lexicology

My article, “Grass-Bed: A Poetic Compound in the Alliterative Tradition,” appears in Anglia. This article synthesizes the study of meter and the study of poetic vocabulary through a case study of one rare poetic word closely affiliated with the alliterative tradition from Old to Middle English. Here’s the abstract:

The compound word grass-bed occurs four times in Old and Middle English texts. In each case, grass-bed occurs in an alliterative poem; in each case, the word is used as a kenning for a site of bodily death (a battlefield or a grave). The chronologically and metrically uneven distribution of poetic words like grass-bed in the corpus of medieval English texts raises questions about the reliability of the extant written record, the historical resources of individual writers, and the cultural meanings of poetic traditions. Meanwhile, research in alliterative metrics has begun to suggest that the division of medieval English literary history into Old and Middle subperiods masks fundamental continuities between pre- and post-Conquest alliterative verse. Progress in alliterative metrics refocuses the historical problems attendant upon rare poetic words like grass-bed. Conversely, against the backdrop of technical argumentation in the field of metrics, the study of words offers a second way of understanding the continuity of the alliterative tradition. This article explores connections between metrical history and lexical history via a case study of one especially long-lived and metrically marked poetic word.

My note, “A Postdating of Throw ‘Time’ in Twelfth Night,” appears in Notes and Queries. It’s expected to be published in fall 2016. This note identifies the latest known instance of throw in the sense ‘time,’ in Shakespeare’s early seventeenth-century play. I teach Twelfth Night in Literature Core, and I noticed that editors of the play do not consistently catch Orsino’s pun on the word throw in Act 5. This prompted me to consult the Oxford English Dictionary, where throw ‘time’ was said to have disappeared in the early sixteenth century. Here’s an abbreviated version of the opening paragraph of the note:

In the final act of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1600-01), Duke Orsino rebuffs Feste’s third request for payment: ‘You can fool no more money out of me at this throw’ (V.i.32). The primary meaning of throw is ‘time’, from Old English þrag ‘time; season’. The secondary meaning is ‘throw (of the dice)’, playing on Feste’s dice metaphor (‘Primo, secundo, tertio is a good play’, V.i.29). This occurrence of throw ‘time’ postdates by almost a century the last citation for that meaning at Oxford English Dictionary Online, ‘throw, n.¹’, 1 (‘The time at which anything happens; an occasion’), from Gavin Douglas’s Eneados (1513).

a poetic compound

a postdating of throw ‘time’