Henry Bradley

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ RIDDLES (A.S. raedan, to interpret) , probably the oldest extant form of humour. They spring from man's earliest perception that there are such things as analogies in nature. Man observes an example of analogy, puts his observations in the form of a question, and there is the riddle ready made. Some Boeotian humorist, for example, detected the analogy between the life of humanity—the child on all fours, the man erect, on two legs, old age with its staff-on one side, and on the other the conception of an animal with a varying number of limbs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When seven years old the orphaned Beowulf was adopted by his grandfather king Hrethel, the father of Hygelac, and was regarded by him with as much affection as any of his own sons. In youth, although famed for his wonderful strength of grip, he was generally despised as sluggish and unwarlike. Yet even before his encounter with Grendel, he had won renown by his swimming contest with another youth named Breca, when after battling for seven days and nights with the waves, and slaying many sea-monsters, he came to land in the country of the Finns. ”

“ Cynewulf’s unquestioned poems show that he was a scholar, familiar with Latin and with religious literature, and they display much metrical skill and felicity in the use of traditional poetic language; but of the higher qualities of poetry they give little evidence. There are pleasing passages in Elene, but the clumsy and tasteless narration of the Latin original is faithfully reproduced, and the added descriptions of battles and voyages are strings of conventional phrases, with no real imagination. In The Ascension the genuine religious fervour imparts a higher tone to the poetry ”

“ Anse, the ear, is no doubt the Latin ansa, handle. In the 15th century and later the ranks of vagabondage were often recruited from the class of poor students, so that the presence of some words of learned origin in the vocabulary of the vagrant and criminal classes is not surprising. Among the prominent features of later French slang may be noted the use of the suffix mare to form derivatives such as perruquemare, a wig-maker, and the practice of rendering conversation unintelligible to outsiders by tacking on some unmeaning ending to every word. ”

“ However detrimental these redundancies may be to the poetic beauty of the epic, they add enormously to its interest for students of Germanic history or legend. If the mass of traditions which it purports to contain be genuine, the poem is of unique importance as a source of knowledge respecting the early history of the peoples of northern Germany and Scandinavia. But the value to be assigned to Beowulf in this respect can be determined only by ascertaining its probable date, origin and manner of composition. ”

“ As this William is said to have had an uncle named Orm, and probably owed his Norman name to a godfather belonging to the Amundeville family, it seems not unlikely that the author of the Ormulum and his brother Walter were his sons, named respectively after their father's uncle and his lord, and that they entered the religious house of which they had been made subjects.
The name Orm is Scandinavian (Old Norse Ormr, literally “serpent,” corresponding to the Old Eng. wyrm, “worm”) , and was not uncommon in the Danish parts of England. It occurs once in the book. ”

“ As a rule, every trade and profession, and every closely associated group of persons, has its own slang; indeed, there are probably few family circles that have not certain peculiar expressions used only within the household. It may be noted that some classes of workmen - printers and tailors for example - are more than others remarkable for the copiousness of their trade slang. The theatrical profession has in all countries an abundant vocabulary of sportively metaphorical and allusive words and phrases. ”

“ The conjecture that most naturally presents itself to those who have made no special study of the question, is that an English epic treating of the deeds of a Scandinavian hero on Scandinavian ground must have been composed in the days of Norse or Danish dominion in England. This, however, is impossible. The forms under which Scandinavian names appear in the poem show clearly that these names must have entered English tradition not later than the beginning of the 7th century. It does not indeed follow that the extant poem is of so early a date ”

“ All the Englishmen who wrote riddles in the 8th and following centuries, whether they wrote in their native tongue or in Latin, may be said to belong to one school, and their work has many features in common. But except in a few instances the riddles written in Old English are probably not less but more original than those written in Latin. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The first of these is that slang is a conscious offence against some conventional standard of propriety. A mere vulgarism is not slang, except when it is purposely adopted, and acquires an artificial currency, among some class of persons to whom it is not native. ”

“ Similarly, the prize-ring, the turf, the gaming-table and all the varieties of "fast" and "Bohemian" life have their own eccentric vocabularies, partly identical with, and in general character altogether resembling, the slang of the criminal and vagrant classes. In the second place, a little consideration is sufficient to show that thieves' cant is only one species of an extensive genus, its specific difference consisting in the unessential circumstance that its use is confined to one particular class of persons. ”

