Old English on Example of "The Anglo – Saxon Chronicle"

Introduction

This text was written during the reign of King Alfred, the Great (871 – 899), and it belongs to the Pre – Norman period. The Anglo – Saxon Chronicle is a compilation of annals which contains information of that period, mainly from the oral tradition. The oldest annals are dated in 60 a.C and continue after the death of the King, precisely until the 20th century.

The Anglo – Saxon Chronicle is composed of more text by unknown authors, due to the fact that King Alfred, the Great began the collection of those events, which are contained in annals, such as the West Saxon, Regnal and Episcopal and the Northern Chronicle, among others.

Specifically, this text belongs to the Peterborough manuscript and it is considered as one of the most important historical documents preserved from that period.

The text narrates the Battle of Maldon, which took place in the year 991, when the Vikings offered the Peace to Byrhtnoth if they paid a tribute to them, but refusing the proposal, Byrhtnoth was letting clear that he will fight against them and as a consequence, the English were defeated by the Vikings.

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The Noun

In Old English, nouns have three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), two numbers (singular and plural) and five cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumental).

• Nominative case. This case is used for sentence subjects (persons or things performing an action). Examples that can be found in the text are Gyperwīc (line 1), Brihtnōd (line 2), Ōswald (line 8), Lundenbyrig (line 12). It is easy to identificate because those proper names are linked by ond in their sentences and they form a copulative coordinated sentence.
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• Accusative case. Used for Direct Objects of transitive verbs. It is the noun directly affected by the action of a verb. To give one example, we can mention the word scipu (line 11), which is the accusative plural of the word scip, that means ship in modern English.
• Genitive case. This case shows that one noun belongs to another noun. In other words, this case is used for possesions. In modern English, we translate the noun in genitive case adding the English preposition “of” or using the genitive marker “s”. For example, a clear case of this type could be pūsend punda (line 6), where punda is the genitive plural neuter of pund, which in modern English is translated as pound. Another example is found in line 12, where āhtes is the word in genitive case, which is complementing the word scipu (ships) in line 11.
• Dative case. It shows that a noun is indirectly affected by the action of the sentence. We can mention as an example the word mannum (line 4), which is the dative plural of the noun “man”
• Instrumental case. It rarely differs from the dative in form, is the case of the means or the method. It may be called the with or by case.

In the text, we can find many examples of masculine words, such as Maldūne (line 3), man, Deniscan and mannum (line 4), eorl (line 14), sylfum (line 20).

Depending on the Germanic Stem, OE nouns are divided in two major declensions:

• Strong declension (if the stem ends in a vowel). Examples: pund (line 6) and lif (line 8).
• Weak declension (if the stem ends in consonant). Examples: wita (line 11)

Number and case are marked by inflection that can vary according to the Germanic word from which the noun is derived.

The Adjectives

In OE adjectives, as in OE nouns, we can find three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. OE adjectives also had two declensions:

• Strong declension (when adjectives precede nouns without a definite article or pronoun). One example of strong declension is found in the adjective micel (line 23), that means “large”.
• Weak declension (when the adjectives preceding the noun follows a definite article (þæt, that means “The”) or a pronoun (this, that, these, those). One example of weak declension is the word Deniscan (line 4).

The Definite Article

The definite article in OE shows that a substantive is a particular noun that the listener should recognize. Old English had two main determiners: “se”, that function as both “the” or “that” in Modern English and “þes”, which in Modern English is translated as “this”. The plural of each gender was “þa”.

Some examples are the following: þaet man (“that man”, line 4), and pām sāeriman (“the coast”, line 5), pā fyrde (“the army”, line 13)

The Personal Pronoun

OE personal pronouns are quite similar to the used in English nowadays. It is more different in the first and the second person singular, but apart from that, we can see that they do not differ a lot. Besides inflections for the three numbers, it is important to mention that the first and the second persons were inflected for case (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive) but not for gender.

The personal pronouns that can be found on the text are mainly in third person, as hī (“they”, third person nominative plural, found in lines 5, 15, 22), hē (“he”, third person nominative masculine singular, line 19) and him (line 20).

The Verb

In OE verbs, we can find two tenses: present and past. It is interesting to mention that the present tense was also used for the future. OE verbs had no inflectional form to make the passive and they used to distinguish three moods: indicative, subjunctive and imperative. Also, it was formed only for three persons and two numbers (singular and plural).

As in present – day English, we can find two main types of verbs in OE:

Strong verbs, that change their vowel in different tenses (sing/sang). Those verbs changed the root vowel to indicate change of time.

A clear example can be found in lines 2, 21 and 23 (ofslaegen, ofslōh and ofslōgon, respectively, that means “to kill”). Ofslaegen is a past participle verb of class 6 strong verb ofslean, that means “to slay, to kill”. Ofslōgon, on the other hand, is a third plural preterit indicative of class 6 strong verb ofslëan, that means “to slay, to kill”.

Another example of strong verbs can be the verb gefōr (third person singular preterit indicative of class 7 of the verb gefaran, that means “to die”).

Weak verbs, which use inflectional endings for the same purpose (love/loved). Some examples of weak verbs are found in the following lines:

• Worhtan (line 5): 3rd plural preterit indicative of Class I weak verb wyrcan ‘to produce’, ‘to bring about’.
• Betræppan (line 16a): Infinitive of Class I weak verb ‘to entrap’.
• Gewæˉpnod (line 24a): past participle of Class I weak verb wæˉpnian ‘to arm’, ‘to weapon’.
• Gewæˉdod (line 24b): past participle of Class II weak verb wæˉdian ‘to equip’.

Old English Syntax

The word order in OE is similar to Latin and Greek. Contrary to many other languages, OE syntax does not have a determined position. So, we can say that the Word order in OE is a Little free.

In Old English, words do not depend on the sentence position, but they depend on the word inflection, or what it is the same, the case.

Modern English gives now a lot of importance to word order, what it is totally different to what happened in OE, where its syntax normally seemed a little bit messy.

We have some syntax rules in OE that we must take into account. Firstly, the nouns must concord in gender, number and case with the adjectives and demostratives, and the verb has to concord with the subject in person and number.

There has always been a disagreement among scholars about the basic word order in independent clauses because some agree that it was SVO and others that it was different, affirming that it was SOV.

In line 7, we can find an example parataxis, with an OVS structure (a structure that has dissapeared):

Ðæne ræˉd geræˉdde Siric arcebiscop (This plan devised by Sigeric archbishop)

We can also observe in the text an example of SVO in line 8:

Ōswald, se ēadiga arċebiscop, forlēt þis līf (Oswald the blessed archbishop abandoned this life).

And to conclude with the examples of structures, we have to mention the one we can find in lines 15 and 16, which is an example of VSO structure:

gif hī meahton þone here āhwæˉr ūtene betræppan (if they could the invading army anywhere out entrap)

It is a little bit confusing to determine if a particular clause is independent or subordinate, because it is sometimes ambiguous. Also, we cannot forget mention the parataxis in OE. Some texts are based on independent clauses, whereas others are composed mainly of embedded clauses. The first ones are in “Paratactyc style” and the second ones are in “Hypotactic style”.

To mention a subordinate clause example on the text, we could mention the one in line 2 of the text:

swīðe raðe wæs Brihtnōð ealdorman ofslægen æt Mældūne (Very soon was Birhtnoth nobleman slain at Maldon)

So, analysing the text proposed, we can say that this text is in hypotactic style because it is composed of long sentences with subordination. Hypotaxis is characterized by the subordination of one clause to another within sentences.