I studied Old English with Stephen Pollington at City Lit in London. The coursework was taken from his textbook “First Steps in Old English”, available from Anglo-Saxon Books.

Old English, rather than importing words from other languages such as Latin and Greek, would make use of the words it already had and form compound nouns. So charity in Old English is “mild heartedness”, fertility is “fruit bearingness”, window is “eye hole” and elbow is “forearm bow” (because it bends). I rather admire this inventiveness on the part of our forebears, opting to create new words instead of borrowing from another language. Of course, lots of foreign words would come in when that Norman arrived.

Oh, and Modern English derives not from West Saxon, the language of the translator-king and others, but from a variant spoken in the South Midlands because of the influence of Oxford and Cambridge.

What I also find interesting is the use of a prefix to describe the extent of an action, such as “of-slegen”, meaning “off-slain”, “off-beaten”. The “of” means that the action was taken to its logical conclusion, namely dying. One of the features of Bulgarian is this use of prefixes, where today English would use an adverb or preposition after the verb – worn out, for example, done in.

* * *

The Old English word for “man” is “wer”, which is linked to the Latin word “vir”. It is found today in words such as “werewolf” (“man-wolf”) and “world” (which means “man-age”, the “age of man”). Isn’t it interesting that we should call the world the “age of man”? The word for “woman” is “wif”, which has to do with “weave”. The Old English “mann” is like “chovek” in Bulgarian – it refers to a person, an adult human being, not specifically male. So “mankind” is really “peoplekind” – it doesn’t refer specifically to men. And when we say in the Creed that Christ came down to earth “for us men and for our salvation”, we are not being sexist, we are referring to the human race.

Every letter is pronounced, as in Spanish. So “sweord” is “swe-ord” (today’s “sword”, which is really pronounced “sord”, we’ve dropped the letter “w” and we’ve done away with the diphthong). “What” is “hwæt” – and yes, the “h” is pronounced: “h-wat”. Obviously, that got too much, and we dropped the “h” like Cockneys, but we remembered it was there, so we stuck it after the “w” when writing it down. “Sometimes” is “hwilum”, a particularly lovely word, which I’m guessing is linked to “while” and means something like “at whiles”. Again, the “h” has found itself relegated.

Lots of Old English (of old languages) is to be found in place names. “Place” is “stow”, and we find this word in Felixstowe, for example. “River” is “ea”, and that’s at the end of “Chelsea”. And “buy/sell” is “ceap” (“sellen” is “hand over”, “give away”) – this word is in “cheap” (bought/sold at a good price), in “ceapmann” (“merchant”, a “buy/sell-person”) and in place names such as Chipping Norton or even (its Danish equivalent) Copenhagen.

There is a lovely eleventh-century text called Ælfric’s “Colloquy on the Occupations”. It was intended as a Latin course, but some clever teacher from Canterbury has written the Old English words over the Latin as a kind of crib, and now this crib is used to learn Old English (the opposite of what it was intended for). A teacher interviews his pupils, who take on the roles of tradespeople – ploughman, hunter, fisherman… The ploughman goes first. He has to work very hard in winter; his boy is hoarse from the cold and shouting. He says it’s a lot of work, taking the oxen to the field, yoking them to the plough, feeding and watering them, mucking them out. But what to do, he says, “I am not free” – “ic neom freoh”. Better to be a hunter for the king! Then you get well fed and clothed (“shrouded”), and if you’re lucky, he may present you with a horse and an arm ring, tokens of wealth in the eleventh century.

* * *

We take “for” to have a positive meaning (as opposed to “against”), but as a prefix, “for-”, it can suggest an unfortunate outcome. Think of “forget” and “forsake”. So it is “lidan” means to “go by sea”, but “forlidan” is to go by sea and end badly – that is, to be shipwrecked. Of course, “for-” is not always negative. What about “forge” and “forgive”?

