982. Delve into the fascinating world of Old English with medievalist Hana Videen, author of "The Deorhord." We'll uncover the secrets of Old English animal names, from "walking weaver" for spider to the ominous "unland" for a whale's deceptive island.
982. This week, we delve into the fascinating world of Old English with medievalist Hana Videen, author of "The Deorhord." We'll uncover the secrets of Old English animal names, from "walking weaver" for spider to the ominous "unland" for a whale's deceptive island.
Find Hana Videen at https://OldEnglishWordhord.com/
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/videen/transcript
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Mignon: Hey, it's Mignon. Today's show is the third in a series of interviews called Grammar Girl Conversations that I'm doing with my favorite people — authors, linguists, dictionary editors, and more. Today, medievalist Hana Videen, author of "The Deorhord," will tell us about delightful Old English words like "airworm," "walking weaver," "heaven candle," and the origin or fire-breathing dragons. Enjoy the show.
Mignon: Hana, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Hana: Thank you so much.
Mignon: Yes. So, I loved, I love your work and the Wordhord, your daily Old English word and "The Deorhord" is your new book. So delightful. And I can't wait to talk about the animals, but also I would like to use it as a bit of an excuse to talk about Old English. I know you have a PhD in Old English from King's College, London. And can you start by just telling us, I think there's a lot of confusion about what Old English is or when it was spoken. So maybe just orient us that way before we get completely into your book.
Hana: Sure. So a lot of people think that Old English is the language that was spoken around the time of Shakespeare, and that English is old and different from the language we speak now, but it's actually still early Modern English. And going back further to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," sometimes people think that, that's Old English, but that's actually Middle English, which is still fairly readable to, by modern English readers, but then if you go back further to the language that was used in England between around 550 to 1150, that's Old English, and that's quite a bit harder to read and understand, even if you're fluent in modern English.
Mignon: Yeah, it is really so different. I’m sure you don't know this, but your Daily Wordhord is an essential tool for me to put together the Grammar Girl podcast, because whenever I see an Old English word, I don't know how to pronounce it. And so I always go to your site or your app and look up, first, I try to find that word, because you have the best source for pronunciations I've ever found.
And if you don't have the word I'm looking for, then I'll look for words that are spelled similarly and try to figure it out on my own. So, I mean, it really, it really is, Old English is so, so different. Um, yeah. And, you know, one thing that surprised me in your book is you mentioned how few Old English written sources exist. I had no idea it was so little. Can you talk about what exists and the sources you used to put together "The Deorhord"?
Hana: Sure. Yeah. Yeah, the linguist David Crystal says that there is around — if you were to sort of put all of the Old English texts into terms of novels, like medium-length novels — there would be around 30, which really doesn't sound like very much at all.
Mignon: So little.
Hana: Surprisingly, I still haven't read all of the Old English sources. There's a lot to get into in each of the sources. So, it still keeps you busy. And there's around 35,000 Old English words that we know of. So yeah, the sources that I use in both of my books are a combination of poetry and prose. Most of the Old English texts that you study in school now are poetry. The most famous being "Beowulf," which is the longest that, the longest text that we have. But there's actually a lot of other really interesting ones. There are saints' lives, there are homilies and sermons, there are leech books, which are medical remedies.
Mignon: I love that name.
Hana: Some curses, like curses and prayers and…
Mignon: Curses?
Hana: Yeah, there's a, there's a few curses in there. Not curses like curse words, but saying basically anyone who goes against my word in this charter or this book, like who steals my book, whatever is going to be cursed, that kind of thing. But yeah, so there's, yeah, there's quite a variety of different things to look at.
Mignon: That's amazing. And the … I was saying "leech book" is one of, one of the words that I thought was delightful. One thing that I think is just delightful and poetic sounding about Old English in general is all the compound words. You know, you have "airworm" for spider and "fierce swallow" for hawk. That is just delightful. "Cornhouse" for grainary and "people troubles" for tribulations were all things you mentioned in your book. You know, can you talk about sort of the compound, the nature of all the compound words and why they have so many compounds that we don't have today?
Hana: Yeah, sure. Well, the compound, there's a variety of compound words. Some of them are, are particularly special. They're called kennings, which are kind of like riddles as well. So, for instance, you have words like "sky candle" or "heaven candle," "heofon-candel," which refers to the sun, and so "heaven" by itself doesn't mean sun, "candel" by itself doesn't mean "sun," but together their meaning means something else.
