M.J. Harper and others at the lively and interesting site Applied-Epistemology.com are more than a little suspicious that Beowulf, and with it most if not all of the texts written in Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”), are forgeries created in the 16th century. It’s a really interesting argument. The Tudor period was a time of incredible cultural flowering and it was a time when the newly conscious nations of Europe, including England, were hungry for documents establishing their ancient heritage and, thus, legitimacy. Every nation wanted its Homer. The trade in forged religious relics had died with the Reformation, but a vigorous trade in national and literary relics took its place, and it is likely that the libraries of the gentry, whence the contents of the emptied-out monasteries landed, would also have been full of fabrications — many of them created by out-of-work former monks and scribes.

The Beowulf manuscript in the British Library is the sole source for the supposed Dark-Age story that everyone reads in English Lit, and its provenance can only be dated with any surety to right around 1700, the first time it actually is mentioned as part of the Cotton Library collection. The fire-damaged manuscript however bears the signature of a well-connected 16th-century Anglo-Saxonist Laurence Lowell, and is generally assumed to have passed through his hands sometime in the mid-1500s. If Lowell didn’t actually have a hand in creating the document, he may have acquired it via his employer, Sir William Cecil, when Lowell worked in his household tutoring Cecil’s ward, the young Edward de Vere (the later-famous Earl of Oxford, who in my view is the best candidate for the real authorship of Shakespeare’s plays).

Not unconnected to certain players in the story of the Beowulf forgery (if it is that) was the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, also known as Bishop Ussher. He knew Cotton and used his library for his own research, and he also famously dated the creation of the world to 4004 BC, providing fuel for centuries of Creationist absurdity about the young age of the world. He’s the one who said that fossils were put in the rock to test our faith. It is really in the sphere of literature and history that we ought to be “creationists.” Documents may well be younger than they seem, essentially cultural fossils placed in the rock, made new to look old. More and more, despite initial misgivings, I am excited by the possibility that Beowulf is a far younger creation than anybody ever realized.

One of the reasons I always loved Beowulf and tried to get friends to actually read it is that aspects of it feel so weirdly modern. It has such wonderful aspects of sci-fi horror, for example: a resentful outcast monster lurking outside the light of the cheerful halls, preying on people at night, part of a race of creatures who have acid for blood. There’s a battle at the bottom of a lake. How cool is that? It doesn’t exactly feel like mythology, but like a novel. And then there’s the final dark episode with the dragon, which is totally classic. It’s a really dark and cool story, full of twists and turns and beautiful imagery of a misty, ancient Northern kingdom. This is why, despite Woody Allen’s quip that you should never take a class where they make you read Beowulf, readers are often drawn to the story and keep trying to make (invariably terrible) film versions of it.

The “acid for blood” thing has always stood out in my mind as particularly anachronistic for a story supposedly written down somewhere on either side of the year 1,000 and based on older oral tradition. Consider how vividly the poet describes it (this is from Seamus Heaney’s translation):

Meanwhile the sword
began to wilt into gory icicles
to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing,
the way it all melted as ice melts …
its blade had melted
and the scrollwork on it burned, so scalding was the blood
of the poisonous fiend who had perished there.

Alien, anyone? I’m not a chemist, but this sounds like a description of nitric or sulfuric acid’s affect on iron. Those acids were discovered by the Arab alchemist Geber in the 8th century, though were not industrially produced and widely used in Britain until, well, the 16th century. I have a hard time imagining a Dark-Age Anglo-Saxon scop (poet) or even a 10th or 11th century scribe writing such a description. What kind of experience would someone in Britain at that time have with highly corrosive acids? I don’t think a writer necessarily needs to have seen or heard about a thing to be able to imagine it, but this is an awfully singular image that strikes me as out of place before the Renaissance. (I’d welcome hearing a dissenting view on that from someone more acquainted with the history of chemistry/industry.)