In Old English, verbs decline and nouns conjugate. Or is it the other way around? Verbs conjugate and nouns decline. So, “I hear” is “ic hiere”, “you (sing.) hear” is “ðu hierst” and “he/she/it hears” is “he/heo/hit hierð” (the letter “ð”, like “þ”, is pronounced “th”). The plural is the same for all persons: “we hierað”, “ge hierað” and “hie hierað”. The “g” before an “e” is pronounced “y”, so that’s our “ye”. There is no polite form of the pronoun “you”, as in French or Spanish, it is only a question of number.

Adjectives must agree with their nouns, which are masculine, feminine or neuter. “Gram” is “fierce”; the feminine is “gramu” and the neuter “gram” again. The plural is “grame”, “grama” and “gramu”, according to gender. When the noun is an object, the adjective changes only in the singular: “gramne”, “grame” and “gram”. Where did we get this idea that nouns should have a gender (apart from the obvious ones like “man” and “woman”), and why is it that neuter always remains the same in the nominative and accusative, as in Latin and Greek?

We learned a few new words, such as “mereswin” (“dolphin”, literally “sea swine”). What a beautiful word! And how about “ceaster”, from the Latin “castrum”, meaning “fortress, city”? This word is found in modern place names such as Leicester and Colchester.

Of course, we read about William the Bastard, that French newcomer whose only interest in people seems to have been how much they were worth. Land was measured in hides, which was not a set area, but the amount of land required to support a family. If the land was “til” (“good, gainful”), then a hide might be sixty acres, but on rocky ground it was more likely to be over a hundred.

* * *

England (“Englaland”) means “Land of the Angles”. That “a” in the middle of “Englaland” is the genitive plural, meaning “of”. So when English football fans chant “Eng-a-land, Eng-a-land, Eng-a-land”, they are (in a way) singing Old English. They are harking back to the genitive case. (We haven’t done it yet, but I have seen the genitive singular ends in “s”, clearly this is the origin of our possessive “’s”.)

There is no word for the number “zero”. It hasn’t arrived yet from India. “Twenty-one” is “one and twenty” (“ān ond twentig”, that final “g” is pronounced “y”), “twenty-two” is “two and twenty” (“twēgen ond twentig”), and so on. Interestingly, Old English seems to have been influenced by the Babylonian way of counting in chunks of sixty. For the second chunk (61-120), the multiples of ten are written “seven-ty”, “eight-ty”, “nine-ty”, “ten-ty”, “eleven-ty” and “twelve-ty”. It’s kind of logical. They are also all preceded by the prefix “hund-”. So we have “hundseofontig”, “hundeahtatig”, “hundnigontig”, “hundtigontig” (though 100 can be simply “hund” or “hundred”), “hundendleofontig” and “hundtwelftig”. I rather like this idea of “twelfty” for 120. That said, in manuscripts, scribes almost always use Roman numerals to indicate numbers, not words. “Four” is “iiij”. There is no “v” in Old English, so “five” is “u”. Forty thousand (men killed, hides in a region) is “xl þūsend”.

There are some false friends. The preposition “ofer” is not so much “over” as “on the other side of”. “Wið” (that “th” again, which can be written “ð” or “þ”) is not so much “with” as “against”. That said, you can “fight with” or “fight against” – the “with” doesn’t always indicate partiality. My favourite prepositions, those words like joints that connect limbs, are “oð”, meaning “as far as” (space) or “until” (time), and “ymbe”, meaning “around”.

I can understand why people create word hoards for Old English that focus on the vocabulary, there are so many lovely sounding words. How about these three, which all end with the suffix “-sum” (our “-some”, as in “lonesome”) – “longsum” (“enduring”), “lufsum” (“lovable”) and “wilsum” (“enjoyable”)? But my favourites this week are “se lyft” (“the sky”, a kind of lift, think Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator) and “forðferde” (“forth-travelled”, “travelled forth”, meaning “passed on”).

