The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  Much the same happened with the Roman inheritance, though the invaders did borrow some Latin words spoken by the Celts. The Romans were in Britain from 43 BC to AD 410 and many Celtic Britons would have spoken or known some words from Latin. Yet the Roman influence on the first one hundred fifty years of invaders’ English is very slight — about two hundred words at most. “Planta” (plant), “win” (wine), “catte” (cat), “cetel” (kettle), “candel” (candle), “ancor” (anchor), “cest” (chest), “forca” (fork); a few for buildings, “weall” (wall), “ceaster” (camp), “straet ” (road), “mortere” (mortar), “epistula” (letter), “rosa” (rose). The Roman influence was to be revived through the reintroduction of Christianity but, as with the Celts, we have the Angles, Saxons and Jutes taking on very little at first. It could be that they rejected the Romans because they did not want to kow-tow to a language, therefore a people, who had a historical claim to be their superior. The masses — the Celts — would be enslaved, their language rejected; and equally the relict of empire would be spurned, its great classical sentences also rejected. Less than three percent of Old English, the bedrock vocabulary, is loan words from other languages. The invaders kept it tight, just as their heirs, the Puritans, a thousand years later, were to do when they went into America.

  Though purists maintain that English did not fully exist until the late ninth century, the time of Alfred the Great, there is little doubt that as its many varieties increasingly consolidated, English in one of its dialects from much earlier on determined the common tongue.

  We can see it most plainly in many places in England today. The “-ing” ending in modern place names means “the people of” and “-ing” is all about us — Ealing, Dorking, Worthing, Reading, Hastings; “-ton” means enclosure or village, as in my own home town of Wigton, and as in Wilton, Taunton, Bridlington, Ashton, Burton, Crediton, Luton; “-ham” means farm — Birmingham, Chippenham, Grantham, Fulham, Tottenham, Nottingham. There are hundreds of examples. These were straightforward territorial claims. The language said: We are here to stay, we name and we own this.

  Then came the great work, the laying of the foundations of the English language, and one which endures vigorously to this day.

  Our everyday conversation is still founded on and funded by Old English. All of the following are Old English: is, you, man, son, daughter, friend, house, drink, here, there, the, in, on, into, by, from, come, go, sheep, shepherd, ox, earth, home, horse, ground, plough, swine, mouse, dog, wood, field, work, eyes, ears, mouth, nose — “my dog has no nose” — broth, fish, fowl, herring, love, lust, like, sing, glee, mirth, laughter, night, day, sun, word — “come hell or high water.” These words are our foundation. We can have intelligent conversations in Old English and only rarely do we need to swerve away from it. Almost all of the hundred most common words in our language worldwide, wherever it is spoken, come from Old English. There are three from Old Norse, “they,” “their” and “them,” and the first French-derived word is “number,” in at seventy-six.

  The hundred words are: 1. the; 2. of; 3. and; 4. a; 5. to; 6. in; 7. is; 8. you; 9. that; 10. it; 11. he; 12. was; 13. for; 14. on; 15. are; 16. as; 17. with; 18. his; 19. they; 20. I; 21. at; 22. be; 23. this; 24. have; 25. from; 26. or; 27. one; 28. had; 29. by; 30. word; 31. but; 32. not; 33. what; 34. all; 35. were; 36. we; 37. when; 38. your; 39. can; 40. said; 41. there; 42. use; 43. an; 44. each; 45. which; 46. she; 47. do; 48. how; 49. their; 50. if; 51. will; 52. up; 53. other; 54. about; 55. out; 56; many; 57. then; 58. them; 59. these; 60. so; 61. some; 62. her; 63. would; 64. make; 65. like; 66. him; 67. into; 68. time; 69. has; 70. look; 71. two; 72. more; 73. write; 74. go; 75. see; 76. number; 77. no; 78. way; 79. could; 80. people; 81. my; 82. than; 83. first; 84. water; 85. been; 86. call; 87. who; 88. oil; 89. its; 90. now; 91. find; 92. long; 93. down; 94. day; 95. did; 96. get; 97. come; 98. made; 99. may; 100. part.

  English had also dug into family, friendship, land, loyalty, war, numbers, pleasure, celebration, animals, the bread of life, the salt of the earth. This deep, long-toughened tongue proved to be the basis for dizzying monuments of learning and literature, for surreal jokes and songs superb and slushy.

  With the 20/20 vision of hindsight it seems as if English knew exactly what it was doing: building slowly but building to last, testing itself among competing tribes as in centuries to come it would be tested among competing nations, getting ready for as difficult a fight as was needed, branding the tongue. Even in its apparent simple directness and comparatively limited vocabulary — twenty-five thousand recorded words compared with the hundreds of thousands of today — it is always able to rise to greatness.

  “We shall fight on the beaches,” said Churchill in 1940, “we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Only “surrender” is not Old English. That, in itself, might be significant.

