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the anglo-saxon rune poem

(note: i’m in a feeling about capitals and for the time being, i’m not willing to use them. it’s not hard to get used to
discerning full stops and if you’re anything like me you’ll find the whole feeling of the text much gentler on your
mind and psyche.)

the following sample shows the first verse of the anglo-saxon rune poem
interlinear with a typical, fairly free translation.

feoh byþ frofur fira gehwylcum;


wealth is a comfort to all men;
sceal ðeah manna gehwylc miclun hyt dælan
yet every man must share it freely,
gif he wile for drihtne domes hleotan
if he wishes for honour in the sight of the lord.

the assumption is that the language is primarily germanic influenced by


celtic and church latin. ‘feoh’ is assumed to be related to the english word
‘fee’, which once just meant money (in some old ballads for example). but
spelling used to be phonetic, and while ‘fe’ might recall ‘fee’, what of the o
and h. this spelling would have been based on a careful analysis of real
pronunciation of speech, and would have represented every sound produced
by the utterer and no sound that wasn’t, at least somewhere in the history
of this spelling – except in rare events which i need not detail here. so feoh
would have spelt a two syllable word ‘fe-oh’, with the h representing an
audible breathing at the least. more like modern english ‘fair’, pronounced
with what i as an australian would hear as a posh pommy1 accent.

but frofur? they’ve had to guess, if not for this text, for some earlier text,
and their guess has gone into the lexicons as official knowledge of the
language, forever after to shape or distort all subsequent translation
attempts. and in my opinion they’ve guessed wrong.

if you have false teeth (or if you haven’t, just imagine it) take them out for a
moment and letting your lips relax completely, try saying ‘proper’. ‘is that
the proper goose or just the propaganda?’ ‘is the proper propper propping up
the proper properties?’ ‘poppa’s purple popcorn parlour proposes the proper
propaganda’.

now look again at frofur.

now read on.

that drihtne means honour is also a guess, pure and simple. so are domes
= lord, and hleotan = praise. they are guesses without foundation.

worse still, ‘gehwylc’ which occurs also with a case-ending as ‘gehwylcum’ is


translated as ‘comfort’ in one place and ‘freely’ in another, with total
disregard for grammar, and both ‘fira’ and ‘manna’ are translated as ‘man’.

1this word has no unkind connotations in most australians’ vocabulary, as poms are
generally liked.
this is simply not an academically sound translation, but we seem to be
stuck with it. every student knows that his/her career depends on agreeing
with the existing scholarship and that it is exceedingly difficult for any
alternative theory to get a hearing among the professionals. existing
scholarship, conceited in its wisdom, is committed to the grammatical logic
it has derived by guesswork and which it then tautologically invokes to
make further translations.

it’s often true that any historian with a knowledge of a couple of germanic
languages (preferably dutch and danish), a couple of celtic ones, including
irish, good english and some french, an ear attuned to dialect difference and
a knowledge of how spelling sometimes reflects real speech and sometimes
doesn’t and a feeling for when it’s likely to and when it isn’t can enable you
to derive reasonable sense from the anglo-saxon texts using common sense
alone, while the traditional scholar’s attempts based on unrealistically
formalised grammar and lexicography based on such guesses as the above
and worse are often unconvincing and sometimes down-right nonsensical.

whether we err through excessive simplicity, or through over-sophistication,


naively or ‘conceited in our wisdom’, i argue that we get more sense out of
the simple method than the complex way.

let’s try simple substitution of the english word nearest in sound to translate
this poem. i’ll assume that the spellings are strictly phonetic. if there isn’t
one, i’ll leave it unchanged for now. i won’t be right in every case: ge isn’t
gay for example, but bear with me – things like that will be picked up and
corrected at the end.

feoh byþ frofur fir a ge hwylc-um;


fair be’s proper for a gay hwylc -um
sceal ðeah manna ge hwylc miclun hyt dælan
sceal there many ge hwylc miclun it dælan
gif he wile for drihtne domes hleotan
if he will for drihtne domes hleotan.

now i observe that three words, sceal, miclun, and drihtne are very close to
irish words, and as i know from wider reading that irish words are as often
to be found in old english texts as english ones are in irish texts, i’ll
translate them without a qualm:

feoh byþ frofur fir a ge hwylc-um;


fair be’s proper for a gay hwylc -um
sceal ðeah manna ge hwylc miclun hyt dælan
story there many gay hwylc students it dælan
gif he wile for drihtne domes hleotan
if he will for druids domes hleotan.

now it becomes possible to look at words which are not quite so close to
obvious english or irish equivalents: dælan and domes. these are still
recognisable english words if a dialect difference is noted: in some area the
hard t is softened to a d. so substituting we get:

and as for the rest, hwyl- can be while and mean ‘while away time’ or ‘a
while’ and the –c is a plural ending, and hleotan can carry both senses,
letters and loud, and mean ‘read aloud’.

feoh byþ frofur fir a ge hwylc-um;


fair be’s proper for a gay times -um
sceal ðeah manna ge hwylc miclun hyt dælan
story there many gay times students it telling
gif he wile for drihtne domes hleotan
if he will for druids tomes read aloud.