We read a short excerpt of the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” (we call it “ASC”) about the Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793. Lindisfarne is a small island near Bamburgh, an Anglo-Saxon stronghold, and it was Aidan, an Irish monk sent from Iona to evangelise the Northumbrians, who founded a monastic community there in around 634. I recently read a fascinating book by the archaeologist Max Adams on the life and times of the seventh-century Northumbrian king Oswald (later a saint, he gave away a silver platter to the poor in the presence of Aidan, who said his right arm would remain incorrupt). It seems from the time of King Oswald Northumbrian kings started giving rather too much land to the Church, and not enough to their warrior class. The land was given to the Church in perpetuity, whereas warriors were rewarded with land for their lifetime, after which it reverted to the king. This may explain why the Vikings found it relatively easy to start attacking the Northumbrian coast a century later. There weren’t enough warriors. In the meantime, monasteries began to proliferate. They enjoyed certain privileges, and so they became a kind of tax dodge. Young men who weren’t all that interested in the strictures of the ascetic life would join a monastery to avoid going to war. Bede picked up on this and wasn’t overly impressed. The moral? Be careful who you give your land to, and how long for.

* * *

Unusually, Old English has two words for “to be”, like Spanish. In Spanish, “ser”is for general truths, things that don’t change, while “estar” is for temporary states and location. I remember the difficult one to learn is “soy feliz” (“I am happy), but “estoy contento” (“I am content”), as if happiness was deeper. Old English is similar. There is “wesan” for what is happening at the moment and “bēon” for general truths, gnomic utterances. “Fire is a thief” (because it burns your house down) would be “bēon”. It is also used to refer to the future – “I shall be ready” – as if I’m not ready yet, but perhaps I should be. In an ideal world, I would be.

“Wesan” declines (or is it conjugates?) as follows: eom, eart, is, sind (all persons in the plural). That “sind” looks very much like a Latin subjunctive. So where did “are” (all persons in the plural) come from? That was inherited from an Anglian dialect, not West Saxon: “earon”. “Bēon” is conjugated: bēo, bist, biþ, bēoþ (all persons in the plural).

Of course, “bēon” gives “be” and “been”, whereas “wesan” gives “was” and “were”, so it seems we modern speakers of the language mixed and matched. The teacher also referred to the Anglo-Saxon habit of beating fruit trees at New Year so they would bear fruit in the coming year, which is to wassail. “Wassail” means “wes hāl”, “be healthy”. There are some customs I am glad have changed, since I wouldn’t much fancy going outside in the cold and beating trees. It’s enough to be grateful.

Did you know that Anglo-Saxon ships (“scipas”) were steered by large, rudder-like oars mounted at the back on the right-hand side? This oar was called a “steer-board”, which is where we get “starboard” to refer to the right-hand side of a ship.

The word “but” comes from the Old English prepositon “būtan”, meaning “without” or “except”. The preposition “tō” has the meaning “to”, as you would expect, but also “as”, so the phrase “to boot” actually means “as a remedy”.

“Genumen” is a past participle, meaning “taken”. It appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (the ASC). And this is where we get our word “numb”. If you fall asleep while leaning on your arm and wake up to find it is numb, it is as if someone has taken it from you.

* * *

We saw that the genitive plural in Old English ends in “-a”. The genitive singular for the masculine and neuter ends in “-es”, and that is where we get the use of “ ’s” to indicate possession. “The king’s thane” (a landholder, one of his fighters) is “ðæs cyninges ðegn” – literally, “of the king thane”. What’s interesting for me is that it’s not necessary to say “the of the king thane” or “of the king the thane”. The fact he is “the king’s” is specification enough.

We see this possessive “ ’s” in the possessive adjective “his” as well – “his” is the genitive of “he”. Talking of kings, Old English accrues negatives, as do Spanish and Bulgarian, but not modern English. “There is no king here” would be “nis nān cyning hēr” – literally, “(there) isn’t no king here”. The negative is “ne” and it comes before the verb. So, “is” is “is”, and “isn’t” is “nis”, where the “ne” has elided with the verb that follows.

We also looked at names. I believe names contain something of our destiny in this life, if you can only decipher their meaning. So, a word for “friend” is “wine” – not so common, but it does appear as the second element of names like Edwin (“blessed friend”), Godwin (“good friend”) and Alcuin (“friend of the protective place, of the temple”).