Same with the word for body you have "bān," words like "bān-hūs," which means "bone house," literally. And ones like, one of my favorites is the one for spider, which is "gange-wæfre," which is the "walking weaver." It's a great riddle, sort of riddling word to make you think, well, what kind of animal would that be? So yeah, you find so many of those in Old English.
They were common in Old Norse poetry as well, these kennings. And yeah, the compound words, you just find such a variety of different words in the poetry, especially, although you don't know how often they were used in everyday speech. That's the one catch.
Mignon: Right. So when did we stop calling the sun, the sky, "heaven candle" and start calling it "the sun" and so many other compounds that we've lost too?
Hana: Well, the thing is, we also, the word “sunne” also existed in Old English at the same time that “heofon-candel” existed. So, it wasn't that there wasn't a word for sun that was very similar to the one we use now, but there were these additional words that you could use when you're writing poetry. The poetic compounds are also really helpful because in Old English, poetry works by alliteration.
So if you were trying to write a poem and you wanted to talk about the sun, but you were trying to alliterate with H, then you could use a compound like “heofon-candel” instead of just saying “sunne.” But you, but you tend to find those more interesting compounds in poetry for that reason, and if you were looking in more sort of prosaic texts, you would see words like "sunne" instead.
Mignon: Nice. And, and "deorhord" itself is a compound, right?
Hana: "Deorhord" is a compound, although it's one I made up for the sake of this project. I use "deorhord" as a play on "wordhord," which is a real Old English compound. So, "wordhord" in Old English is poets’ sort of storage or arsenal of words that they drew on when they were composing poetry. There's a lot of the poetry might've been spoken orally, and it's nice to have some words and phrases just packed away in your brain to pull out when you need them. So that was what, that's what a “wordhord” is. And that's the title of my first book. My second book I was focusing on animals. So I created in my own compound for animals using the word for animal “deor” and “hord” to create what I, I thought was a good word for a bestiary, an Old English bestiary, since one doesn't exist.
Mignon: And a "deo" is the word for animal?
Hana: "Deor."
Mignon: "Deor."
Hana: Yeah, "deor," yeah.
Mignon: Deor. But isn't it also deer?
Hana: So it wasn't at the time. So now, um, it's a phenomenon called semantic narrowing. When you have a word that means something a lot more broad and general, like "deor" used to mean "animal," but then over time its meaning narrowed until it just meant a specific type of animal. So a deor, back in around the 10th century could have been a whale. It could have been a fox. It could have been all kinds of different critters. Um, but yeah, and there were other words to use for deer.
Mignon: I see. So I've heard it said that back then every animal was called a deer, but that's not really accurate. It's more that the meaning of the word has narrowed since then.
Hana: Yeah. Yeah. You get that with other words too. Like, the word "læc" is, in Old English, it means "plant or herb," and it's a general word for herb or plant, but now a leek is a specific type of vegetable that we have. So, you get that for other types of words too, not just animals.
Mignon: That's so fascinating. And, and you mentioned the whale. So in your book, "The Deorhord," the whale, I was so surprised to find out that the whale was evil. Tell us about the evil whale!
Hana: I know, I love the whale. Yeah, yeah, he's, the whale is not what you sort of expect for the, the baddie of literature. I don't know, I think. The serpent and the wolf, the dragon, those are less surprising, but the whale, you think, “What did a whale do to anyone?” But in Old English, and actually in a lot of other, sort of stories from folklore in different parts of the world, there are these creatures that are, they're whales, but they pretend to be islands. And so, a whale might sit so still just with its back on the surface of the water that trees and plants start to grow on it, and sailors come along and think, oh, that's a nice place to land, and they land on the whale's back, start making camp, building a fire, and then the whale carries them down to the bottom of the sea, and they all drown.
So, yeah, and this particular animal is associated with Satan, who sort of tempts you to follow, to follow him in a way, and then you are eventually dragged down to hell. So, yeah.
Mignon: Amazing. And, and that word that, another word that jumped out for me in that section, in that section was island, that it was "unland." Is that?
Hana: Oh, that word actually. Yeah. "Unland" is an island. Um, the, the land, the, the word "unland" refers specifically, it's, it's kind of a weird compound that doesn't appear in other places. It means "false land." So, it refers specifically to this false island of the whale, which, so yeah, it's like the negative of land, but people think it's land. Yeah.
