Riddle
playing with language (10th century)
People have probably played with words as long as language has existed. They love to take a word and mess about with it, such as by saying it backwards, making an outrageous pun on it or stringing it together with other words so that it can’t be said (tongue-twisters). The playful temperament has produced innumerable word games and competitions, such as crossword puzzles and Scrabble. And one of the earliest signs of this temperament in English appears in the form of riddles.
It took a while for the word riddle to develop this meaning. When it first appears in Old English, in early translations from Latin, it was in the form rædels (pronounced ‘reah-dels’), a combination of the word for ‘read’ with an -els ending. It meant a ‘reading’ or ‘opinion’ about something. Gradually the sense broadened to an ‘interpretation’ of something, and then, in an interesting switch, to a ‘saying that defies easy interpretation’ – an enigma. The modern meaning was in place by the 10th century.
The form of the word changed too. That -els ending was quite common in Old English, turning up in such words as gyrdels (‘girdle’) and byrels (‘tomb’ – think buriels). But during the 14th century it evidently confused everyone. By then, the -s ending on a noun was being thought of as a plural. So when people saw the word redels (as it was usually spelled in the Middle Ages), they thought it of it as a plural form, riddles. During the 15th century, they gradually dropped the -s to make a new singular form, riddle.
There’s a collection of Old English riddles in one of the finest Anglo-Saxon manuscripts: the Exeter Book. It was compiled in the late 10th century, and is so called because it was acquired by Bishop Leofric for Exeter Cathedral some time afterwards. It contains over thirty poems and over ninety verse riddles. They cover a wide range of subjects reflecting the Anglo-Saxon way of life, such as weapons, book-making, animals and everyday objects.
Each riddle presents a topic in a mysterious or puzzling way and asks the reader to identify it. Some are the equivalent of the modern ‘dirty joke’. The riddle whose answer is ‘a key’ begins like this: ‘Something wondrous hangs by a man’s thigh …’ Here’s R. K. Gordon’s translation of one of the cleaner riddles:
I saw a creature in the cities of men who feeds the cattle. It has many teeth. Its beak is useful. It goes pointing downward. It plunders gently and returns home. It searches through the slopes, seeks herbs. Always it finds those which are not firm. It leaves the fair ones fixed by their roots, quietly standing in their station, gleaming brightly, blowing and growing.
The answer is: a rake.
The story of riddle doesn’t end here. By the 14th century it had developed the general sense of a ‘difficult problem’ or ‘mystery’. It came to be applied to people: He’s a complete riddle; I don’t understand him at all! And then, in the 16th century, the noun became a verb, meaning ‘to speak in riddles’. ‘Lysander riddles very prettily,’ says Hermia in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (II.ii.59).
Something very curious then took place. Some people started to use the verb and the noun together. Riddle me a riddle, says one 16th-century writer, meaning ‘Solve this riddle for me’. Others dropped the noun and used the verb twice: Riddle me, riddle me. Evidently people found the sound of the word appealing. And children did too, because eventually the phrase became part of a popular nursery rhyme:
Riddle me, riddle me, ree;
A little man in a tree;
A stick in his hand,
A stone in his throat,
If you tell me this riddle
I’ll give you a groat.
Riddle-me-ree became a frequent title for collections of riddles, and the phrase often appeared in children’s stories. You’ll find it in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, by Beatrix Potter.
What
an early exclamation (10th century)
Imagine the scene. You are in front of an audience, about to make an announcement or give a speech. Everyone is noisy. Some may have had too much to drink. You need to quieten people down. You’ve no hammer to bang against a table. There’s no spoon to clink against a glass. All you have is your voice. At least you can shout. But what will you say? ‘Ladies and gentlemen …’? ‘Quiet, please …’? ‘Excuse me …’? They all seem a little weak.
