A Time for Words
By blending Anglo Saxon words with modern language, Hana Videen shows us how close the English of the past is to the English of the present.
Review by J.C. Scharl
As far as we can tell, English has the most words of any language (excepting, of course, those blessed tongues called “agglutinative,” like Hungarian and Korean, that can string words together and open up a practically infinite range of meaning), and the next on the list doesn’t even come close. There are somewhere around a million English words; by contrast, French has less than two hundred thousand, Russian around one hundred and fifty thousand, and the characters of Mandarin Chinese combine to make a little over one hundred thousand words.
There are a few reasons for this, but the one I find most intriguing is English’s tendency to borrow—and keep—from many different sources. Everyday English sentences are a blend of words with Latinate, French, and Germanic roots, as well as more recently adopted words from all over the world (pajamas, for instance, is from Urdu, sofa from Turkish, and glitch from Yiddish). English has a curious openness, making a space for any word it finds apt, uniquely specific, or simply fun.
But behind this glittering front, there is the deep and vast treasure-hoard of Anglo-Saxon (otherwise known as Old English): the oldest, if you will permit me such a generalization, source of what we recognize as “English.” This is the English not of Merrie Englande, nor even of Chaucer’s pilgrims; it is older by far, stretching back to before the Norman Conquest, when England’s imagination belonged not to France and Rome but to the North: to Denmark in the East, and Iceland in the West. Much of this treasure-hall is now lost to us; if a native English speaker were to pick up a book written in Anglo-Saxon, he or she would be bewildered by the unfamiliar words with a few runes sprinkled throughout. But hear those unfamiliar words spoken aloud, and suddenly all around the doors of the ancient hall crack open, letting the light in—or, perhaps, out.
Videen ingeniously weaves the Anglo-Saxon words into her paragraphs, so we encounter them as naturally as possible, and their presence in turn transforms the more familiar Modern English words.
Hana Videen’s new book, The Wordhord, strives to open those ancient doors a little more. Videen holds a PhD in Anglo-Saxon from King’s College London, and her love of her subject shines through every page. She began collecting her word-hord on her blog nearly ten years ago, where her sparkling style gave her etymological expeditions much broader appeal. The Wordhord is the culmination of her work.
This is no textbook, though it should be required reading for anyone trying to learn Old English. Instead, Videen ingeniously weaves the Anglo-Saxon words into her paragraphs, so we encounter them as naturally as possible, and their presence in turn transforms the more familiar Modern English words. Knowing the forebears, we see the children more clearly.
The unexpected delight of Videen’s book is how she organizes it. Each chapter becomes a little word-hord, clustered around a central topic. But even within chapters, Videen does not simply introduce lists of words or throw new terms at us willy-nilly. Instead, the book reads like a travel memoir. It reminded me, not stylistically but structurally, a bit of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s magnificent A Time of Gifts, where the author walks from Holland through Germany in the winter of 1933. Where Fermor builds his travelogue on the rocks of cathedrals and castles, Videen builds hers on lost words, and both writers reveal gently to us that what we thought of as archaic ruins are actually a whole vast world undergirding our own.
I have been thinking and writing a lot about time recently, specifically how beneath a veneer of inflexibility (“Time marches on!”) it is really a great deal more like a landscape: mountains, rivers that double back on themselves in their flowing, long empty plains, and somewhere unseen but all around, the sea. What marches is not time, but us. A fascination with time is wed, of course, to a fascination with memory, for what do we know of time without memory? And what are our memories but an ever-shifting seabed, set in place once long ago but stirred and moved by waves far overhead?
The chapters are not merely about words, but about words in everyday life—a life largely gone, but one that still strikes chords of longing in our hearts.
Videen’s book is a gift of cultural memory. Reading it, I had the sense of hearing a childhood song, whose words I’d long forgotten but whose tune sometimes still bubbles up at the oddest moment. Videen sings for us the lost songs of our language, and with them she evokes the childhood of the world. The chapters are not merely about words, but about words in everyday life—a life largely gone, but one that still strikes chords of longing in our hearts.
The chapter “Passing the Time” gives us the names of the months in Anglo-Saxon (my favorite is March, hreþ-monaþ, or Glory-Month, since it often includes the Resurrection), but in so doing, also gives a precis of the Church calendar. “Learning and Working” tells us the names for different cræfts and workers, and corrects some modern misunderstandings about the role of women in early medieval society. My favorite chapter is “Beyond Human,” which introduces us to the ælf, wearg, hell-rune, and other non-human characters in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Videen’s book is an etymological study, yes, but it is much more, and it should draw readers from across disciplines. Anyone with an interest in the English language at any of its stages—Old, Middle, or Modern—should peruse this book. In this hoard, there is a treasure for everyone.
J.C. Scharl is a poet, editor, and critic. Her poetry has been featured on the BBC and in New Ohio Review, Classical Outlook, Measure Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Dappled Things, Plough Quarterly, Fare Forward, and Euphony Journal (among many others). Her criticism has appeared in Plough Quarterly, Dappled Things, and others.
The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English was published by Princeton University Press on May 10, 2022. Fare Forward thanks them for their provision of a review copy, and invites you to purchase your own copy on their website here.