Even more anachronistic, to my mind, is the covert theme of Beowulf, which is melancholia. I’ve always felt that the Beowulf-poet was not just some bard reciting one of the favorite legends of his people, but an original creator of a poetic work about the sickness of his own soul. The monster that terrorizes the previously cheerful hall of Heorot reads like a model of clinical depression: He is an exile, condemned to lurk beyond the reach of the light spilling from the hall of men, forced to listen in bitterness to the sound of their harps, the clink of cups, and their laughter. Unable to join them because of his original guilt (he is one of the “sons of Cain”), he lives instead with his mother at the bottom of a murky, monster-filled lake.

Anyone who has suffered depression would recognize these images and identify with Grendel’s alienation from the cheerful happy people, the stocky, manly Beowulves of this world (and perhaps would even identify with the Freudian/Hitchcockian theme of unresolved bitter and dependent feelings toward a similarly alienated mother). Grendel is a brilliant portrait of the bitter self-exile of the depressed person. By contrast, Beowulf himself is nothing more than a comic-book caricature, a frat guy cum uber-hero. In describing this contrast between the noble hall of the cheerful heroes and the alienation of the monster, the Beowulf poet was describing his own painful alienation from his fellows. The poem was a poetic expression of that melancholy loneliness.

People have always experienced introverted sadness, but just as “clinical depression” is a cultural construct of our age, melancholia was a cultural construct of the Renaissance. It was in the 15th Century that this kind of socially alienated introversion began to be romanticized and explored as an aspect of genius by writers and philosophers and playwrights. To my knowledge, you don’t get sensitive, sympathetic portrayals of melancholics before this period; and while Grendel is not exactly a sympathetic portrayal, there is definitely something sad about him and his life. It is hard not to feel his pain as he runs off, sans arm, to die at home with his mother. It is this sympathetic aspect of his character that makes Grendel seem so modern, and so inviting to modern reimagining by writers like John Gardner.

There is the whole notion that J.R.R. Tolkien, entranced by the mysteries of Beowulf and its ancient idiom, wrote The Lord of the Rings to flesh out the ancient mythological world of the Anglo Saxons and, in the process, create a uniquely English myth. What if he wasn’t original? What if, in fact, that’s what the original 16th-century writer of Beowulf was himself doing? I’m reminded of the quote by Hegel: The mysteries of the Egyptians were mysteries for the Egyptians themselves. There is an occult recursion in history, if you look carefully, and Tolkien’s relation to Beowulf seems like an example of that process.

Some of the pleasure of the “Beowulf-as-forgery” idea is admittedly simply the thrill of conspiracy, an unsolved mystery. (Finding out the truth will require carbon-dating the manuscript–perhaps after Harper and his friends gain sufficient legitimacy for their theory that the British Library could be persuaded to perform the necessary tests on this British national treasure.) But I also find that it actually adds to my pleasure in the text to read it through the lens of its being a possible product of the age of Shakespeare or Milton. I actually think it adds to the genius of the work to see its mysteries as being part of an atmosphere of pastness created imaginatively by a Renaissance writer, rather than simply a more or less faithful recording of a Dark Age legend.

M.J. Harper (The Secret History of the English Language–see previous post) has been taken to task for an apparent misunderstanding of how evolution works: A form can’t evolve from another living form, goes the dogma; rather, two related forms are said to share a common ancestor. So, for example, humans did not evolve from chimpanzees; rather, humans and chimpanzees share a recent (5 million years ago) common ancestor. Harper’s suggestion that the Germanic and Latinate languages “evolved from” Modern English (or something pretty close to it) sounds like making the faux pas that humans evolved from chimps, as if chimps haven’t been changing for the past 5 million years just like we have.

But that’s just political correctness—or, I suppose, good manners. The professional insistence on not calling one extant form a descendent of another extant form is really just a matter of politeness. It would offend fragile human sensibilities to say we evolved from chimps—I mean, just look at them!—so we say instead “from a common ancestor.” And the chimps feel better too, because yeah, they haven’t been just slacking off either; they’re nothing like those boobs of the Pliocene. When you assume evolution moves at the same pace for everyone, everyone saves face; everyone keeps up appearances that “we’ve all been evolving all this time, everyone evolves the same amount, nobody’s calling anyone ‘primitive.’”