Another noun, “aelf” (meaning “elf”), appears in Alfred. The second part of Alfred comes from the Old English “rǣd”, meaning “plan”, “counsel”. We talked about this sense of the other world – sprites, goblins, fairies – that glimpsing something out of the corner of your eye only to find a rational explanation. Well, it does say in the Creed of God the Father that he is “maker of all things visible and invisible”. That implies there is something we do not see.

“Poet” is “scop” (pronounced “shop”). Another word is “laughter-smith”. I think this is wonderful. You are meant to make people laugh (not to bore them silly). This led us to riddles. No, I’m not going to talk about the one-eyed man selling garlic, or the onion that stands in its bed and makes the woman cry. But I did like “Godes condel” (“God’s candle”) for the sun, and “gannotes bæð” (“gannet’s bath”) for… any guesses? The sea.

And by the way, in case you’re wondering, “glæd mann hæfð scip sweord ond wīf” – “a happy man has a ship, a sword and a woman”. Or that’s what our Germanic ancestors believed.

* * *

Language has markers. For example, if I add “-ed” to a verb, “warn”, and write “warned”, this shows that the action took place in the past. Ancient Greek actually adds letters to the front and back of a verb – “luo” (“release”) becomes “elusa”. But there are times when letters are not added and there is a change of vowel. For example, “drive” and “drove” (not “drived”). This change of vowel is a feature of Old English (though the teacher said it dates back to the Bronze Age, people sitting around fires, mutating their “i”s).

The same thing happens with nouns. To make a plural, the normal thing is to add “s” (“son”, “sons”). But some nouns do not add an “s”, they change the vowel – “foot”, “feet”; “man”, “men”. There are only a handful, but they exist in Old English: “fōt”, “fēt”; “mann”, “menn”; “toð”, “teð” (the things you bite with); “mūs”, “mȳs” (the animal that squeaks).

“Book” is interesting – “bōc” becomes “bēc” in the plural, and there is a school of thought that says this is because books were made from the bark of beeches. Another interesting one is “burg”, meaning “stronghold”. The plural is “byrig”. So the second element in place names such as Middlesborough and Shaftesbury is derived from the same word in Old English, it’s just that “-borough” comes from the singular and “-bury” from the plural.

Two others nouns that change their vowels in the plural are “frēond” (which becomes the more recognizable “frīend”) and “fēond” (which becomes the more recognizable “fīend”). The former meant “one who loves”, the latter “one who hates”. It seems this business of loving and hating, feuds and flings, existed even before the Norman Conquest.

We read an extraordinary text on the formation of the foetus. It is an Old English translation of an earlier Latin text and is quoted in a book by the Reverend Thomas Oswald Cockayne called “Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England” (oh, to have been a country priest in the Victorian Age!). There were some interesting observations. In the third month, the man is without a soul (“he biþ man butan sawle”). He doesn’t get bones or skin until the sixth. And it’s generally advisable if the bairn can be born in the ninth month, not the tenth, when there can be complications. These happen most often on a Tuesday eve (“oftost on tiwes niht”).

* * *

The Danes liked English money. That is why they kept coming to England on their ships (“scipu”). There was a reason for this. English coins had a higher standard. This is because King Edgar, who reigned in the middle of the tenth century, used to recall silver coins and issue new ones on a three-yearly basis. The only problem is that you would hand in 240 coins and only receive 220 of the new coins in return. Sound familiar? Ten of your coins went to the mint, and ten went to the king himself.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle lists the deaths of ealdormen and bishops. It also lists battles with the Vikings, as they sailed along the coast of England and harried English cities. In this context, I learnt my new favourite word in Old English – “se sǣrima”, the coast, literally “the sea rim”.

That said, I am still enchanted by the way the Chronicle describes death – “forðferde”. So-and-so “travelled forth”. What a lovely way of talking about someone’s demise! Then there is “forlet þis lif ond geferde þet heofonlice” – “abandoned this life and travelled to that heavenly one”. The word for “abandoned” is “forlet” – “for-let”. What a lovely way of bringing the preposition in front of the verb! He didn’t abandon his studies, he “for-let” them.

