linguistics

My short essay, “The Meter of Widsith and the Distant Past,” appears in Neophilologus. This essay mobilizes metrical and linguistic evidence in order to dispute the possibility that any portion of the Old English poem Widsith was composed before the migration of the Angles and Saxons to Britain (adventus Saxonum). In so doing, this essay seeks to ground the modern editorial definition of ‘text’ in verse history. Here’s the abstract:

In a recent article in this journal, Leonard Neidorf argues for a seventh-century date for the Old English poem Widsith, while countenancing the possibility that one portion of the poem was composed before the migration of the Angles and Saxons to Britain (adventus Saxonum). The present article disputes the possibility of a pre-adventus date for this and other portions of Widsith. Metrical considerations tend to contradict such an exceptionally early dating, with ramifications for the categorization and interpretation of the poem as a whole. After reviewing the pertinent metrical evidence, this article argues that the available metrical form of Widsith is the essential feature by which the poem, whenever and wherever it was composed, can be recognized as ‘the poem’ in the first place. This article concludes that Widsith is not an ancient poem from a pan-Germanic distant past, but an encyclopedic Old English poem that turns inherited vocabulary to its own rhetorical purposes.

My note, “A Plea for Pronunciation,” appears in a special issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART) devoted to Old English pedagogy, edited by Haruko Momma and Heide Estes. This special issue of SMART (22.2, 2015) grew out of a 2012 workshop at New York University. Here’s the opening paragraph:

The correct pronunciation of Old English is an essential skill. “Correct” here refers to an internally consistent approximation of the sounds of the language as reconstructed by historical linguistics and attested by scribal orthography. The present note confines itself to the West-Saxonized koiné used in most Anglo-Saxon literary manuscripts. Many new students and some professors of Old English seem to be of the opinion that pronunciation is an arcane and at any rate artificial reconstruction, a distraction from the larger literary-historical or aesthetic questions to which Old English literature is usually subjected. However artificial it may be, correct pronunciation equips the inner ear to apprehend Old English literature in something approaching a fluent mode. Without a sense of the language as language, students can only regard the literary monuments as composed of so many sequences of letters to be laboriously matched, one by one, to corresponding sequences in a dictionary. There are at least five good reasons to teach correct pronunciation.

The note concludes by providing four resources for further study of the pronunciation of Old English, which I reproduce here:

Baker, Peter S. “Pronunciation.” The Electronic Introduction to Old English.

Barney, Stephen A. Word-Hoard: An Introduction to Old English Vocabulary. 2d ed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985.

Hasenfratz, Robert, and Thomas Jambeck. Reading Old English: A Primer and First Reader, 7-25. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2005.

Weiskott, Eric. “Precepts,” recording read aloud in Old English to accompany Jay Parini, “Precepts.” In The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, ed. Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, 231-37. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

meter and the distant past

a plea for pronunciation