Mignon: Interesting. Yeah. And then, the other thing, so talking about the, the whale and the, the mouth. So, the section on dragons was also really interesting in that I was surprised to hear that although they have existed in literature from the fifth millennium BCE in China, that you said "Beowulf" was maybe the first time there was a fire breathing dragon. And, and why was that?
Hana: Yeah, that was something that surprised me too when I was doing my research. I didn't know that before. And, yeah, it seemed really surprising. But it seems like the fire breathing dragon kind of, like, the earliest example you see is in "Beowulf" with that fire breathing dragon, and sort of the theory about it is that the hellmouth became an important sort of metaphor and symbol at the time.
And the hellmouth is portrayed in medieval manuscripts as a beast's mouth, sometimes like a dragon's mouth, with lots of teeth and like hellfire coming out of it and people getting thrown in by devils. And so that image might have also contributed to this idea that the dragon who's associated a lot with Satan could also have fire breathing because of the association of hellfire to hell and Satan. So yeah, it's, it's an interesting, yeah, an interesting, sort of, I think it's a strange sort of surprise that the fire breathing dragon hasn't been around for longer.
Mignon: Yeah, I would have thought so. And, then…
Hana: Listeners, reach out if you know of a fire breathing dragon that's earlier, but yeah.
Mignon: Definitely, we'd love to hear about it!
Hana: Yeah.
Mignon: And then, you know, there was, there was something in the dragon section and also in, I forget what section now, but it jumped out at me that you know, there was, there are words from "Lord of the Rings" and words from "Harry Potter" that were jumping out that were, were from these earlier words that if you didn't know, you wouldn't have thought of it. But then once you see it, you're like, “Oh, that makes so much sense!” Like, can you talk about some of those words?
Hana: Yeah, I've heard "Lord of the Rings" described as a gateway drug into Old English because of the sort of fascination that Tolkien had with Old English. He was a, he was an Old English professor at Oxford, and so he was very much interested in, in the Old English language and he uses it all the time and his writing, using it for names of people and places and, so yeah. Like, the word “Mordor” is English for "murder," and you get other things like that, um, but yeah.
Mignon: Sauron's Tower?
Hana: I’m trying to think, Orthanc. Yeah. So yeah, Orthanc in Old English is a skillful contrivance or, um, so it's, he's sort of known for his industrial building and destroying of nature and like doing wicked things that way.
So a name like skillful contrivance for his tower makes sense. It's rather fitting.
Mignon: Old English, it's Latin, but, uh, Latin for dragon is “draco.” So…
Hana: Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah. And the Old English word, well, there's a few words for "dragon" in Old English, but the one that sort of definitively means "dragon" is also taken from Latin. It's “draco,” but it was just borrowed from Latin. There's another word, “wyrm,” which is. It's used more frequently than “draco,” but it is a little less specific. It could refer to earthworms, as well as dragons, and snakes, and, yeah, creepy crawlies in general.
Mignon: Yeah, like the spider that you like is also referred to as "the airworm."
Hana: Yeah, yeah, different, so yeah, wyrms are more general.
Mignon: Yeah, yeah. An interesting thing from the spider section that I especially liked was the story of why we call it a cobweb.
Hana: Right, right, so, yeah. So the word, um, the spider used to be called "coppa" and "attor-coppa" also, which is, there's a coppa, the "coppa" part could either refer to a head, so it could be in something like "poison head," or it could mean something like "poison vessel." It's sort of not really known exactly where that, that part of it comes from, but yeah a "cobweb" comes from that "coppa" in Old English.
Mignon: So it's sort of the surviving remnants of that other name for spiders in Old English and, and that's where we…
Hana: The cobwebs of the word, I guess. Yeah.
Mignon: Right. Yeah. And so then the other thing, you know, of course, farming was so central to life back then, all the words for a farmer. My absolute favorite was “earthling.” So a farmer was called an "earthling." How does that make sense?
Hana: I know. I love, I love that one too. Our word “earthling” that we have in sci-fi stories is not derived from that "irthling," but there was a word in Old English "irthling." "Irth" refers to plowing, so an "irthling" is a person who does the plowing.
Mignon: That's fabulous. I just, I just love it so much. And then, um. Yeah, they also were called an “acre person” and an “earth tiller.” Oh, and then cow. So talk about how important the cow was.
