Digressive book review: Old English and its Closest Relatives, by Orrin W. Robinson

For my birthday, aviva_m got me (inter alia) the book Old English and its Closest Relatives by Orrin W. Robinson. You might think this might make for rather dry reading, but that doesn't have to be the case: Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle-Earth, for example, captures the excitement of philologists in the nineteenth century when they realised they could resurrect the history of lost empires based on nothing more than linguistic traces, and their astonishment when, upon discovering a record from the late sixteenth century of Gothic spoken in the Crimea, the best part of a millennium after it had been thought to have gone extinct, the possibility was raised, incorrectly as it turned out, that Gothic had survived even to the present day.

Sadly, Old English and its Closest Relatives is indeed a bit dry compared to The Road to Middle-Earth, but it still has entertaining parts, such as the story of Thor and the Giant Skrymir, taken from the Prose Edda and presented as a reading in the original Old Norse, which reads rather like a Daffy Duck cartoon; or the following extract, from a discussion about the origins of Dutch:

Unfortunately, all that survives from the early period of Old West Low Franconian, beyond a great deal of onomastic material in Latin texts, is the following remarkable West Flemish sentence of the eleventh century, found in England in the binding of a Latin manuscript:

hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hi(c) (e)nda thu w(at) (u)ndidan (w)e nu
'All the birds have begun nests except for you and me—what are we waiting for?'

I've also found some interesting things following up references the book didn't give in full, but merely alluded to. For example, it talks about Gothic as the only well-attested member of the East Germanic group of languages. Presumably, I thought, this meant there was little more than personal names recorded of other members of the group, but a bit of poking around on Wikipedia revealed the following snippet of Vandalian (loosely referred to as "Gothic") embedded in a Latin text:

Inter “eils” Goticum “scapia matzia ia drincan!” non audet quisquam dignos educere versus.
Between the Gothic [cries] "Hail" and "Let's get [something to] eat and drink" nobody dares to put forth decent verses.

Another interesting tidbit that wasn't in the book is the earliest attested Germanic, which is an inscription in Etruscan letters on a bronze helmet found in Negau (Negova, Slovenia), dating to the period 450–350 BCE (but with the writing probably added in the second century BCE or later (up until the helmet was buried in ca. 50 BC, shortly before the Roman invasion of the area). The inscription reads (from right to left):

///
harikastiteiva\\\ip

It is conventionally interpreted as "Harigast the priest". What interested me about this discovery is how far Slovenia was from where the Germanic peoples were to be found at the time. Some time ago I reviewed the books Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon by Matthew Woodring Stover, which begin in Tyre in the thirteenth century BCE, when the city's bars are filled with Trojan War vets spending their whole time reliving their war experiences. The protagonist, Barra, is a Pictish mercenary brought there by Phoenician traders, who has teamed up with an Egyptian and an Achaean (Greek). Leaving aside the fact that (as I mentioned in my reviews) there were no Picts, or indeed Celts, at that time^*, and their ancestors (or at any rate, speakers of the language that would eventually evolve into Old Celtic) were all living on the Continent, I thought it dubious that someone from Britain could get as far as the eastern Mediterranean at that time.

* Taking "Celts" as corresponding to the La Tène archaeological culture, and anything further back as "pre-Celts".

Wikipedia, however, furnished evidence that the Phoenicians did get all the way to Britain (they were after the tin, the same thing that originally attracted the Celts); and the presence of a German mercenary serving hundreds of miles from his homeland in Slovenia makes the possibility of finding a Pictish mercenary in the Levant—a much greater distance, but with Phoenician trade routes available to take her the whole way—more believable for me.

Coming back to the Robinson book, one other thing that got me excited was the discovery that the few runic incriptions written in the oldest runic alphabet, the so-called Elder Futhark are not written in Old Norse as are Younger Futhark inscriptions, but rather in what appears to be proto-North/West-Germanic, the parent language of all the Germanic languages except Gothic (and the abovementioned other poorly attested East Germanic languages).

Really, though, it's ridiculous that I should get so excited about this. There's nothing mystical about a reconstructed unattested proto-language. We know lots of examples of attested proto-languages—for example, the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese and Romansch) are descended from Latin, but we don't get all excited about the thought of Latin, because we have hods of texts in it!

Anyhow, one thing reading the book brought home to me is how much not just English but German has changed since the time they separated. I'd previously been struck by how different English and German are nowadays, and had reflected on how much English had changed since the Anglo-Saxon period, putting a substantial degree of the blame on the Norman Conquest, but it turns out Old High German is equally incomprehensible to the modern German speaker (viz. aviva_m). In fact, all modern Indo-European languages that I am familiar with are very much worn down in their inflections and their vocabulary compared to two thousand years ago, to the extent that the commonality between different subfamilies is hard to spot. By contrast, looking back at the older forms really brings out their common Indo-European heritage: Seeing the older Germanic inflections (and even occasionally modern ones), or looking at, say, the grammar of Proto-Celtic brings out echoes of Latin. Which should not surprise me—it was European scholars having the same reaction to Sanskrit in the nineteenth century that led to the hypothesis of a parent proto-Indo-European language in the first place—but it's nice to see confirmation in languages I personally have been introduced to.

One final point: I was amused to see, in the last reading in the book—from the ninth-century Old High German text Muspilli—a reference to Middle-Earth:

muor varsuuilhit sih, suilizot lougiu der himil, mano uallit, prinnit mittilagart

(The) moor swallows itself, the heavens burn slowly with flames, (The) moon falls, (the) world burns

Of course, lots of Germanic languages used to refer to our world as "Middle-Earth"; probably the best-known being Old Norse (midgard). But even English used the name once, too. To give the final word to Tom Shippey in The Road to Middle-Earth, quoting a song recorded in the eighteenth century:

Middle-Earth itself survived in song even after people had forgotten what it meant:

Cocks are crowing a merry mid-larf,
I wat the wild fule boded day;