The Adventure of English (3 page)

It is so moving. Spoken aloud the similarity is all but a twinning. Even there on the page: ure/our; Fæder/Father;
u/who; eart/art; heofonum/ heaven. And later:

Forgyf/forgive; gyltas (guilts)/trespasses.

Across thirteen centuries the sounds come to us, the sound of our ancestral voices speaking across time and space, words holding ideas and ideals about the conduct of life with which we still engage today, words in the English common tongue.

As if that were not enough, as the roots went down, English, with the self-confidence of the new player in the book, planted its claims to literature. When precisely works like
The Wanderer, The Seafarer
and
Beowulf
were composed is hard to establish, but that they came out of the intellectual ambitions of this period — seventh, eighth century — seems possible. English, settled now, began to play. The Exeter Book with its riddles gives us insights into the word games so beloved of English-language crossword solvers and Scrabble addicts ever since. The seeds are already there in what were so long mis-called “The Dark Ages.” This is from the sole remaining manuscript, in the library of Exeter Cathedral, which contains ninety-four riddles.

What is this?

The first four lines in Old English read:

Answer: The Shield

The greatest of the Old English poems (written around AD 900) is
Beowulf,
the tale of a Scandinavian hero who goes to the aid of Hrothgar, the Danish king, to defend him against the monster Grendel. It has been called the first great epic poem in the English language. It begins:

We are, yet again, hearing our own language, but this time through the art of the poet or poets using techniques which are the property of poetic literature. The language has been alchemised into literature.

Seamus Heaney's recent translation interprets the work for our own age while providing an echo of the original, which reads, speaking of Grendel the monster:

Heaney writes of Grendel:

Heaney has called this a “fully developed poetic language capable of great elaboration.” Its alliterative powers and percussive effects tend to overlay the subtleties. He finds it “terrific for action, terrific for description.” One point he made which seemed almost the clincher in Early English's claim to poetic greatness is its capacity to make up extra words: “ban-hus” — bone-house, for “body”; “gleo-beam” — glee-wood, for “harp”; “wig-bord” — war-board, for “shield”; “whale's-way” for “sea”; “wave-steed” for “boat.”

Between the Lord's Prayer, laws of the land, and
Beowulf,
English had already sunk deep shafts into written language. Latin and Greek had created great bodies of literature in the classical past. In the East at about this time, Arabic and Chinese were being used as the languages of poetry. But at that time, no other language in the Christian world could match the achievements of the
Beowulf
poet and his anonymous contemporaries inside and outside the Church.

Old English had found its home. It had fought its way to pre-eminence in a new, rich and diverse country. The adventure was under way.

But just as the springs of English had come from the shores of Friesland in the fifth century, so, in the late eighth century, a potential destroyer of the language was ordering his battle fleets in another tongue, five hundred miles to the north.

O
ne of the manuscripts of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for 793 reads: “In this year dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. There were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine immediately followed these signs, and a little after that in the same year, on the eighth of June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God's church on Lindisfarne.”

The Vikings were unloosed and for almost three centuries raids and settlements by these Scandinavian warriors devastated huge tracts of the English islands and threatened to supplant the language which had begun to show such astonishing promise. The Norwegians raided the northern and western rim of Scotland and flooded into Cumbria in the northwest of England. It was the Danes, though, who came with greatest force, their armies looting and then occupying substantial territories in the Midlands and in the east of the country. They were, as the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
pointed out, heathen, very effective on the battlefield and with no reason to abandon their own tongue, which came from the same root as English but had evolved into a different language. English was in danger of being overrun or exiled as the Celtic languages had been.

It is important to emphasise that when we use the word “English” we have to be careful. It is likely that some Celtic was still spoken and the mutually intelligible but differing dialects of the Germanic tribes were by no means unified. Yet we have, for example, our great and founding historian, Bede, calling his book
The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation
and that in itself, together with its early translation into Old English, is a strong indication that the fabric of a cohering language was in place. The Danes tore through that.

They ripped the jewels from the costly bindings of manuscripts like the Lindisfarne Gospels and wore them as ornaments. The Gospels themselves escaped, some would say miraculously. The year after they plundered Lindisfarne they returned and sacked Jarrow and burned down the great library which had nourished Bede. Despite some survivals, it was as if their raids were designed to stamp out that which had given the tongue its greatest opportunity for survival — the books. By the middle of the ninth century the Danes were the dominating force. In 865 they landed a powerful army in East Anglia and moved south for the final kill. In 878 they won what appeared to be a decisive victory at Chippenham. Wessex, the last of the old kingdoms, was set to disappear. Alfred, the leader of that English army, fled into the baffling marshes of Somerset, known as the Levels. He and his small group of survivors moved, according to a contemporary record, “under difficulties, through woods and into inaccessible places.” The Danes ruled. What they said went.

