Volume 137, Issue 4

A recent resurgence of interest in Old Norse linguistic borrowings in Old English has greatly expanded our knowledge of the contact situation between these two speech communities in the early medieval period and beyond. However, there are a significant number of words that have been considered borrowings in the “other” direction, i. e. from Old English to Old Norse, which have not attracted the same amount of attention in current scholarship. Much of this material requires reassessment and this paper provides a case study of two parallel compound formations in both languages – OE bærsynnig [ mann ]/ON bersynðugr [ maðr ] (‘one who is openly sinful; publican’), and OE healsbōc /ON hálsbók (‘phylactery, amulet’, lit. ‘neck-book’) – that have traditionally been considered loan translations from Old English to Old Norse with little evidence other than their formation from cognate elements. In the absence of clear-cut linguistic criteria for identifying loan translations between these two closely related languages, this paper draws on a range of literary evidence to argue for a strong likelihood of a relationship between the two compounds. Both words offer important evidence for biblical translation practices, and contribute to our knowledge about the Christianisation of Norse speaking peoples and Anglo-Norse language contact in Viking Age England.

A special kind of a short text that is embedded in a larger text is the prayer near the beginning of St Augustine’s Soliloquia , which serves as a kind of introduction to the ensuing dialogue. The relatively independent nature of this prayer was recognized early on, and in addition to its transmission in the manuscripts of the Soliloquia it has also been transmitted as an independent prayer. Something similar happened to the Old English translation. There is a full translation of the entire text, traditionally ascribed to King Alfred (and his learned helpers), but preserved only in a much later manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv); however, a shortened version of the prayer was included in a collection of brief penitential texts in an earlier manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii). In the present article I look at the structure of the Latin prayer and at its Old English translation, especially the relation of the two manuscript versions and their value for textual criticism and the reconstruction of the original version, their relation to the Latin source, and the rhetoric of the Latin prayer and its Old English translation, including a brief discussion of the binomials used. The Appendix provides a synoptic version of the Latin text and the two manuscript versions of the Old English translation, highlighting their rhetorical structure, something that to my knowledge has never been done for the Old English translation.

Elusive and fraught with textual difficulties, Riddle 95, the ‘last’ of the Old English verse riddles preserved in the tenth-century Exeter Book, has long baffled modern readers as one of a handful of thorny items in the collection that have so far defied solution. ‘Book’ is the answer that has found most acceptance with critics in the past, yet the speaking subject of Riddle 95 is unlike anything described in those items of the collection that actually deal with writing and the tools of the monastic scriptorium. Rather, the linguistic and thematic parallels between Riddle 95 on the one hand, and the cosmological riddles and poems in the Exeter Book on the other, strongly suggest that the subject of Riddle 95 is the sun, a frequent topic of early medieval enigmatography. The poem obliquely relates how the rising sun installs itself in the sky to shed its welcome light upon the earth before it sets and vanishes from sight, completing its daily orbit along unknown paths. The main clues helping to secure the solution ‘sun’ are based upon what was known in Anglo-Saxon England about the solar course and the planetary motions, especially from the astronomical writings of Isidore of Seville and Bede. Further evidence is provided by several analogues in the Anglo-Latin riddle tradition, including the Enigmata of Aldhelm and his followers.

In the play The Dilemma of a Ghost and the short story “Something to talk about on the way to a funeral”, Ama Ata Aidoo addresses her concern for the loss of matrilineal traditions in Akan communities. Her works portray mothers-in-law who cannot exert their matrilineal role of selecting their daughters-in-law; instead it is their sons – representatives of the patriarchal traditions acquired since the colonial times – the ones who choose a wife without their mothers’ consent or awareness. This article will examine these women’s attempt to deal with dominant strategies and how their role transforms into that of surrogate mothers who leave aside the rejection of the community and / or their sons towards their daughters-in-law and embrace them in order to promote their acceptance and thus be able to maintain the matrilineal society they belong to.