But just because a word or a concept can be used derogatorily doesn’t mean it’s not descriptive. Let’s put aside political correctness (and, heck, manners) just a moment. Evolutionary biologists know that some species and some adaptations are more primitive than others. Evolution does not occur at a constant rate for all species, and there is no reason one living species couldn’t have branched off another living species that, for whatever reason, did not change at all in the interim. When speciation occurs due to geographical separation, for example, there is nothing in principle mandating that one branch could become radically different due to rapidly changing local selection pressures while the other branch could be relatively unchanged after a given period of time due to selection pressures that remained constant in its particular neck of the woods. Speciation is not Newtonian: It doesn’t demand an “equal and opposite reaction” on the part of both bifurcating species, esp. if geography is the reason for the split.

Cockroaches and coelacanths and sharks are called “living fossils” because they’ve stayed the same while the world around them has changed more rapidly. It’s not a sign of being old and stuffy; it’s a sign of a good adaptation, one that nature hasn’t found a way to improve upon in its particular niche. Harper is suggesting that this is what happened with English—or, English as she was spake in Neolithic Britain. Some sort of English (he argues) was spoken in the dim mists of prehistory by a group that settled throughout Europe. On the Continent, affected by different historical and demographic pressures, this ur-English bifurcated into two broad linguistic streams: German and French, which in turn evolved into various local forms. But on the island of Britain, it changed much more slowly. (I gather that place-name archaeology and genetics are starting to corroborate this idea, at least somewhat, although linguists will have nothing to do with it.)

In other words, following Harper’s line of thinking, saying German and French didn’t evolve from Modern English is trivially true only in the sense that they didn’t evolve from the English spoken in our day, but the English spoken thousands of years ago. Yet, if that ancient English was so close to Modern English to be regarded as, essentially, the same language, then why not say German and French evolved from English?

Well, I already answered this question: It’s just politeness that dictates you don’t say that. The Germans and French must be allowed to save face, here. No doubt, should Harper’s paradigm gain more acceptance, manners will dictate that we name the English spoken in pre-Roman times something else, like “proto-English” or whatever (since “Old English” is already misappropriated by the Anglo-Saxonists), and it will be called a “common ancestor” to modern English and the bitter tongues of the Continent.

Reckoning the origins of words is a politically significant exercise, and etymologies, wherever and whenever they are from, are notoriously full of shit. They always reflect someone’s political vested interests or fantasies of “who was here first.” Yet somehow the old dons who gave us our etymological bible, the OED, have always remained above suspicion. These are tweedy respectable old guys who don’t go in for politics or fantasy (well, ahem, besides J.R.R.). And good god, what a huge dictionary it is, with such teeny tiny little words. It must all be true.

If a mysterious, snarky personage named M.J. Harper (about whom all is known is that he “lives in London”) has anything to say about it, the last hundred-odd years of English etymology, philology, archaeology, and history are due to be swept aside, and with it the hoary origin myth of the English language that we learned in school. The Secret History of the English Language is a bracing slap-in-the-face for anyone who sort of cherishes that myth. But despite my geeky love of English philology a la Tolkien and the summer I spent trying to learn Anglo-Saxon so I could read Beowulf in the original, I have to give it to this guy: I think he could be on to something.

At first, Harper’s “applied epistemology” sounds like the puffed-up ‘methodology’ of a manic-depressive paranoid who either never finished his PhD or, despite finishing it, works in a used bookstore, and either way has nursed a grudge against his professors for twenty or thirty years. As a science editor I get sent a lot of self-published books from the pseudo-science and pseudo-academic fringe — heck, I consider myself part of that fringe — so I know the signs of this mentality. But I don’t think Harper can be reduced to that rubric. He appears to be a smart guy, and rigorous enough in his thinking to be taken seriously, despite his flip tone. And a bit of snooping around on the internet reveals that ideas that harmonize well with his theory are emerging from archaeology (Win Scutt) and genetic studies (Oppenheimer) as well. I don’t know, but a bona fide paradigm shift might be in the offing.