Alfred is the only English monarch to be known as “The Great.” He has been hailed as the Saviour of England. That may be debatable in the strict sense — there was not as yet one “England,” more a federation waiting to be moulded into one. Alfred can, though, lay claim to saving the English language. It is in one of his own translations — in the preface to Gregory's
Pastoral Care
— that one of the first appearances of the word “Englisc,” describing the language, is recorded. But Alfred not only saved the language, he dug it even more deeply into the minds of his people by using English as a rallying force and even more importantly as the conduit for an intense programme of education.

That, though, must have seemed impossible as the young king, disguised we assume, sat in the legendary cottage of the poor woman and dreamed away, only to be scolded for burning the wheaten cakes he had been set to mind. He had in defeat proved to be enterprising in irregular warfare and mounted guerrilla attacks against the occupying forces of Guthrum, the Danish invader.

He realised that guerrilla warfare would never be enough. To defeat the Danes he had to bring them to open battle. His army had been scattered and many had been slaughtered. But they were not wiped out. In the spring of 878, Alfred sent out a loyalty call to the men of the shire fyrds — the county armies, the basis of the great county regiments. About four thousand men joined him, mainly from Wiltshire and Somerset. We are told they were armed only with shields, battle-axes and throwing spears.

They mustered at Egbert's Stone, where trackways and ridgeways met. Two days later they advanced against the Danish army of about five thousand men, who had positioned themselves brilliantly on high ground at Ethandune (Edington, in Wiltshire) on the western edge of Salisbury Plain. Drumming their shields and led from the front by the young king, they stormed the heights. Contemporary accounts tell us that what followed was a rout, a slaughter of the Danes. Modern historians question that, but there is no doubt that Alfred and his men prevailed. His crown and his kingdom were repossessed. The Danes surrendered. Their leader Guthrum was baptised as a Christian, with Alfred in conciliatory attendance. A great white horse was carved into a Wiltshire hillside to commemorate the victory — undoubtedly a key victory for an emerging England and a crucial victory for English. Alfred had saved the language.

It is worth spending a few sentences on what might have been. The Danes were fierce and conquering tribes and had they occupied the whole of the land it is very likely that the final tongue would have come out of their dialects and not the “English” dialects. Would that have mattered? Very likely, yes, I think. Their written records were meagre compared with the traditions already well established in the rich lands they had all but overrun. Their basic attitude to written language was to burn it or, more helpfully for the future, toss it aside. And though their version of a Germanic dialect might over time have dug in, it would have taken centuries and who knows whether it would have held English's vital combination of deep obstinacy and, when faced with real extinction, astonishing flexibility and that vital survival technique, the power to absorb.

What happened to English after the Battle of Ethandune was that it not only endured, it thrived, it grew. Having held steady under fire, it moved forward. The two principal reasons for this were Alfred himself and what seems to me to be the profoundly self-preserving nature of the language which had so slowly and doggedly alchemised into English.

Sometimes I think that it is a pity that the Victorians dubbed Alfred “The Great.” It makes rather a nursery hero of him. He was much better than that. This is not the place to describe the full range of his achievements, but with regard to English his contribution was unique.

The Danes had been defeated but they were a persistent enemy. They would and they did come back again and again. Alfred had won a victory but the war was not over. He knew that the kingdom and tribes he now commanded were still wounded from the defeats they had suffered. They needed to feel safe, they needed to feel protected, they needed to feel part of a winning side. Alfred's use of the English language united them. He was the first but by no means the last to see that loyalty and strength could come through an appeal to a shared language. He saw that inside the language itself, in the words of the day, there lay a community of history and continuity which could be invoked. He set out to teach the English English and make them proud of it, gather around it, be prepared to fight for it.

He recognised that the Danes would not accept subjugation, nor did he have the manpower to enforce it. So he drew a line diagonally across the country from the Thames to the old Roman road of Watling Street. The land to the north and east would be known as the Danelaw and would be under Danish rule. The land to the south and west would be under West Saxon, becoming the core of the new England. This was no cosmetic exercise. No one was allowed to cross the line, save for one purpose — trade. This act of commercial realism would more radically change the structure of the English language than anything before or since. Trade refined the language and made it more flexible.