Hana: Sure. Yeah, the cow. Yeah, there are so many "cow" words that we don't have in modern English. One of my favorite is "cū-wearm," which means "cow warm." And it refers to the temperature of milk that's straight from the cow, which is something that would make sense if you live in a farming community. But not when you get your milk from the store all the time, you aren't sort of conscious of what, how hot, how warm milk would be. You'd be more familiar with fridge-cold milk or something like that. So there's fun words like that. Um, and the word "feoh" in Old English is, well, it's the first letter of the runic alphabet for one. And so it's an important letter, but it also means, it means "cattle or cow," and it also means sort of possession or wealth. So, the same word was used for, for both things, and that gives you an idea of how important and how valuable a cow would be.
Mignon: Right? Our, our current word for "fee," like a, an amount of money that you pay comes from "feoh," the name for a cow. That's amazing. It's very cool. And, oh, talk about the name, the name for the month of May that, that was um…
Hana: All right, that's uh, the Three Milk Month, right? So, "thrimilcemonath" literally means “three milkings month” and we don't know for sure if this is the truth, but Bede among other medieval scholars were saying, well, this is, this is why it was called that it was because it was a time of such plenty. There was grass everywhere and the, the cows could graze all day, so, and produce so much milk that he would milk the cows three times in a day, and that's why it was called Three Milk, Three Milkings Month.
Mignon: Yeah, it's just, it's
Hana: Whether that's true, I don't know.
Mignon: Such a great example of the centrality of farming and, and caring for the animals. Uh, you know, the, the month would be named after how many times you milk a day, in a day.
Hana: You get that with other months, too, like Harvest Month (Hāligmōnath) is September, and that's the month where you do harvest, and Weed Month (Wēodmōnath) is August, and it means "weed month," and it's the season of weeding, so.
Mignon: The worst season of all.
Hana: I know, I know, I, my birthday's in August, and it's sort of a disappointment that I was born in weed month, but, whatever.
Mignon: And going back to the runes, actually, another thing that surprised me, you know, I knew about the runic alphabet, but I didn't know that the, the runes could represent concepts or words as well as just single letters. Can you talk about that element of Old English?
Hana: Yeah, so like in modern English, we have the letter A, and it's written with a certain character, and when we see it, we know it is the letter A, and it makes an A sound, but we don't have an association of A with anything in particular. A, the word A doesn't mean anything other than the letter, but in Old English, a word like "feoh" is … you see it, and you know it makes the letter F sound, so "fuh." "Feoh" on its own means "cattle or wealth," so you could use just that letter, it's like using the letter F and knowing that it means "cattle" or whatever. So, in Old English texts you don't get a whole lot of runes. They're not really, they were used, kind of in earlier times, you find them in stone inscriptions and stuff, but by the time that Christianity has come to England, there's less use of that.
There's more use of the Roman alphabet. But you still get it occasionally, especially in poetry. There's a particular poet, Cynewulf, who had a kind of sign off on his poems, where he would use the letters of his name, but incorporate them into his poem in such a way that arguably that that word fit into what he was trying to say.
So in, in Old English, the letter H, "hægel," means "hail," and the letter A is "ac," and that means "oak," and then the letter N is "nīd," I believe, which is, yeah, means "need or affliction." So if I wanted to spell my name H-A-N-A, then I'd have to end, I'd have to write a poem that somehow involves a hail, an oak, need, and then oak again, and that would, and just when I, instead of writing out those words, I would use the symbol of the, so I'd use the rune within that, that line of poetry and then write the rest of it in Roman or Latin letters around it, if that makes sense.
Mignon: Ah, okay. That makes sense. Yeah. So you hide the runes in the poem by using the runes for the word that represents
Hana: Yeah, and you have to, and you, and you see the rune and you know, "Oh, that's the rune that means this. So you substitute that word in." But Cynewulf in particular liked to do that with the letters of his name in the end of poems. And that's, that's actually why we have a name at all for him because most, um, most writers in Old English are anonymous. We don't know who wrote things, um, because he liked to do that. We can identify that those poems were all written by the same person who went by that name.
Mignon: Oh, how fun. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Good for him, I guess. You know, that reminds me too of the other thing you mentioned is that, you know, we know spellings weren't standardized in Old English, but how useful that can be to researchers. How do researchers actually use the lack of standard spelling in their work?
Hana: Yeah. Um, well, the great thing about Old English is that you can never make spelling mistakes when you're, you're writing in it, because there's no standard spelling for anything. People would use the letters of the alphabet, the Latin alphabet to write out words, and the letters made certain sounds. And you would use whatever letter combination made sense for the way you pronounce a word. And that gives us an idea of where different dialects were used. And knowing that, we can kind of tell where a manuscript might have been written and around what time period as well. So yeah, it's quite useful for that given that most manuscripts do not have any sort of date or author. Um, yeah.