We also read a short extract from Ælfric of Eynsham’s “Catholic Homilies”, where he states that our age in eternity (a delightful paradox) will be 33, the age Christ was when he suffered. It doesn’t matter how old we are when we die, this will be our age in eternity.

And we studied the past tense. We saw where that famous “-ed” ending comes from. The past of “nerian”, “to save”, for example, is “ic nerede”, “þu neredest”, “hē/hēo/hit nerede”, and in the plural, “wē/gē/hīe neredon”. The “-e”, “-est” and “-on” have fallen off. But it could just as easily have been an “-od” ending. There are verbs like “lufian”, “to love”, that are conjugated “ic lufode”, etc. That would put the spanner in the works, if we changed our past ending to “-od” instead of “-ed”!

* * *

I would like to reiterate that the word “man” in Old English is not gender-specific. It means “one”, “anyone”, “people”. So, when a woman sighs, raises her eyes, and exclaims, “Men!”, she is actually talking about herself as much as anybody else.

Old English uses “man” – “one” – where we would use the passive (I know other languages that shy away from the passive, but modern English quite likes it). So, for example, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 993, “gegaderode man swiðe mycele fyrde” means “one gathered (a) very great army”, i.e. “a very great army was gathered”. That word “great” (“mycele”) is our “much”.

And then there is the present perfect tense for an action completed in the past that still resonates with us now. “I have been to Sydney”, “I have met your brother”. These are actions that occurred in the past, but they still resonate now (“so I can tell you about it”, “so I know what he looks like”). The present perfect is not so common in Old English, but it does exist: “ic nerede” means “I saved”, “ic hæbbe genered” means “I have saved”. See how we use the auxiliary “have” to talk about actions between the past and now, as if these past experiences were a kind of possession (which they are).

I love that use of the prefix “ge-”. It’s not “ic hæbbe nered” – “I have saved” – but “ic hæbbe genered”. This prefix conveys the idea of completion. So, the verb “āscian” means “to ask, enquire”, while “geāscian” is the logical conclusion of asking/enquiring, which is “to find out”. “Winnan” means “to contend, compete”; “gewinnan” is what you hope will be the outcome (unless you’re Christ), namely “to win”.

In 994, Anlaf and Sweyne came to London with ninety-four ships. It’s never good news when two people called Anlaf and Sweyne come to your city aboard ships. But it was the Nativity of Mary, and out of her mercy (“mildheartedness”) she protected the city, so the Vikings went off to raid elsewhere. Can you tell what this means? “Wrohton þet mæste yfel þe æfre ænig here don mihte.” You just have to screw your eyes up a bit. “(They) wrought the most evil that ever any army do might.”

My new favourite word: “unweder” (“unweather”), meaning “bad weather”.

* * *

Old English has weak and strong verbs, just as Ancient Greek does. The past tense is interesting because the final consonant can vary, as can the root vowel. The past of “rīdan”, “to ride”, for example is: “ic rād”, “ðu ride”, “hē/hēo/hit rād”, “wē/gē/hīe ridon”. See how the root vowel changes in the first and third person singular? Another example, “bītan”, “to bite”, is conjugated in the same way: “bāt”, “bite”, “bāt”, “biton”.

A long “a” in Old English often becomes a long “o” in Modern English (“āc” is today “oak”, “bān” is “bone”), hence the past tense “rād” is today “rode”, but the past of “bite” is not “bote” (it could have been!), it is “bit”, so sometimes the past in Modern English is taken from the first and third person singular, others from the second person singular and the plural. It depends.

The same thing happens when the final consonant changes, as in the example “lēon”, “to lend”. Here, the past is “ic lāh”, “ðu lige”, “hē/hēo/hit lāh”, “wē/gē/hīe ligon”. See how the final consonant switches between “h” and “g”? Consonants are always shifting. I think of them as the pillars of language, just like the Pillars of Hercules that hold up the world, but in truth the ground beneath our feet isn’t always stable.

