Old English and the lexicography of Old High German
In this lecture I will focus on how Old English affected the early German written record and on the difficulties of its lexicographical description.
Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice: From Oriental Bazar to English Cloister in Anglo-French
Until recently, such limited interest as late Anglo-French was able to arouse amongst scholars specializing in medieval French has been confined, with only a very few exceptions, to the efforts made in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries to teach what was by now a language unknown to most of the inhabitants of a country moving inexorably towards the unchallenged dominance of English as the national language.
Heorot and the Plundered Hoard: A Study of Beowulf
Time and again the Beowulf poet’s choice of words and details reveals that he practised his craft within a tradition in which his creativeness was bound and disciplined by the objectiveness of a particular structure of images. We perceive in all the rich variety of his work the unifying effect of the typological imagination. It is in the typological mode of Beowulf that the key to its meaning and artistry is to be found.
The Legend of the Purgatory of Saint Patrick: From Ireland to Dante and Beyond
“Yes by Saint Patrick …. Touching this vision here It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5)
Why There May Have Been Contacts between Slovenes and Jews before 1000 A.D.
The first documented evidence of a Jewish presence in Slovenia dates from the 13th century, when Yiddish- and Italian-speaking Jews migrated south from Austria to Maribor and Celje, and east from Italy into Ljubljana. This is a good three centuries after the first mention of Jews in the Austrian lands.
Conquest, Contact, and Convention: Simulating the Norman Invasion’s Impact on Linguistic Usage
How do conventions arise? Lewis adressed this in his work Convention via signaling games, a mathematical model of communication where a sender sends a message to a receiver who then interprets it. When we say conventions, we mean by that a system of coor- dinated behavior pairing information states with actions
Contemplating the Evolution of Medieval Double-Entendre Literature
The linguistic composition of the Exeter Book Riddles supports this, and in fact, the genre became a refuge for contemporary colloquial speech which was seen as coarse and lower class within the ideologies of Christianity and Germanic heroism.
Bernard of Morlaix: the literature of complaint, the Latin tradition and the twelfth-century “Renaissance”
Bernard of Morlaix was a monk of the order of Cluny who flourished around 1140. Excerpts from one of his poems appear in some anthologies of medieval Latin verse1 and he is briefly noticed in some works on the twelfth-century renaissance, but he has received little critical attention and only one of his poems has been translated from the Latin.
Celtic Search Talk III: Irish Classical Studies and the Irish History of Troy
This was part of a series of papers given at the University of Toronto in competition for a position in the Celtic Studies department. This paper focused on the reception of literature and the reception of the classics in medieval Ireland.
The Old English Rune Poem – Semantics, Structure, and Symmetry
The later runic alphabets do, of course, follow the basic pattern of the earlier Germanic Fupark though considerably modified by the late eighth century, decreasing in the number of runes in Scandinavia whilst increasing in number in the runic alphabets of England.
The British Kingdom of Lindsey
The first piece of evidence which offers support for the above contention comes from the kingdom-name ‘Lindsey’ itself. Two forms of this name exist in Anglo-Saxon sources, reflecting two different Old English suffixes:6 Lindissi (later Lindesse, as used by Bede and the earliest manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)7 and Lindesig…
The Scandinavian element beyond the Danelaw
The present paper concentrates on the Scandinavian element present in Eng- lish in the area beyond the Danelaw, i.e. in the West Midlands and Southern parts of the country.
The Development of Predicative Possession in Slavic Languages
As an active language, Early Proto-Indo-European (Pre-Indo-Euro- pean) had no category of syntactic transitivity (Subject-Object relation), which is the central characteristic of nominative (accusative) languages, and no verb ‘have’.
A Christological reading of The Ruin
We should be aware that the semantic scope of each word may vary drastically and that the reader is influenced by many variables in attaching the meaning to a given word. The question becomes trickier if we take the allegorical viewpoint, because polysemy is concerned with the entire text, not with just a word. Thus, we should not consider the surface meaning of the words, but look more carefully for the covert meanings.
The Cross as Tree: The Wood-of-the-Cross Legends in Middle English and Latin Texts in Medieval England
The wood-of-the-cross legend is actually a group of narratives that trace the pre- history of the wood used to make Christ’s cross back to Old Testament figures, or in some cases back to paradise itself.
The History of English in Ten Minutes
Learn where words like house, loaf, bishop, font, drag, die, jury, justice, swine, mutton, pork, eyeball and alligator came from!
Property Rights in Celtic Irish Law
Unfortunately, many historians not specializing in the study of the ancient Irish law tracts have been unaware of the textual inaccuracies of the O’Curry – O’Donovan translations and have continued to incorporate their older unscientific work, and that of their editors, into their own work.
Tolkien’s Imaginary Languages
Tolkien’s extensive knowledge of world languages both ancient and modern lent itself to his creation of the artificial languages that add so much realistic depth to his fictional writing
Language and Legend in the Fantasy Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien
There was something so real in the languages that he created, and critics wanted to find the inspirations behind Tolkien‘s worlds. Elves, dwarves, men, hobbits, and various other creatures occupied the pages of his books, but the languages he created were complex and had real elements in them. Examples of his invented languages were those spoken by the Elves, Sindarin and Quenya.
”Beowulf” and the Influence of Old English on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is set in the fictional but incredibly vast and detailed universe of Middle-Earth. Tolkien has put great effort in developing an impossibly gigantic realm peopled by many diverse races. Of the immeasurable number of characters and locations present in Tolkien’s work, many bear a name deeply rooted in Old English.
The Knighting of Henry, son of William the Conqueror, in 1086
This paper was part of SESSION VIII: Power & Politics in the Long Twelfth Century, at the Haskins Conference at Boston College.
“My trouthe for to holde—allas, allas!”: Dorigen and Honor in “The Franklin’s Tale”
We can see from the beginning of the Franklin’s Tale that honor as pub- lic esteem is an overriding concern for Arveragus, who qualifies his exceedingly courtly marriage vow, swearing always to remain Dorigen’s servant in love, with the condition that he retain the public appearance of lordly husband, “That wolde he have for shame of his degree”.
The Three Recensions of Eriugena’s Versio Dionysii
However, as G. Théry later discovered, Traube’s point of departure—the citations of Dionysius in Hincmar’s treatise on predestination—was faulty. Since Traube published his notes on the manuscripts of the Versio, Théry has proven that the citations in Hincmar’s Liber de praedestinatione come from Hilduin’s translation rather than that of Eriugena.
‘In the Beginning’: The London Medieval Graduate Network Inaugural Conference
This is a summary of the The London Medieval Graduate Network Inaugural Conference by Rachel Scott. The conference was held on November 2nd at King’s College London.