The poet-minstrels in Anglo-Saxon mead-halls had the same problem. They were called scops (pronounced ‘shops’), and their role was to tell the heroic stories of the Germanic people to the assembled warriors. The scops must have had prodigious memories. The epic poem Beowulf is 3,182 lines long – that’s about the same length as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – and, if it was recited in one go, without interruptions, it would have taken a scop well over three hours. But first he had to call the assembly to order. And he did this with a single word, which appears as the opening word of that poem: Hwæt! It is one of the first oral exclamations in English to achieve a literary presence. Nine Old English poems begin with the word.
How was hwæt pronounced? The letter æ was like the short a of modern English cat as spoken by someone from the north of England. The h shows that the w was pronounced with aspiration – a puff of air. Anyone today who makes a distinction in their speech between whales and Wales is using the old hw sound. And if we turn the whole word into modern spelling, it appears as What!
Hwæt certainly packs an auditory punch. Scholars usually translate it as ‘Lo!’, or as a story-telling opener such as ‘Well now’ or ‘So’, but nothing quite captures the short sharp impact of a Hwæt! With its open vowel and high-pitched final consonant, it’s a vocal clap of the hands. We can easily imagine a hall of warriors falling silent, after such an attention-call.
What! continued to have an exclamatory use throughout the Middle Ages, when the word came to be spelled in the modern way and gradually broadened its meaning. It began to express surprise or shock. It could be used to hail or greet someone, in the manner of a modern Hello! And it acted as a summons. In The Tempest (IV.i.33), Prospero uses it to call his spirit-servant to him: ‘What, Ariel! My industrious servant, Ariel!’
We don’t use what as a greeting or summons any more. The closest we get to that is in the phrase What ho!, which lasted well into the 20th century in Britain, and is still sometimes heard. Its fashionable use among the upper classes led to a neat parody by P. G. Wodehouse in My Man Jeeves (1919):
‘What ho!’, I said. ‘What ho!’ said Motty. ‘What ho! What ho!’ ‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’ After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.
What! is still used today as an exclamation of surprise or astonishment, often tinged with irritation or anger. We can expand it with an intensifying phrase: What the devil! What the dickens! What on earth! And if our emotion is so great that we’re at a real loss for words, we simply leave the sentence hanging in the air: What in the name of …! What the …!
What, spelled wot, was especially visible as an exclamation in the mid-20th century, during and after the Second World War, when everything was in short supply. All over Europe appeared the drawing of a man with a small round head, a long nose and two hands, peering over the top of a wall. He was called Mr Chad, and he was always complaining about shortages, using such phrases as ‘Wot, no eggs?’ or ‘Wot, no petrol?’ In the USA he was called Kilroy, and a similar cartoon contained the caption ‘Kilroy was here’. In Australia, ‘Foo was here’.
The origin of Chad is uncertain, but it’s likely to derive from the nickname of the cartoonist George Edward Chatterton, who was known to everyone as Chat. The caption became a catch-phrase, and it stayed popular long after wartime shortages disappeared. It’s still with us. In recent months I’ve seen the drawing on a wall where someone was complaining about the lack of a good mobile phone connection. The writing said simply: ‘Wot, no signal?’
3. The name may vary, but the face remains the same – one of the most widely travelled pieces of 20th-century graffiti. Theories abound as to the origins
of the names Chad, Foo and Kilroy, with several real-life candidates suggested. The character has been given other names too. In the British army, for example, he was called ‘Private Snoops’.
Bone-house
a word-painting (10th century)
What comes into your mind when you hear the word bone-house? It sounds like a building where someone has put a number of bones – animal bones, perhaps. Or maybe human. I once visited an ancient monastery church in Belgium, and in the crypt, on shelf after shelf, were the skulls of innumerable generations of monks. That felt like a bone-house. But whichever way you look at it, bone-houses are for the dead. Charnel-houses, we would call them these days – from the Latin word for ‘flesh’, carnis. Flesh-houses.
The Anglo-Saxons used the word. Ban-hus (pronounced ‘bahn-hoos’) it was then. But they used it to talk about something very different: the human body while still alive. It paints a wonderful picture. That’s what we all are, at the end of the day. Bone-houses.
