglo-Saxon England the word probably meant something different, something more specific than “lord, king”. A dryhten was a lord. A dryhtenweard‘s role may have been to guard a lord or king, but he may have been a man of noble birth nonetheless.

The modern English word lord is traced to hlaford, which is typically translated as “master of a household” but assumed to derive from hlaf (“loaf (of bread)”) and weard (“ward, guardian”). Today’s English Lords are thus descended from men who guarded the food supply and their wives, the ladies whose original title, hlafæta, meant “loaf eater”. Maybe the history of the title “lord” is as ancient and noble as that of “steward” (sty + weard, “(pig)sty warden, guardian”).

It is probably no coincidence that Old English names and their modern equivalents for leaders and positions of responsibility are derived from ancient words for “head”, food, and war. Wars may have been fought over food sources going back tens of thousands of years; families, clans, and tribes would have looked to their leaders to defend them in war and to help ensure that everyone had food to eat. The Germanic/English word war appears to derive from Proto-Germanic *werso, believed to mean “to confuse, perplex”.

War is indeed confusing and perplexing. But then, so too is our study of language and history.