Henry Bradley

“ It is surely the peasant Cædmon, and not any poet of literary and theological culture, who represents the transgression of Adam and Eve as an almost unavoidable error, deserving rather pity than blame, and who expresses his simple-hearted wonder that God should have permitted his children to be so terribly deceived. In the ‘Heliand’ touches of this kind are scarcely to be found. ”

“ Of Cædmon’s song Bæda gives a prose paraphrase, which may be literally rendered as follows:—“Now must we praise the author of the heavenly kingdom, the Creator’s power and counsel, the deeds of the Father of glory: how He, the eternal God, was the author of all marvels—He, who first gave to the sons of men the heaven for a roof, and then, Almighty Guardian of mankind, created the earth.” ”

“ It is a reasonable conjecture that the tales of victories over Grendel and the fiery dragon belong properly to the myth of Beaw. If Beowulf, the champion of the Gautar, had already become a theme of epic song, the resemblance of name might easily suggest the idea of enriching his story by adding to it the achievements of Beaw. At the same time, the tradition that the hero of these adventures was a son of Scyld, who was identified (whether rightly or wrongly) with the eponymus of the Danish dynasty of the Scyldings, may well have prompted the supposition that they took place in Denmark. ”

“ Here, at an early age, young Bertram obtained the post of English teacher in the school for naval cadets. Being keenly desirous of celebrity, he conceived at the of twenty-four, the idea of bringing himself into notice by means of a literary forgery. He selected as the victim of his imposture the celebrated Dr. William Stukeley, whose reputation for antiquarian learning, and manifest eager credulity, rendered him a suitable object for such a design. ”

“ Inasmuch as the Romans in Britain must often have found it necessary to erect towns or military stations in places that were uninhabited and had not native names, we might have expected to find that they often gave Latin names to these new foundations. As a matter of fact, names of Latin etymology are almost entirely absent from the lists of towns and stations given in Roman military documents. What the Romans usually did, when they had to find a name for a station in a place that had no native appellation, was to take the British name of the adjacent river, and use it as a place-name. ”

“ A class of words that has a certain affinity with slang, though admitting of being clearly distinguished from it, consists of those which are proscribed from the intercourse of reputable society because they express too plainly ideas that are deemed indelicate, or because they are brutally insulting. Such words share with slang the characteristic that they are ordinarily employed only in intentional defiance of propriety; they differ from it in being really part of the original vernacular, and not of an artificial vocabulary which is substituted for it. ”

“ In 1823 appeared his ‘Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar,’ which was the earliest work of its kind in the English language. Although this grammar showed no more scientific knowledge of the structure of the language than did the works of Hickes and Lye, from which it was compiled, it rendered important service in awakening amongst Englishmen an interest in the earliest form of their native tongue. In 1826 Bosworth published ‘A Compendious Grammar of the primitive English or Anglo-Saxon Language,’ which is an abridgment of the former work, with some improvements. ”

“ All his poetry was on sacred themes, and its unvarying aim was to turn men from sin to righteousness and the love of God. Although many amongst the Angles had, following his example, essayed to compose religious poetry, none of them, in Bæda’s opinion, had approached the excellence of Cædmon’s songs. ”

“ The essential point is that it does not, like the words of ordinary language, originate in the desire to be understood. The slang word is not invented or used because it is in any respect better than the accepted term, but because it is different. No doubt it may accidentally happen that a word which originates as slang is superior in expressiveness to its regular synonym (much as a nickname may identify a person better than his name does) , or that in time it develops a shade of meaning which the ordinary language cannot convey. ”

“ Now I hope to show some reason for believing that by the use of proper methods, the origin of our place-names may often be determined with a high degree of probability, and even with positive certainty. That the matter is not of the highest importance may be freely admitted; but as false local etymology has in the past been the source of a great deal of historical error, so sound local etymology may sometimes be a valuable help in the discovery of historical truth. ”

“ CALENIUS, WALTER (d. 1151) , is the name given by Bale to a person whom earlier writers mention only as ‘Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford.’ There is strong reason for believing that the designation ‘Calenius’ was coined by Bale himself, or at all events that it was invented in the sixteenth century. Among the scholars of that period ‘Calena’ (a misreading for Calleva or Caleva, which occurs in Ptolemy and Antoninus as the name of a Roman station now known to have been at Silchester) was commonly understood to be a Latin name for Oxford. ”

“ Since, however, we learn from Bæda that already in his time Cædmon had had many imitators, the abstract probability is rather unfavourable than otherwise to the assumption that a collection of poems contained in a late 10th century MS. contains any of his work. Modern criticism has shown conclusively that the poetry of the “Cædmon MS.” cannot be all by one author. Some portions of it are plainly the work of a scholar who wrote with his Latin Bible before him. ”

“ Technical and scientific terms may justly be stigmatized as slang when they are used pretentiously without any good reason, but not when they are chosen because, to those who understand them, they afford a clearer, more precise, or more convenient expression of the meaning than is found in the ordinary vocabulary. At the same time, it is true that every trade or profession has a real slang of its own; that is to say, a body of peculiar words and expressions that serve as flippant or undignified substitutes for the terms that are recognized as correct. ”

“ The vocabulary, then, which has to be used for the interpretation of the British place-names of the Roman period, is not that of modern or even of early Welsh, but is a vocabulary reconstructed by means of a comparative study of the Celtic languages. It would, of course, be absurd to suppose that the whole of the language of early Britain can be recovered by the inferential methods that I have described. In all probability the ancient language contained many words that have been lost both in Welsh and Irish ”

