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Lexical Evidence for the Relative Chronology of Old English Poetry

Paper · 2013 · Leonard Neidorf

Summary

Leonard Neidorf asks whether vocabulary can help date Old English poems relative to one another. Metrical dating, which relies on verses that only scan with pre-seventh-century phonology, is well developed. Lexical dating is much less mature. Because the two methods rest on unrelated linguistic changes, each can test the other. The article has two parts. The first examines Dennis Cronan's 2004 argument that uncommon poetic simplexes found in common across six poems (Widsið, Exodus, Beowulf, Maxims I, Daniel and Genesis A) indicate early composition, and sets it against the alternative readings Roberta Frank offered in 2008. The second looks for further words outside Cronan's narrow criteria that seem to have died out early in the Anglo-Saxon period. Neidorf concludes that these six poems keep an archaic word layer that had disappeared before ninth-century verse and prose were written. This matches the metrical chronology and strengthens the case for early dating, Beowulf included.

Key points

  • The article appears in SELIM 20 (2013–2014), pp. 7–48, received March 2014. The volume itself is dated 2013–2014, although the request gives 2019.
  • Cronan's set has 14 restricted simplexes linking the six poems, for example dyhtig, gombe, eodor, missere, þengel, lufen and bresne.
  • suhtriga ("nephew") is the strongest case:
    • Outside these poems it occurs only in glossaries traced to seventh-century glossae collectae.
    • In Beowulf and Widsið it survives inside the dvandva compound suhter(ge)fædren, a word-formation type that was no longer productive.
    • Synonyms such as brōðorsunu and nefa stay in use throughout the period.
  • Against Frank's claim that the word was reserved for sacral contexts, Neidorf notes three things:
    • Glossaries give both suhtriga and brōðorsunu for Latin fratuelis.
    • The Genesis A poet calls Lot by both terms within 25 lines.
    • Ælfric uses only brōðorsunu for Lot.
  • On the metrical side, Fulk (1992) found that archaisms such as non-contraction and non-parasiting are most frequent in Beowulf, Genesis A, Daniel and Exodus. They become rarer in Cynewulfian and Alfredian poetry.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Two lines of evidence that rest on unrelated causes (metre versus vocabulary) give much stronger support when they agree, and a clash between them is a useful reason to revisit one of them.
  • I2. A word's absence only counts as evidence of obsolescence if later writers had real chances to use it and chose a synonym instead.
  • I3. Synonymy is tested from usage rather than assumed: two words glossing the same Latin item, and one author applying both to the same person, together show interchangeability.
  • I4. Items of unequal strength are judged by how well one hypothesis explains the whole cluster, not by any single item.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Silver data should be agreed by witnesses with truly independent error sources, such as a rule-based parser and gparse, and their disagreements should be routed to repair rules.
  • I2 (learn): Negative-control evaluations should count a missing construction only where the context made it possible, so that genuine gaps are not confused with lack of opportunity.
  • I3 (world): Synonym and ontology links taken from WordNet could be confirmed when coreference shows two lexemes naming the same entity in one text.
  • I4 (answer): When answering QA on tales, competing readings could be scored by how many clues each accounts for, with weak clues weighted lower, and that tally reported as the explanation.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Harvard UniversityCambridge · United States112 works · 42,023 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksClassics · 116 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 249 works

Cite

Cite as Leonard Neidorf. 2013. Lexical Evidence for the Relative Chronology of Old English Poetry. SELIM 20.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.20.2013.7-48

@inproceedings{neidorf2013lexical,
  title = {{Lexical Evidence for the Relative Chronology of Old English Poetry}},
  author = {Leonard Neidorf},
  booktitle = {SELIM 20},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.20.2013.7-48},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.20.2013.7-48}
}

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  79. Received 06 Mar 2014; accepted 22 Apr 2014 find
  80. SELIM 20 (2013–2014) Leonard Neidorf • find

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