Mignon: Yeah. No. Wonderful. Like based on knowing how a word … inferring how a word may have been pronounced by how it was spelled gives you all these wonderful clues.
Hana: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we don't have, but we have now in modern English where people pronounce words completely differently from how they're spelled because maybe once they were pronounced another way and now that's changed. Um, so, yeah.
Mignon: Yeah. Well, to wrap up, let's, why don't you pick what your, your, your favorite story or your favorite animal from "The Deorhord"? What would … what story would you like to leave people with today?
Hana: Oh, that's a difficult question. Just one animal. Well, I already talked about the whale quite a bit, but the whale's kind of counterpart in Old English. So there's a, there's actually a whale poem and a panther poem that appear side by side in the same manuscript and, they're sort of, you can sort of see how you're meant to contrast these two animals.
So while the whale is, is evil and representative of Satan, the panther is actually very good and represents Christ. Which, again, might be a…
Mignon: Yeah.
Hana: A bit surprising. You wouldn't necessarily think that. They do have some of the same qualities as well. So the whale, both the whale and the panther have this sweet smelling breath that, and I know it's a whale with breath, which doesn't make sense, but if you ignore that, they both have breath that draws other creatures to them because it smells so good.
And in the case of the whale, it's, you know, Satan's words drawing you towards it. And in the panther's case, it's Christ's words drawing you to it. So, yeah, same characteristic, but used in different ways. And the panther has, the story with the panther is that he has a big meal, a really big meal and then goes to sleep in his cave for three nights and on the third day wakes up and, um, roars and all of the animals come to him and that's reflecting, um, the story of Christ, the Last Supper and then, you know, burial and resurrection.
Yeah, so I think the panther is quite, quite interesting. And the panther is a friend to everyone except for the draca. So, he doesn't like the dragon and that's because the dragon is representative of Satan. So, in medieval manuscripts and medieval bestiaries, you often see pictures of the panther standing there with a crowd of animals around him who are all very happy to be there. And then there's a little pathetic dragon in the corner hiding. So, yeah.
Mignon: And you taught me that panthers aren't uniformly black. That was surprising to me.
Hana: Yeah, that was surprising when I first learned about it, too, when I, because when I was first looking at images of panthers and medieval manuscripts, I was thinking, why are they? Why are they rainbow colored? That seems weird. They have spots all over them and, um, the Old English poem described, like, compares the panther's fur to, you know, Joseph's multicolored cloak. Like, I think we often think of panthers as black, but if you look really closely, they're actually spots, spots in the fur and the multicolors might be referring to the way light reflects off of the shiny fur.
Mignon: I'm going to have to look more closely next time I have a, I don't know, a panther. I don't know when that will be.
Hana: Yeah.
Mignon: Well, Hana, thank you so much for sharing just all these wonderful stories. I adored your book, "The Deorhord." Again, not, it's also, it's a great book, but it's also gorgeous.
If you're watching the video, you can see it has gold on the cover. It's really a, a beautiful book as well as an interesting book. It would make a great gift actually. And, thank you for your work since I think 2013, you've been adding a word every day to The Wordhord, which is, as again, I said, I use that all the time to help me put together this show. So it's wonderful to finally meet you and thank you for, for coming on the podcast.
Hana: Thanks so much for having me.
Mignon: Oh, do, why don't you tell people, um, is it just, is it the, just the word hord dot…where can people find you?
Hana: Yeah. So, um, you can find me at, the website is OldEnglishWordHord.com. "Wordhord" spelled W-O-R-D-H-O-R-D. And from there, I have links to my various social media accounts. The Twitter one is OEWordHord, but I'm also on Instagram, Facebook, and, um, and other places.
And, of course, there's the app that you can download for free. Um, there's a link to that on my website too, um, that's available for iOS, and you can get your word of the day that way as well.
Mignon: That's wonderful. Thank you. Thank you again so much.
Hana: Thanks.
Mignon: I hope you all enjoyed my conversation with Hana Videen.
I'll be back Tuesday with a regular episode about skunked words and the power of the word "we," And then make sure to check your feed again Thursday for our next installment of Grammar Girl Conversations when I'll be talking with Eli Burnstein about his "Dictionary of Fine Distinctions" that looks at pressing questions like what actually is the difference between a cappuccino and a latte, chicken stock and chicken broth, a maze and a labyrinth, and more.
That's all. Thanks for listening.