Mind your language

24 November 2007

The language of Beowulf

As the joint authors of The Ring of Words (Oxford, 2006) point out, J.R.R. Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings, has Treebeard listing creatures that include ‘bear bee-hunter, boar the fighter’. Tolkien makes one of his characters a bearish shape-shifter and a fighter too, in the person of Beorn, encountered in The Hobbit. His name also simply means ‘bear’, and by night he takes the form of a bear, fighting like a berserker at need.

A berserker, someone who goes berserk, is just a ‘bear-shirt’, for our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had the general notion that we act within a body as if it were a shirt or cloak. Beowulf’s name suggests that he takes after his totem animal in a fight.

The wolf itself was known by the kenning of greaghama, a ‘grey-hame’ or ‘grey-skin’. It is instructive to note that perfectly respectable Anglo-Saxons were named after the wolf. An Archbishop of York, who died in 1023, was called Wulfstan, or in Latin simply Lupus, ‘wolf’, the author of a sermon that made life miserable for generations of undergraduates 900 years or so later. In fact about 22 of his sermons survive and they are of some interest if you are interested in that sort of thing.

Slightly later comes a saint called Wulfstan, whose brother was Aelfstan, ‘elf-stone’, also an ecclesiastic. These pagan names were Christianised by the very men who bore them. Only by an accident of history do we lack a St Beowulf.