now we can interrogate the grammar: obviously ge is a prefix, not the


english gay as first seemed possible. although it’s spelt like the germanic
ge- it’s used like the irish go, since the –um ending of gehwylcum signifies a
plural noun. it can be left untranslated, and so can the –um, which is
implied by the preposition fir=for. the a is no longer a singular indefinite
article since the following noun is a plural, so it must either be a’=all, or part
of the preceding word – i.e., fira = for (see sp para). my guess is the latter.
for, as in dutch voor, looks like before, or in front of, especially since fira
means for. byþ can be is. and we can supply an indefinite article before the
singular noun, story. finally, since miclun is plural (irish mac leine (s) mic
leine (pl)) he must be they (and there’s nothing so variable from dialect to
dialect as the pronouns, so it’s anybody’s guess, and this is mine!). so it
now looks like this:

feoh byþ frofur fira gehwylcum;


fair is proper for time-passings
sceal ðeah manna gehwylc miclun hyt dælan
a story there many times students it telling
gif he wile for drihtne domes hleotan
if they will before druids tomes read-aloud.

let’s now consider the word-order. the first line is idiomatic enough. in the
second, the word order is reminiscent of cornish word order. where the most
interesting word in the sentence comes first: story, and it’s pronoun hyt
refers back to it. it’s actually two sentences, one without a verb, with the
verb to be understood: “a story there many times; students telling it, if they
want to read tomes aloud before druids.

in defence of my technique, i might say that the use of rules for translation
derived from texts written in a quite different dialect or even language, such
as is currently in vogue, is utterly unsound. the languages of the time are
very imperfectly understood and the chronology based on guesses as
dubious as those that supply the lexicography. the land was evidently a
land of schools and colleges, universities and monasteries, win which
learning from childhood to adulthood were prized.
a diverse yet structured education system is evident, and it produced
language change far more than modern schools do. it brought many
children of different backgrounds together to be educated in isolation from
the rest of the world, within a linguistic environment which is both artificial
and idiosyncratic. yet despite that fact that a tiny minority are educated in
any given population, one speaker can profoundly affect the speech of his
generation. a very elite school which has on its teaching staff a single
teacher with a speech defect, or who has a foreign accent, or no teeth, or
even an affectation, who takes the scholars for classes given in the school’s
preferred language, while other teachers teach in, say, latin, or in classes
where language is not so vital such as equestrianism, dancing and fencing,
may introduce a particular trait into the language such that the nobility
learns it, their retinues affect it, and it begins to be a mark of superiority,
such that the educated who use it begin to correct the ‘uneducated’ who still
use the correct forms. try saying “the proper propaganda is propagated
properly” with two fingers in your mouth. or if you have false teeth, take
them out and letting your lips flop, try it then. or if you have your own
teeth, try sucking in your lips in imitation of someone who has none and try
saying it then. then, if you’re not hearing yourself say frofur, i’ll go he.

to test the hypothesis underlying this translation method, let’s look at some
other verses of this famous poem (the anglo-saxon rune poem.) some
comments first. from other texts as well as this i take ur to mean fur or hair.
7 is sometimes the spanish y, sometimes shorthand for that, and sometimes
replaces the word seven or words pronounced like it, such as sewen and
means here sewn. this leads me to think that when it means that, it was
pronounced ‘ze wen’, or ‘the one’. as i take the n of hyrn to be a pre-vowel
form of hyr, meaning their, preceding ed (’ead) in my father but mine uncle
of not so long ago.

ur byþ mod 7 ofer hyrn ed


hair be’s mode the one over their head
felafrecne deor feohteth mid hornum
fallow-freck(le)-any deer faredeth with horns
maere mor stapa 7 is modig wuht.
mare great-topcoat the one is modish white.

in the last line, mor=irish m/or, meaning great, english more, cornish meur,
and stapa has the germanic s, remant of das, attached to tapa, which is the
same as top(per), meaning top-coat. it is related to tapestry, and the french
tapis, reflecting the weightiness and stiffness of the heavy furred animal
skins which were worn as a top garment.
fur is a fashion sewn over the head.
freckled fallow deer (that) runs(fares) with horns.
horse(-skin) great-coat that is fashionable white.
this verse has been translated as something like

aurochs is ferocious with huge horns


a very fierce beast, it fights with its horns,
a well-known moor-stepper, it is a courageous creature.

but the anglo-saxons wouldn’t have known about the aurochs.

another verse?

thorn byþ ðearle scearp degna gehwylcum


thorn be’s thoroughly sharp spikes with delays
anfeng ys yfyl, ungenetun reðe
bite is evil, un-ge-netun rather,
manna gehwylcum ðe him mid rest.
(for) many times, to them with rest

gewhylcum might mean delay.


degna is related to tig, a stick-like projection, like the spine of a hedge-hog,
which is still often called ‘tiggy’, and also to stick itself, and to twig and dig,
with –na = -ne, as a plural ending related to the modern english “any”. so
the translation is

thorn(tree) is very sharp spikes, for delays,


it’s bite is evil. unfavourable(not neat?) advice
with many delays, to rest with them.

this poem is usually translated something like:

thorn is very sharp, harmful to every man


who grasps it, unsuitably cruel
to every man who rests upon it.

you will see by now that my translations are at least as probable as those
currently in favour, and in many cases, much more so. you might like to try
my technique on the remaining verses of the poem and see what you make
of it. i don’t think existing versions can claim to have had the last word on
it!

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