Evidently the picture was an appealing one, for the poets coined several words for the same idea. They also describe the body as a ‘bone-hall’ (bansele, pronounced ‘bahn-selluh’), a ‘bone-vessel’ (ban-fæt, ‘bahn-fat’), a ‘bone-dwelling’ (ban-cofa, ‘bahn-cohvuh’) and a ‘bone-enclosure’ (ban-loca, ‘bahn-lockuh’). The human mind, or spirit, was a banhuses weard – ‘guardian, or ward, of the bone-house’.
This sort of vivid description is found throughout Anglo-Saxon poetry. It’s one of the earliest signs of an impulse to create figures of speech in English literature. It was an impulse that extended well beyond English, for similar word creations appear in the early poetry of other Germanic languages, such as the Viking tongue, Old Norse. But the Anglo-Saxon poets really took it to heart. There are over a thousand such descriptions in the great Old English saga Beowulf.
The coinages are called kennings, a word adapted from the Old Icelandic language. Kenning is from the verb kenna, ‘to know’, and it captures the idea that these coinages have a meaning that is more insightful than can be expressed by a single word. Ken is still used as a verb in Scots English and in some northern dialects of England. And we still hear it as a noun in the phrase beyond our ken.
The poets loved kennings, because they were opportunities to vary their descriptions when they told long stories of heroes and battles. Stories of this kind repeatedly refer to the same kinds of events, such as a battle, or a banquet or an army crossing the sea. We can easily imagine how a story could get boring if the storyteller said ‘And he crossed the sea in a boat’ a third, fourth or tenth time. How much more appealing would be fresh, vivid descriptions – especially ones that would suit the rhythm of the verse and echo the sounds of other words in his lines.
So, what could a ship be? A wave floater, sea goer, sea-house or sea steed. And the sea? A seal bath, fish home, swan road or whale way. Anything could be described using a kenning. A woman is a peace-weaver, a traveller is an earth-walker, a sword is a wolf of wounds, the sun is a sky candle, the sky is the curtain of the gods, blood is battle sweat or battle icicle. There are hundreds more.
Kennings don’t seem to have been much used outside of poetry, and they fell out of use after the Anglo-Saxon period. But the same poetic impulse lies behind many compound words. We hear it still when a scientist is described as an egghead, or a criminal as a lawbreaker or a boxer as a prize-fighter. But we don’t seem to take the same joy in creating vivid alternative descriptions as the Anglo-Saxons did.
Perhaps we should. Imagine a football sports commentary, for example, in which the commentators used kennings. They’d be talking about net-aimers and ball-strikers and perhaps, when things got exciting, score-cuddles, card-offs and ref-haters. Am I misremembering, or have I sometimes heard the occasional off-the-cuff kenning in a commentary? If so, without realising it, the bone-house is tapping into a tradition that is a thousand years old.
Brock
a Celtic arrival (10th century)
During the 11th century, several books were written which listed the names of plants and animals, especially in relation to their medicinal properties. In one of the first, around the year 1000, we read this: ‘Sum fyðerfete nyten is, ðæt we nemnaþ taxonem, ðæt ys broc on Englisc.’ Translation: ‘There is a four-footed animal, which we call taxonem, that is brock in English.’
Brock, the Old English name for a badger. It was the everyday name until the 16th century, when badger took over in standard English. Why the change? Probably because brock had developed a number of unpleasant associations: people would talk about a stinking brock, and by 1600 the word had come to be applied to people who were dirty or who behaved in an underhand way – much as someone might use the word skunk today. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (II.v.102), Sir Toby Belch sees Malvolio puzzling over the meaning of a letter and says Marry, hang thee, brock! Malvolio is indeed, badger-like, rooting out the sense. But Toby is also calling him a stinker.
Badger, by contrast, had positive associations in the 16th century. The word probably comes from badge, the white mark on the animal’s head being its most striking feature. Badges had strongly positive associations, being chiefly associated with the ‘badges of arms’ used by knights. The word was also being used, in the sense of a ‘distinguishing sign’, in the 16th-century translations of the Bible. So if people wanted an unemotional way of talking about the animal, badger would be more appealing.