  Rome came back, not with a sword but with a cross. In 597 Augustine arrived in Kent, sent from Holy Rome with all its authority by Pope Gregory, who had been impressed by the blond-haired Anglian boy-slaves (“non Angli,” said the apparently compulsively punning Pope, “sed angeli”). In 635, Aidan independently arrived in the north of England with all the apostolic zeal and learned crusading ferocity of the Irish Celtic Church. In remote monasteries and enclosed orders, in arcane services and devoted godly scholarship, without threat and despite hindrance, these men and their successors fed the growing English with their Church Latin. Gradually English, partly I think because it could control these marginal praying clerics, took on Latin, the second classical tongue of the ancient world, and Latin smuggled in Greek. The English talent to absorb and its appetite for layerings had begun with what are called “loan words.”

  These words began by creeping in at the outer edges of the concerns of the pagan English. “Angel,” “mass” and “bishop” came in, as did “altar,” “minster,” “abbess,” “monk,” “nun” and “verse.” Greek slipped in via Latin with, for example, “alms,” “psalm,” “apostle,” “pope” and “school.” As importantly, existing Old English terms were given new powers, a new philosophy. Heaven and hell, for instance, or Halig Gast (Holy Ghost), Domesday (from Judgement Day). Eostre, a famous pagan goddess, gave her name to the most important of the Christian festivals. And through Christianity we have the first recorded entrance into our literature of the common man, Cædmon the swineherd who, untutored we are told and inspired wholly by faith, composed this hymn in English.

  Now we shall praise the Keeper of the Heavenly Kingdom

  The power of the Lord of Destiny, and his imagination . . .

  Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard

  metudæs maecti end his modgidanc . . .

  This Northumbrian version is from an eighth-century manuscript. But it is not his words alone which are of central importance here. What matters, I think, is that through the words comes a faith new to most of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, the melders of English, and the ideas inside that faith. Ideas of resurrection, of a life after death, were in parts of the Germanic culture, but heaven and hell were of a different order. As was the idea of saints, the company of angels, of sin, and especially of a gentle Saviour, a non-warrior God; so were all the intellectual complexities of the Roman faith and its often tortuous and tormented way of looking at the material world. The word “martyr,” for instance, opened up astounding possibilities to non-Christians.

  As the Church grew more pervasive in the land, not least through its recruitment of wealthy and learned aristocratic women like St. Hilda, so its overall philosophy flourished and Latin slid under the carapace of English and would never be expelled or ignored again. This was the quietest but possibly in the long term the most successful grafting on to English, for it brought to the barely literate lusty language book-tested ways of thinking and words which could and often did direct a whole view of life. The messages and words of Christianity would feed English for
more than a thousand years. It was English’s first encounter with an invading force of thought and slowly, over centuries, overcoming long-held practices and superstitions, English let it in. The tightly bonded local language began to open up.

  Rich bishops went to Rome and brought back pictures, books, holy relics, craftsmen, but above all, as far as the adventure of English is concerned, they brought back writing, and writing began to mould and advance the native language.

  The Angles, Saxons and Jutes had not brought a script with them. They used runes. The runic alphabet (called the “futhorc,” named after the first letters of the runic alphabet, just as our “alphabet” is from the first letters of the Greek alphabet) was made up of symbols formed mainly of straight lines, so that the letters could be carved into stone or wood or bone. This best equipped them for short practical messages. They are represented in the solutions to some of the Exeter Riddles. Runes were capable of poetry, as can be seen on the eighth-century Ruthwell Cross near Dumfries in Scotland, which shows events from the life of Christ. There are lines of runes, as in the poem “The Dream of the Rood” in which Christ’s Passion is told from the point of view of the Cross on which he was crucified.

  The Cross speaks:

  Ic wæs mip blodi bistemid [Old English translation]

  I was with blood bedewed

  Runes could not only be used for poetry, they were sufficiently developed to have coped with War and Peace. But these straight lines were designed to be cut, chiselled on hard surfaces: wood, metal, stone and bone. The Christians brought with them the manuscript book and a different script, a technology more suitable for the new medium of vellum and parchment. English was emerging from the tribal Babel as a resourceful tongue, but it had no great written language and without that it would be for ever condemned to the limbo of vernaculars all over the world whose attempt to live on by sound alone has often doomed them to insularity, then to irrelevance, finally to oblivion. Occasionally there is desperate resuscitation from a few survivors who know that to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life. Only writing preserves a language. Writing gives posterity the keys it needs. It can cross all boundaries. A written language brings precision, forces ideas into steady shapes, secures against loss. Once the words are on the page they are there to be challenged and embellished by those who come across them later. Writing begins as the secondary arm but soon, for many, becomes the primary source, the guardian, the authority, the soul of language.

  Written words stimulate the imagination as much as any other external reality — fire, storm, thunder — and yet they can express an internal reality — hope, philosophy, mood — in ways which also provoke the imagination, engage with that astounding faculty and set it off to make more words, adding to the visible map of the mind. Writing helps us fully to see what it is to be more completely human. “The word was made flesh and dwelt among us” can apply to the alphabet as well as to Christ. The alphabet created and unleashed a new world.