“ Beowulf, with fourteen companions, sails to Denmark, to offer his help to Hrothgar, king of the Danes, whose hall (called “Heorot”) has for twelve years been rendered uninhabitable by the ravages of a devouring monster (apparently in gigantic human shape) called Grendel, a dweller in the waste, who used nightly to force an entrance and slaughter some of the inmates. Beowulf and his friends are feasted in the long-deserted Heorot. At night the Danes withdraw, leaving the strangers alone. ”

“ The hypothesis that Beowulf is in whole or in part a translation from a Scandinavian original, although still maintained by some scholars, introduces more difficulties than it solves, and must be dismissed as untenable. The limits of this article do not permit us to state and criticize the many elaborate theories that have been proposed respecting the origin of the poem. All that can be done is to set forth the view that appears to us to be most free from objection. ”

“ There are other points of contact between Beowulf on the one hand and the Scandinavian records on the other, confirming the conclusion that the Old English poem contains much of the historical tradition of the Gautar, the Danes and the Swedes, in its purest accessible form.
Of the hero of the poem no mention has been found elsewhere. But the name (the Icelandic form of which is Bjōlfr) is genuinely Scandinavian. It was borne by one of the early settlers in Iceland, and a monk named Biuulf is commemorated in the Liber Vitae of the church of Durham. ”

“ It must be confessed that Orm often forgets his own rules of spelling, and although hundreds of oversights are corrected by interlineation, many inconsistencies still remain. Nevertheless, the orthography of the Ormulum is the most valuable existing source of information on the development of sounds in Middle English. ”

“ As thus defined, slang includes many varieties of speech, which are current respectively among different sections of the population. The one, however, which most perfectly answers to the definition, and may be regarded as the primary type, is the artificial jargon, partly cryptic and partly facetious, used by vagrants and professional thieves. It is true that the name of slang is now seldom applied to this jargon ”

“ From the 17th century onwards it has been more and more difficult to distinguish between the cant of thieves and vagrants and the slang of other classes more or less characterized by disorderly habits of life, such as pugilists, the lower orders of strolling players, professional gamblers and persons of all ranks addicted to low pleasures. Many words that were once peculiar to the outcasts from society are now in general slang use. ”

“ The criticism of the Old English epic has therefore for nearly a century been justly regarded as indispensable to the investigation of Germanic antiquities.
The starting-point of all Beowulf criticism is the fact (discovered by N. F. S. Grundtvig in 1815) that one of the episodes of the poem belongs to authentic history. Gregory of Tours, who died in 594, relates that in the reign of Theodoric of Metz (511–534) the Danes invaded the kingdom, and carried off many captives and much plunder to their ships. ”

“ The English word has, in cant speech, certain applications to matters other than those of language; and although these have not been found recorded at any very early date, they may possibly be old, and may contribute to the determination of the primary sense. ”

“ The slang current in the orderly portions of society, in England at least, does not present many insoluble puzzles of etymology, the words of obscure origin being for the most part such as have been imported from a lower level. ”

“ Although it often happens that words belonging to the more reputable kinds of slang undergo some improvement in status - acquiring some degree of toleration in refined circles where they would once have been considered offensive - there are few instances in which such a word has come to be regarded as unexceptionable English. ”

“ ORM, or Ormin, the author of an English book, called by himself Ormulum (“because Orm made it”) , consisting of metrical homilies on the gospels read at mass. The unique MS., now in the Bodleian Library, is certainly Orm's autograph, and contains abundant corrections by his own hand. On palaeographical grounds it is referred to about A.D. 1200, and this date is supported by the linguistic evidence. The dialect is midland, with some northern features. ”

“ In the Heliand the Saviour and His Apostles are conceived as a king and his faithful warriors, and the use of the traditional epic phrases appears to be not, as with Cynewulf or the author of Andreas, a mere following of accepted models, but the spontaneous mode of expression of one accustomed to sing of heroic themes. The Genesis fragments have less of the heroic tone, except in the splendid passage describing the rebellion of Satan and his host. ”