Other pairs of consonants that shift like this are “ð/d” and “s/r”. This is why the past of “to be” in Modern English is “was/were”. It’s the same consonantal shift.

It seems to me Christ was more of an anti-hero than a hero. He didn’t meet the expectations of some of his followers, who had been expecting a military leader to free the Hebrews from Roman oppression by force. But in Anglo-Saxon texts he is often described as a “hero” – “hæleð”. This was so that a warrior culture such as theirs could look up to him. He needed to be a man who would stand up and be counted in battle, if he was to gain their respect and love. That he was, but through submission and forgiveness rather than driving a sword through someone’s innards, I think. I’m still not quite sure we’ve worked out the idea of freedom.

On the subject of mandrakes, those plants that appear in Harry Potter and scream very loudly, the “Medicina de Quadrupedibus” counsels using a dog to uproot them by attaching them to the dog’s neck and then placing food in front of the dog’s nose, so it will reach forwards. I would never do this to my dog, but I did like this description of the mandrake: “heo on nihte scineð ealswa leohtfæt”. “It shines in the night like a lantern.”

Sometimes I think there is nothing as beautiful as language.

* * *

Old English has two words for “to serve”. One is to serve as a thane, a royal official, “þegnian”; the other, to serve as a theow, a hireling, “þēowian”. One imagines that the experience would be quite different. A royal official would no doubt have servants of his own; a hireling would be somewhat anonymous, even though he is the one putting food on the table, one of those dull brown figures in a field one sees from the carriage as one passes and who rarely makes it into the history books.

I wonder where we got this idea that some people should serve others. Where did we get this idea of entitlement? I blame the Normans, of course. After the Conquest, they treated England as a private slush fund, a hunting park – it is no coincidence that two of William the Conqueror’s sons, Richard and William Rufus, died while hunting (not in battle) – and regularly arrived unannounced in villages, pillaging and raping. When did we lose sight of the sacred nature of our fellow humans, such that some of them might be our slaves? Isn’t this view what upholds the concept of Empire, where human beings and the earth’s resources exist to make us rich? Hasn’t it persisted until today?

Old English uses the dative to indicate possession, so while you can say “ic hæbbe sunu” (“I have a son”), equally you can say “mē is sunu” (“to me is a son”). It uses the dative to translate the ablative absolute from Latin: “āstrehtum earmum clīpode hē” (“with outstretched arms he called out”).

One use of the accusative is to indicate extent in space or time: “ealne weg rād hēo swifte” (“all the way she rode swiftly”) or “hē rīcsode fēower gēar” (“he ruled for four years”).

And so I was particularly pleased to come across a sentence in the Old English adapation of Paulus Orosius’s “Histories Against the Pagans” – known as the Old English Orosius – in which a Norwegian traveller by the name of Ohthere visits King Alfred and describes to him the geography of his homeland. It’s a bit like Herodotus, some of it based on hearsay, and very charming.

Here we read, “Him wæs ealne weg weste land” (“To him was all the way wasteland”), finding examples of both the dative for possession and the accusative for extent in space. That kind of thing makes me very happy! I think we still use this accusative (albeit it no longer differs from the nominative) today – “I was there three days”, “we didn’t talk the whole way”. No preposition.

I started telling the class how Herodotus was known for his wonderful stories, which he heard and rarely validated himself, whereas Thucydides was the first to be an eye-witness, to go and see things for himself (notably the plague in Athens), but they weren’t overly interested. Orosius reminded me of Herodotus.

Ohthere boasts about killing sixty whales in two days, which the teacher pointed out was not something we would boast about today. Again, this intrinsically human need to take possession, to kill what is exquisite, hunting trophies, even though it can reveal the divine to us. The French scientist and priest Piere Teilhard de Chardin said, “At the heart of matter is the heart of God.” That doesn’t mean you have to kill it.

Anyway, I did learn the word for “walrus”: “horshwæl” (“horse-whale”). Now, tell me that’s not beautiful.