Hana Videen

This is a great concept, and I like how the book is organized: each chapter covers a theme (food and drink, weather, etc.), and ends with a wordhord that brings together all the Old English words used in the chapter. Pronunciation guides are provided too, making this part especially fun to read aloud. It seems like there isn’t a lot of Old English literature kicking around, but there are multiple translations of what does exist, and I really liked how Videen compared different translators’ choices and rationales to illustrate how one word can have multiple nuances. Even more intriguing are the words for which no great translation exists because they’re used only once in the extant literature (these are called hapaxes, great new word).

I will say this is probably a book that’s better for flipping through over an extended period, rather than rushing to finish because you’re on a library deadline. But if you like learning new words or are interested in this period of history, I definitely recommend it. I now want to dig out my two translations of Beowulf! (I have the Seamus Heaney and the Maria Dahvana Headley translations.)… (more)

This is a delightful compendium of various Old English words which both shows us some of the continuities in the language over more than a thousand years—sumer, wulf, leornung-mann, ears-endu—but also something of how different the mentalities of the inhabitants of early medieval England were. It matters that for these long ago English people, a "mearc-stapa" ("boundary stepper", one on the fringes of society) could be thought of as monstrous, or that there was no word that meant "nature", only "sceaft" ("creation"), an awesome and often terrifying place haunted by elves and other inhuman beings.

There are a couple of slips about history here and there that may be the result of sloppy editing more than anything else (e.g. it was technically the Feast of the Conception, not of the Immaculate Conception, in the Middle Ages; in a quill pen, the "longest hollow sections" of the feather don't "serve as barrels for holding ink", you cut a small slit at the tip of the pen which lets you take up a little ink at a time using capillary action). Still, an enjoyable compendium of "hord-wynn" ("hoard-joy") that's perfect for dipping into if you find pleasure in language.… (more)