But brock didn’t disappear. It stayed as the everyday name for the animal in regional dialects all over the British Isles and was especially popular in the north of England. Then it started to creep back into standard English – as a name. Brock the badger. It has appeared in countless sympathetic accounts of badgers by naturalists, and is the regular name used in children’s stories, most famously by Alison Uttley. Few other dialect words have achieved quite the same press.
Brock feels so English – so it comes as a bit of a surprise to discover that it isn’t Anglo-Saxon at all. It’s Celtic. We find it in Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx as broc, in Welsh and Cornish as broch, in Breton as broc’h. The animal goes under a quite different name in the Germanic languages, such as grævling in Danish and Dachs in German (dachsunds were bred to be badger hounds). It didn’t come over with the Anglo-Saxons. That’s what makes it linguistically interesting. It’s one of the very few words to have come into Old English from the Celtic language spoken by the ancient Britons.
Hardly any Old English words have a clear Celtic connection. There are a large number of place-names in England of definite Celtic origin, such as Avon, Exe and Severn, and all the names beginning with pen (‘hill’), such as Penzance and Penrith. But if we restrict the search to everyday words, in addition to brock, we find crag, wan, dun (‘grey-brown’), bannock (‘piece of a loaf or cake’) and a dozen or so others. A few more might have had a Celtic origin, such as puck (‘malicious spirit’) and crock (‘pot’), but similar-looking words appear in the Scandinavian languages, so we can’t be sure.
Why did the Anglo-Saxons ignore the Celtic words they would have heard all around them? There are many conflicting explanations. Perhaps the two ways of life were so similar that the Anglo-Saxons already had all the words they needed. Or perhaps there was so little in common between the Celtic way of life as it had developed in Roman Britain and the Anglo-Saxon way of life as it had developed on the continent that there was no motivation to borrow Celtic words. There might even have been a conscious avoidance of them. If the Celts were forced out of England by the invaders, as some people believe, then one of the consequences would be a distaste for all things Celtic, especially the language. On the other hand, some Anglo-Saxon noblemen gave their children British names, such as Cerdic and Cedd. Cædwalla, for instance, was king of Wessex in 685, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and his is a distinctly Welsh name.
Whatever the reasons, Celtic words are conspicuous by their absence in Old English. Brock, crag and the others remain as an intriguing reminder of what might have been.
English
the language named (10th century)
Much of what we know about the early history of Britain comes from The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, written in Latin around 730 by the Northumbrian monk Bede. He tells us how, in the 5th century, ‘three of the most powerful nations of Germany – Saxons, Angles and Jutes’, arrived in the British Isles. It isn’t possible to say exactly where they came from, or even whether they were as nationally distinct from each other as Bede suggests. But one thing is clear: two of those nations gave us the name Anglo-Saxon.
It’s first found in 8th-century Latin writers, who used the phrase Angli Saxones to mean the ‘English Saxons’ (of Britain) as opposed to the ‘Old Saxons’ (of the continent). The Angli part was the important bit, in their mind. It was the crucial, contrastive element – the English Saxons, as opposed to other kinds. Only later did the phrase come to mean the combined Germanic people of Britain.
In the 9th century, the name broadened its meaning. In the Treaty of Wedmore, made between King Alfred and the Danish leader Guthrum around the year 880, we see English opposed to Danish, and it plainly refers to all of the non-Danish population, not just the Angles. Also, at around the same time, English is used for the language. When Bede’s book was translated into Old English, we find several passages which take a Latin name, and then say ‘… this place is called in English …’, giving the English equivalent.
English came first; England came later. It took over a century before we find the phrase Engla lande referring to the whole country. There was then a long period of varied usage, and we find such forms as Engle land, Englene londe, Engle lond, Engelond and Ingland. The spelling England emerged in the 14th century, and soon after became established as the norm.
The Story of English in 100 Words Page 4