“ It is of course possible to hold that the story of the dream is pure fiction, and that the lines which Bæda translated were not Cædmon’s at all. But there is really nothing to justify this extreme of scepticism. As the hymn is said to have been Cædmon’s first essay in verse, its lack of poetic merit is rather an argument for its genuineness than against it. Whether Bæda’s narrative be historical or not—and it involves nothing either miraculous or essentially improbable—there is no reason to doubt that the nine lines of the Moore MS. are Cædmon’s composition. ”

“ On the other hand, there is no reason for rejecting the almost contemporary testimony of the first part of the Praefatio that the author of the Heliand had won renown as a poet before he undertook his great task at the emperor’s command. It is certainly not impossible that a Christian Saxon, sufficiently educated to read Latin easily, may have chosen to follow the calling of a scop or minstrel [1] instead of entering the priesthood or the cloister; and if such a person existed, it would be natural that he should be selected by the emperor to execute his design. ”

“ It is difficult to read the vivid and beautiful account given by Bæda without feeling that it bears in general the stamp of truth. The nearness of Bæda's place of residence to Streaneshalch would give him ample opportunities of obtaining information from persons to whom Cædmon had been intimately known, and the diligence which he bestowed on the collection of his materials must be evident to every student of his works. ”

“ It has therefore fallen into the hands of unqualified persons, for many of whom it seems to have an unaccountable attraction. Their usual procedure is to ransack the dictionaries of Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Welsh, and other languages, and if they can find words in any of these which bear some resemblance to the syllables of the name to be explained, and which, when joined together without the slightest regard to grammatical rules, can be made to yield something like a plausible sense, they imagine that they have solved the problem of its etymology. ”

“ On the assumption that the Anglo-Saxon ‘sacred epics’ are more or less based upon the songs of Cædmon, there is reason for believing that, with the marked exception of the ‘Exodus,’ they are in general greatly inferior to their originals. Their authors seem to have been men to whom religious edification was more important than poetry, and who often substituted a mere paraphrase of the scriptural text for the free and imaginative handling of the Northumbrian poet. ”

“ The varieties of slang that have their origin and currency in the reputable classes of society owe their existence partly to impatience with the constraint of ceremonious propriety of speech, and partly to the kind of esprit de corps which leads those who are associated in any common pursuit, or whose mutual intercourse is especially intimate, to take pleasure in the possession of modes of speech that are peculiar to their own "set." ”

“ The names left us by the Danes and Norsemen are of great historical importance, because it is from their evidence, aided by that of local dialects, that we can determine what parts of the country were most abundantly settled by those peoples. The ending -by, as in Derby, Whitby, is always the mark of a place once inhabited by Scandinavians; and so is the ending thwaite, which is the Old Norse thveit, a paddock. The word thorp, a village, was Old English as well as Scandinavian; but the Norsemen made more frequent use of it than did the English. ”

“ But the invention of new words of grotesque sound and ludicrously descriptive point is a favourite form of humour in America, and the freedom with which these coinages are used in many newspapers contrasts with the more sober journalistic style usual in England. Much of the current slang of America is used only in the land of its origin, and it is not uncommon to meet with newspaper articles of which an untravelled Englishman would hardly be able to understand a sentence, and on which the dictionaries of Americanisms afford little light. ”

“ Some scholars, moreover, have tried to prove that the dialect and versification are not precisely those of Cædmon's time. But our knowledge of early Northumbrian is so limited that it is impossible to attach much importance to these objections. We must either admit that the Cambridge manuscript gives the actual words which Bæda had before him, or we must suppose that some one took the trouble to render Ælfred's verses into Northumbrian spelling in order to insert them in the manuscript. ”

“ Fact is usually less entertaining than fiction, and for this reason false etymologies are to most people more attractive than true ones. An opinion which is widely prevalent, and sometimes frankly avowed, is that no certainty is attainable in the interpretation of place-names, and that therefore it is absurd to reject a pretty or amusing explanation merely because philological pedants, for some unintelligible reason, choose to assert that it is untenable. ”

“ We may reasonably infer from the statements of the 'Chronicle' that the Southumbrians, whoever they were, had revolted from Æthelred in 697, that in 702 they chose Coenred as their king, and that in 704 Æthelred was induced to yield up the kingdom of Mercia to Coenred. In 709, possibly owing to a reaction against the Southumbrian party, Coenred abdicated in favour of Æthelred's son Ceolred, and, in company with Offa, the young king of the East Saxons, went to Rome, where he received the tonsure, and spent the rest of his life in works of piety. ”

“ It is therefore only what might be expected that every public school and every university has its own elaborately developed slang vocabulary, and that there is also a good deal of slang that is common to schoolboys and to undergraduates in general. Even among persons of riper years there are many to whom ceremonious speech is unwelcome. The motive for the creation of slang is therefore widely diffused throughout all classes. Besides the general slang that is current among all who rebel against the laws of conventional decorum of language, there are innumerable special varieties. ”

“ Another point of difference between Old English dialects is that in the north the ending -es of the genitive had, at least as early as the tenth century, come to be often extended from the masculine and neuter nouns to those of the feminine gender. Hence, while the word gāt, she-goat, had in the south gāte as its genitive form, the modern name of the place called by Bæda Ad Caprae Caput is Gateshead. ”

“ Until 1844 ‘The Testament of Love’ was universally regarded not only as a genuine work of Chaucer, but as an authority of the highest value for the biography of the poet. In that year Sir Harris Nicolas proved that the supposed autobiographical statements were irreconcilable with the known facts of Chaucer's life; but he did not question the traditional view of the authorship, which was disproved by Wilhelm Hertzberg in 1866. The evidence of the acrostic, combined with that of the autobiographical allusions, leaves no possibility of doubt that Usk was the real author. ”