The first English, what we call Old English, is mostly impenetrable to us, athough there are numerous surviving words, in the core of Modern English, words like earth, wind, water, man, woman, friend, after, over, under. Here is a limerick JRR Tolkien made up: Dar fys ma vel gom co palt Hoc Pys go iskili far maino woc? Pro si go fys do roc de Do cat ym maino bocte De volt fact soc ma taimful gyroc! There was an old man who said How can I possibly carry my cow? For if I were to ask it to get in my basket It would make such a terrible row! If one is in the mood one can pick out stuff (e.g., Dar = there; maino = my, fact derived from the Latin facere, etc.) But the cool part is that Tolkien managed to get the thing to rhyme in Old English. The newly released (after decades) Tolkien translation of Beowulf adheres to the inverted syntactic approach of Old English. Meaning: Tolkien, who taught the language for years, did not convert Old English poetry to be restructured to read (and sound) like it was contemporary English. Look at the inversion of word order in this excerpt. Far beyond the hackneyed Yoda-like sentence structure. You can see the strong influence of our primal tongue (rich, complex) on his Rings and Hobbit narratives. Here, Beowulf and his men are returning from a journey by sea back to Geatland, which is now southern Sweden (Beowulf was king of the Geats). Note how the final arrival of the bark (boat) is told abruptly, in five short words: Forth sped the bark troubling the deep waters and forsook the land of the Danes. Then upon the mast was the raiment of the sea, the sail, with rope made fast. The watery timbers groaned. Nought did the wind upon the waves keep her from her course as she rode the billows. A traveler upon the sea she fared, fleeting on with foam about her throat over the waves, over the ocean-streams with wreathed prow, until they might espy the Geatish cliffs and headlands that they knew. Urged by the airs up drove the bark. It rested upon the land.
Posted on: Fri, 30 May 2014 19:59:10 +0000
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