  The first manuscripts were in the Roman alphabet brought to Northumbria by Aidan and other Irish missionaries. That was the basis for the Old English alphabet, for in the monasteries the monks began to use the wonderfully flexible, clear and beautiful half-uncial majuscule script (which can be seen in the Lindisfarne Gospels). Monks recruited locally saw the signs and were converted. An alphabet most likely sown by anonymous clerics grew out of the Latin and remarkably early, by the seventh century, Old English had achieved its own alphabet. It was like discovering intellectual fire. A, æ, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, þ,ð, , u, uu (to become w much later), y. Twenty-four letters to begin with, but from those few letters has flowed an incalculable number of variations, fine distinctions and pyrotechnics, from Shakespeare to James Joyce, from David Hume to Noam Chomsky, from Francis Bacon to Crick and Watson’s DNA, to tens of thousands of journals, novels, magazines and newspapers.

  In the early years English knew its place, and its place was literally in the margins: we see a small plain English hand crawling its shy translation above the towering, magnificently wrought Latin letters which brought the word of God to save the souls of the English. I have always been ridiculously pleased that the Lindisfarne Gospels, the first great English work of art, was a book. Though using craftsmen from other lands it was made in the Northumbrian part of what was to become England. The Lindisfarne Gospels were executed in brilliant colours, a mixture of Germanic, Irish and Byzantine motifs, elaborately designed letters, decorated with precious stones, works to awe the masses and to praise God.

  A few miles away, in the monastery of St. Paul in Jarrow — in the early eighth century — at about the same time as the Gospels were produced, a local boy who had gone into the monastery at the age of seven and become the great scholar Bede wrote Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, which gave status and lineage to the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. His transcendent skills and talents founded the history of the English speakers. He wrote more than thirty books in Latin but it is said that he believed that the language of the people should also be employed. Soon after Bede, English began to dare to compete. Mostly, written early English was used for practical matters — laws, charters, the daily stuff of definition — dull at the time but its information rusting to gold as centuries passed. Sometimes, though, and as early as the seventh century, the new language boldly enters into the heart of things.

  Our Father

  Who art in heaven

  Hallowed be thy name . . .

  Fæder ure

  uþe eart on heofonum

  Siþin in nama gehalgod . . .

  It is so moving. Spoken aloud the similarity is all but a twinning. Even there on the page: ure/our; Fæder/Father; u/who; eart/art; heofonum/ heaven. And later:

  And forgyf us ure gyltas, swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum

  And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

  Forgyf/forgive; gyltas (guilts)/trespasses.

  Across thirteen centuries the sounds come to us, the sound of our ancestral voices speaking across time and space, words holding ideas and ideals about the conduct of life with which we still engage today, words in the English common tongue.

  As if that were not enough, as the roots went down, English, with the self-confidence of the new player in the book, planted its claims to literature. When precisely works like The Wanderer, The Seafarer and Beowulf were composed is hard to establish, but that they came out of the intellectual ambitions of this period — seventh, eighth century — seems possible. English, settled now, began to play. The Exeter Book with its riddles gives us insights into the word games so beloved of English-language crossword solvers and Scrabble addicts ever since. The seeds are already there in what were so long mis-called “The Dark Ages.” This is from the sole remaining manuscript, in the library of Exeter Cathedral, which contains ninety-four riddles.

  What is this?

  I live alone, wounded by iron,

  Struck by a sword, tired of battle-work,

  Weary of blades. Often I see war,

  Fight a fearsome foe. I crave no comfort,

  That safety might come to me out of the war-strife

  Before I among men perish completely.

  But the forged brands strike me,

  Hard-edged and fiercely sharp, the handwork of smiths,

  They bite me in the strongholds. I must wait for

  A more murderous meeting. Never a physician

  In the battlefield could I find

  One of those who with herbs healed wounds

  But my sword slashes grow greater

  Through death blows day and night.

  The first four lines in Old English read:

  Ic eom anhaga iserne wund

  bille gebennad, beadoweorca sæd,

  ecgum werig. Oft ic wig seo,

  frecne feohtan. Frofre ne wene,

  Answer: The Shield

  The greatest of the Old English poems (written around AD 900) is Beo
wulf, the tale of a Scandinavian hero who goes to the aid of Hrothgar, the Danish king, to defend him against the monster Grendel. It has been called the first great epic poem in the English language. It begins:

  Hwaet, we Gar-Dena in geardagum

  So, the Spear-Danes in days gone by

  We are, yet again, hearing our own language, but this time through the art of the poet or poets using techniques which are the property of poetic literature. The language has been alchemised into literature.

  Seamus Heaney’s recent translation interprets the work for our own age while providing an echo of the original, which reads, speaking of Grendel the monster:

  Mynte se manscaða manna cynnes

  summa besyrwan in seleþam hean.

  Heaney writes of Grendel:

  The bane of the race of men

  roamed forth, hunting for prey in the high hall.