The Old English Name of the S-Rune and “Sun” in Germanic

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas P. A. Simms

The name of the Old Englishs-rune,sigil, as found in various medieval manuscripts, is puzzling, as it is the only Anglo-Saxon rune name that is etymologically a loan word. This article examines the variant spelling <sygil> found only in MSCodex Vindobonensis795, arguing that the spelling with <y> is a scribal interpolation. In addressing how an Old High German-speaking scribe might have come to make such an interpolation it is argued that the wordsugilfound in Continentalrunica abecedariaought to be considered an Old High German lexeme relevant to this discussion. A novel etymology for words for ‘sun’ in Germanic is presented, particularly for forms derived from thel-stem variants of the Proto-Indo-European heteroclite.

Author(s):  
Michael Lapidge ◽  
Peter Matthews

Vivienne Law acquired a mastery of the field of late antique and early Medieval Latin grammar, her first task was to familiarise herself with the early medieval manuscripts in which grammatical texts were transmitted. This task necessitated constant travel to British and continental libraries in order to provide herself with transcriptions of grammatical texts; it also necessitated the acquisition of a huge collection of microfilms of grammatical manuscripts. Her work on these manuscripts soon revealed a vast and uncharted sea of unedited and unstudied grammatical texts, for the most part anonymous. A major component of her life's work was the attempt to chart this sea. Her earliest publications reveal a profound experience of grammatical manuscripts and a refusal simply to reiterate the opinions of earlier scholars. All these publications report new discoveries, such as previously unknown Old English glosses to the Ars grammatica of Tatwine, an early 8th-century Anglo-Saxon grammarian; or unsuspected aspects of the relationship between Anglo-Saxon and continental learning as revealed in the transmission of the grammars of Boniface and Tatwine; or the true nature of the jumbled and misunderstood grammar attributed to the early Irish grammarian Malsachanus.


2010 ◽  
Vol 90 ◽  
pp. 153-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hines

AbstractThe seventh-century vernacular laws from the kingdoms of Kent and Wessex specify fines or compensation payments using units of account that have given us familiar terms in the numismatics of this period:scillingas(shillings),sceattasandpæningas(pennies). In light of the use of cognate words in Gothic and Old High German, and the comparative values given in the Old English law-codes themselves and in the fifth-century Theodosian Code, it is suggested that these represent a regular and durable bimetallic system correlating values in gold and silver. This proposition is examined further against the evidence of weighing-sets from sixth- and early seventh-century Anglo-Saxon graves, and it is argued that the results give greater and more precise meaning to the use of gold and silver in Early Anglo-Saxon artefacts, such as the great gold buckle from Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk.


1978 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 149-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald E. Buckalew

When Henry VIII‘s Antiquary, John Leland, died in 1552, he left several volumes of notes and transcripts which have come to be called his Collectanea Volume iii of this collection, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains a long series of extracts from a Latin–Old English glossary entitled ‘Ex antiquissimo Dictionario Latinosaxonico‘. It has not yet been noticed in print that these extracts are a transcript of items from Ælfric‘s Glossary, and it has not been realized that they were copied from a manuscript not otherwise attested. Although (excluding a Latin–Old Cornish version) the Glossary is extant in seven medieval manuscripts (four virtually complete) and in two sets of medieval excerpts – two more manuscripts being known from sixteenth-and seventeenth-century transcripts – this record of a twelfth text is significant for several reasons. It provides valuable textual evidence; it is an additional sign of the medieval popularity of the Glossary; it is an important witness to the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon studies in the years immediately following the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII; its publication in Hearne‘s edition of the Collectanea in 1715 was in fact the first printing of any version of Ælfric's Glossary (although not recognized as such); and it demonstrates the need for more attention to Leland's Collectanea by both medieval and Renaissance scholars.


Author(s):  
Chris Jones

This introductory chapter contextualizes the philological study of language during the nineteenth century as a branch of the evolutionary sciences. It sketches in outline the two phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism for which the rest of the book will subsequently argue in more detail. Moreover, the relationship between Anglo-Saxonism and nineteenth-century medievalism more generally is articulated, and historical analogies are drawn between nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism and more recent political events in the Anglophone world. Finally, the scholarly contribution of Fossil Poetry itself is contextualized within English Studies; it is argued that ‘reception’ is one of the primary objects of Anglo-Saxon or Old English studies, and not merely a secondary object of that field’s study.


Author(s):  
Patrizia Lendinara
Keyword(s):  

This chapter surveys Old English glosses of Latin works in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and discusses the format of glosses, the types of texts that were glossed, hermeneutic texts, merographs, dry-point glosses, glossae collectae, class glossaries, and alphabetical glossaries. The author also treats the production and study of grammar in Anglo-Saxon England, touching on the works of Bede, Tatwine, Boniface, Alcuin, Priscian, and Aelfric.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 275-305
Author(s):  
Helen Appleton

AbstractThe Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, sometimes known as the Cotton map or Cottoniana, is found on folio 56v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, which dates from the first half of the eleventh century. This unique survivor from the period presents a detailed image of the inhabited world, centred on the Mediterranean. The map’s distinctive cartography, with its emphasis on islands, seas and urban spaces, reflects an Insular, West Saxon geographic imagination. As Evelyn Edson has observed, the mappa mundi appears to be copy of an earlier, larger map. This article argues that the mappa mundi’s focus on urban space, translatio imperii and Scandinavia is reminiscent of the Old English Orosius, and that it originates from a similar milieu. The mappa mundi’s northern perspective, together with its obvious dependence on and emulation of Carolingian cartography, suggest that its lost exemplar originated in the assertive England of the earlier tenth century.


1995 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 43-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Lucas

When Old English studies were in their infancy in the seventeenth century, scholars such as Franciscus junius (1591–1677) had very little to study in print. With no grammar and no dictionary (until Somner's in 1659) they had to teach themselves the language from original sources. Junius, whose interest in Germanic studies became active in the early 1650s, was so proficient, not only at Old English, but also at the cognate languages that he became virtually the founding-father of Germanic philology. Over the years Junius made transcripts in his own distinctive imitation-Anglo-Saxon minuscule script of many Old English texts, transcripts that have subsequently proved invaluable, especially where the original manuscripts have been damaged or lost.


Archaeologia ◽  
1868 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-420
Author(s):  
John Brent
Keyword(s):  

The “Old English,” or Anglo-Saxon, Cemetery at Stowting had not, I believe, been systematically explored until the close of the year 1866; yet its existence was rendered probable by the discovery of antiquities about twenty-two years since, when the road abutting on the ground was lowered by the parish authorities.


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