The Vikings had brought their own languages, particularly that of the Danes, but also the language based on the kindred Norwegians. Up to about AD 1000, these were pretty much undifferentiated and known as Old Norse. Deep inside the Danelaw they were attempting to impose this speech as much as they imposed their martial sovereignty. The interesting result was that, apart from the crucial matter of grammar, their success was rather limited. In its later phases, English became a language with an immense capacity to absorb others, to convert others, certainly to take on board other languages without yielding the ground on its own basic vocabulary and meanings. Yet here at this earlier stage — four hundred years later, since the Frisian tribes and others had transported the roots of English into the people who would bear that name — it was still surprisingly obstinate. Only about a score of Celtic words had been admitted; only about two hundred Roman words and, even now, from these overwhelming Danish invaders, no more than about one hundred fifty words were added to a national word-hoard of about twenty-five thousand. This was partly because the power was at Winchester and texts from all around the country were copied into the West Saxon dialect there. But also it is as if at this stage English had dug in so very deeply that it would not be moved. And the result of this obstinacy, in my opinion, made it so powerfully earthed that later, when the Normans came with far more devastating consequences, it could still feed off its deep taproots.

Nevertheless the Vikings — Danes and Norwegians — brought words which enriched the language greatly. In northern parts of England the new invaders' words predominate much more than in the south, exposing the north–south divide; and the accents too, from what linguists tell us — the Yorkshire, the Northumbrian, the Geordie, the Cumbrian — reach back to the sounds of the men in those longships whose peerless shipbuilding crafts enabled them to launch themselves as far as America and into the Mediterranean.

The Vikings live on most strikingly in the place names which spread like a rash over what was the land of the Danelaw. Locally it struck hard and has stayed fast. There are said to be at least one thousand five hundred of these names, more than six hundred of which, for example, end in “-by,” the Scandinavian word for farm or town.

I was brought up in the far north-west of England, a few miles outside the Lake District, a place of more than four hundred mountains and thirty-three lakes deeply settled by Norwegian Vikings, most of whom came across from their stronghold in Dublin. The words they brought were bedded into the local dialect for more than a thousand largely undisturbed years. To use “-by” as an example: within a few miles of the town in which I grew up, Wigton, there are Ireby, Thursby, Wiggonby, Corby, Lazenby, Thornby, Dovenby and Gamblesby; more widely known examples would be Derby, Naseby and Rugby. The “-thorpe” ending, which denotes a village, is seen in Scunthorpe, Althorp, Linthorpe. The “-thwaite” ending, which denotes a portion of land, is again all over the north, and in the Lake District alone you have Bassenthwaite, Ruthwaite, Micklethwaite and Rosthwaite; “-toft,” which means a homestead (the site of a house and its outbuildings), can be seen in Lowestoft, Eastoft, Sandtoft. And there are less popular but still extant Viking names: the word “valley” was “dale” in Old Norse, and the Lake District is furrowed with them — Borrowdale (a valley with a fort), Wasdale (a valley with a lake), Langdale, Eskdale, Patterdale. Sometimes there is a blend as in the Cumbrian village of Blennerhasset, “blaen” being Celtic top of hill, and the Old Norse “heysætr” — hay pasture. And Keswick, one of the prime towns in the Lakes, is a hardened form of the Old English name “cesewic” meaning cheese farm. But without the Viking influence it would most likely be called Cheswick or Cheswich. In short, the Danes pitched camps and named them as their own and with such emphasis that they still stand today.

Similarly, many Viking family names remain today, again much more emphatically in the north. The Danish way of making a name was to add “-son” to the name of the father. If you look in the local papers inside the old Danelaw you find these sons everywhere. At my own school there were Johnsons, Pattisons, Robsons, Harrisons, Rawlinsons, Watsons, Nicholsons, Gibsons, Dickinsons, Hudsons, Hewitsons, Stevensons. And it is still true that despite the centuries of people moving around these comparatively small islands, there are still markedly more shop names, “Harrison,” “Johnson,” “Wilkinson,” more sons, than in any other part of the country.

So they marked their places of arrival and they brought their names. The number of their words which entered into general use was not as many as the strength of the invasion might have promised. But as it were to compensate for that, many of them have become keywords. For instance, “they,” “their” and “them” slowly replaced earlier forms (though they did not enter the language of London until the fifteenth century). Early loan words include “score,” and “steersman” is modelled on an Old Norse word, but they could also spread into the common tongue with “get” and “both” and “same,” “gap,” “take,” “want,” “weak” and “dirt.” What is impressive is its ordinariness. Other Norse loan words include “birth,” “cake,” “call,” “dregs,” “egg,” “freckle,” “guess,” “happy,” “law,” “leg,” “ransack,” “scare,” “sister,” “skill,” “smile,” “thrift” and “trust.” The “sk” sound is a characteristic of Old Norse and English borrowed words like “score,” “skin” and “sky.” Other words from Old Norse include “knife,” “hit,” “husband,” “root” and “wrong.”