Band 135, Heft 2

This paper is designed to show how difficult it is for us in the twenty-first century to establish a valid response to the superlative of adjectives as used in Old English verse. In contradistinction to the monochromatically excessive use of superlatives in modern advertising, the distribution of superlatives is very varied in the English verse of more than a thousand years ago. The first part of the paper consists of a general survey of Old English superlatives, chiefly in the vernacular verse of the Anglo-Saxons, but their prose has not been wholly neglected. The study is evaluative, more so than is usual in sober Linguistics; to this purpose the superlative degree and its statistics contribute to an understanding of the triumphant ending of Beowulf , and grammar is to be seen as the handmaiden of literature. The second part of the paper is more literary, and is based on the incidence of superlatives as presented in the first part. The density of superlatives in the opening of the minor poem Maxims II is observed, without any reasoning for that density. The density of rare superlatives in the last lines of Beowulf is admired for its aesthetic quality, brought out in Edwin Morgan’s poetic rendering of the poem. It is not forgotten that the rarity of a superlative in the extant verse may be because we cannot know if it would have been less rare had more verse survived. The reading of poetry must, if worthwhile, involve an aesthetic response. The paper, at the same time as exercising that response, stresses our insecurity when we respond to Old English poetry.

This article draws attention to a series of seven English annotations in a mid-twelfth-century copy of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica from Bury St Edmunds. It demonstrates that the annotations reflect the comparison of Bede’s Latin with a now-lost manuscript of the Old English Bede shortly after the twelfth-century codex’s production. The annotations are shown to hold a respect for the authority of the Old English Bede that contrasts with the prevailing twelfth-century attitude of gentle suspicion towards earlier vernacular translations.

This article is an attempt to determine possible factors that affect the arrangement of a name and the title king in apposition in the transitional period from Old English to Middle English from a prosodic perspective as a first step to explain how preferred patterns have shifted from the types represented by Alfred King , the King Alfred and Alfred the King in Old English to almost exclusively the type represented by King Alfred in Present-Day English. Contrary to the common and generally sensible judgment of avoiding poetic texts in a syntactic investigation such as this, the present study analyzes the two extant versions of Laȝamon’s Brut , an Early Middle English metrical chronicle, on the grounds that verse may serve a better purpose than prose when intonation and rhythm are centrally involved, as is the case with this study. Use of searchable large-scale electronic corpora may at first glance seem more suitable for research of this kind, but such studies involving multiple texts of different periods, places and types are prone to oversimplification, and crucial details may be missed or glossed over. For a more detailed and coherent account of the development of appositive constructions, this study provides an in-depth analysis of the linguistic situation in a single body of closely related texts.

Most of the Norse legal and administrative terms attested in Old English were replaced by equivalents from the French superstrate soon after the Norman Conquest, whereas a remarkable number of more basic terms are known to have become part of the very basic vocabulary of modern Standard English. This paper focuses on Norse lexical loans that survived during and beyond the period of French rule and became part of this basic vocabulary. It explores (1) the regional and textual conditions for the survival of such loans and (2) their expansion into late medieval London English and into the emerging standard language. Based on selective textual evidence it is argued that they were not quite as basic originally, that they typically survived and developed in regional centres far away from the French-dominated court, and eventually infiltrated the area in and around late medieval London owing to its growing attraction as an economic and intellectual centre. Both the survival of Norse loans and their later usage expansion are shown to be in harmony with the principles of comparative contact linguistics.