[QUOTE=Giles]
Isn’t it “heard under helme”, i.e., it was a hard man under the helmet. “Hard” is still used in that sense today in English.
[/quote]
Yeah, my bad. But it’s still a weird phrase, even more so in context:
By the proud Geatish chief, who these words thereafter spoke,
Hard under helm: “We are Hygelac’s
Table-companions. Beowulf is my name.”
So, that means Beowulf was a “hard man” under his helmet? I guess you had to be there…
As noted in the wikipedia article, that’s true of written Old English poetry, and the original poem probably used a different poetic device (like rhyme) since it was spoken, not written.
[QUOTE=MrDibble]
I must admit, speaking Afrikaans has always helped me quite a bit with Anglo-Saxon poetry. Similar sounds, similar…gutturalness.
[/QUOTE]
That’s where I’m coming from in this thread.
The Dutch and German languages are sort of social constructs, like the term “race”. In fact, there is a dialect continuum between the Low Countries and Germany just as there is a genetic continuum between any two neighboring countries.
Had English not been so heavily influenced by French (or some other language) it would almost be part of that continuum today. The North Sea is a barrier to making it a true part of that continuum, but it’d be a lot closer to Dutch and German than it is. So, it makes sense that the Old English of Beowulff (as it was written down) is more or less part of that continuum as it existed 1000 years ago.
Now, 1000 years is plenty of time to make a language unintelligible to the descendants of the original speakers, but they should still be able to make out much of the original, especially in the written form.
Forgot to add: I had a friend who group in a German speaking household in the US, and was fluent in the language. But his parents actually spoke Low German, and he told me that his first reaction when he went to Europe for the first time was: I didn’t realize I spoke Dutch and not German!
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Also, the phrase “min ærende” is probably literally translated as “my errand”, but that word has a less powerful meaning than “mission” does today. Errand is usually meant to be a small task you are sent on, like picking up a bottle of milk at the grocery store, but I’m guessing it must derive from “ærende”. The phrase “hard of helm” is awkward in Modern English, to say the least. I’m not sure exactly what that is supposed to mean unless it’s: “They had hard helmets.” Not sure why that would be particularly remarkable, since helmets are supposed to be hard.
[/QUOTE]
I might have been a bit too fast there. That was what I meant to say, anyway. Norwegian ærende means the same as english errand, but I thought it reasonable that mission and errand had once been one word, namely ærende. Anyway, who knows if Beowulffs mother hadn’t sent him out for milk? It’s not like he was a bad-ass viking, or anything. Puny Englishmen.
[QUOTE=yelimS]
I might have been a bit too fast there. That was what I meant to say, anyway. Norwegian ærende means the same as english errand, but I thought it reasonable that mission and errand had once been one word, namely ærende.
[/QUOTE]
Yes. “Mission” is a word that came into English from French. I don’t believe it existed in English at the time Beowulf was written down.
Right. He was a Geat (someone from Götaland in modern Sweden), which is essentially a Viking. So I guess he was a “bad ass Viking”, except that the time of the events chronicled in that poem pre-date what we generally think of as the Viking period.