Basically, Harper’s idea is this: English did not evolve out of Anglo-Saxon, as we were all taught. There’s no evidence this happened, and moreover, such an account of the origins of a major language runs counter to everything we know about language everywhere else in the world: It’s a remarkably inert thing. It doesn’t evolve quickly, and people don’t just throw an old one out to adopt a new one. History also offers no real evidence for the cherished English creation myth. There’s no evidence for the “Celtic” language originally spoken in the areas that were taken over by the Anglo Saxons, for example.

Harper’s method boils down simply to the application of Occam’s Razor: The simplest explanation is probably correct. It is far more likely that what the natives were speaking when the Normans arrived, what they were speaking when Hengest and Horsa arrived, and what they were speaking when the Romans arrived, and what they were probably speaking even back when Stonehenge was built, was pretty much what they speak now. Middle English is not an intermediate form between Modern English and Anglo-Saxon (mis-named “Old English”); it’s basically Modern English spelled differently, simply because it reflects the awkward beginnings of English as a written language. Anglo-Saxon, on the other hand, was a related but foreign language spoken by the foreign conquerors, which duped everyone into thinking it was the original form of English only because it happened to be written down before English ever was (though not very often or frequently—Harper even suggests Beowulf is a forgery, although I don’t think such a detail is necessary to his argument). Likewise, the Normans didn’t infuse English with its “Latinate” component. That was part of English all along.

Migrations and incursions and sweepings-away-of-whole-peoples are far more stimulating to the mind than glacial inertia. That’s why myths are full of such upheavals. Thus, how much more exciting to say that the word “beef” was imposed by our Norman conquerors after 1066 than to say that the word “beef” evolved from … well, “beef.” According to Occam’s Razor as, um, wielded by Harper, the Anglo-Saxons and Normans, like the Romans before them, didn’t do anything to the language. In both cases the “doing to” had been done long, long earlier, much more slowly, and in the opposite direction. Because English, he suggests, is really the mother of the tongues that have until now been thought to be its ancestors.

As I understand Harper’s parsimonious schema, something like English was originally spoken all over the continent, giving rise to German and the Scandinavian languages in the north as well as French and the Latinate languages to the south. (I’m ignoring for simplicity the Celtic languages that held fast all up the Atlantic seaboard, including Wales, Western Ireland, and Western Scotland.) So despite what you were told in school, “beef” was original and boeuf descended from it. Which has gotta hurt, if you’re French. The consolation for the French is that theirs is the mother of the Latinate tongues, including Latin (which originated as an artificial, written shorthand—the reason those inscriptions are so succinct). The fact that English only survived in its more or less original form on an Island makes a lot of sense: Events unfolding on the continent accelerated linguistic change. Islands often preserve older biological species even after their continental counterparts have gone extinct or been replaced, so why not languages?

Harper doesn’t point to much data, unfortunately; he’s more interested in uncovering gaps and anomalies and showing how people have imposed their own, convoluted stories to cover them up or obscure them. And the Occam’s Razor explanation sounds boring, at least at first: It requires no invasions, conquests, genocides, or any of the other colorful affairs of history. But for those whose academic reputations aren’t at stake, the implications of Harper’s theory would indeed be pretty amazing. How cool to think, for example, that English could be the oldest Indo-European language in Western Europe—a direct link to the mind and culture of, for example, the people who built Stonehenge?

As a Wargo, descended from the Eastern European hinterlands, home of the original Indo-European culture from which all European languages (as well as Sanskrit) derived, I am naturally drawn to the wer- family of words—one of the main word families of that ancient language, with descendents still in the Slavic, Germanic, and Latin tongues. The wer- family (actually a few related word groups having in common this w followed closely or immediately by an r) is the backbone of English, and if English is viewed not just as a tongue but as a philosophy, the wer- words contain its fundamental intuitions about man and his place in the cosmos. I sort of think of the wer- words as the soul of the Old English worldview.

My favorite of this vast and important family, and a good starting point for any tour of the Anglo-Saxon (AS) tongue, is wyrd, the AS word for “fate.” It survives now in the wonderful word weird, thanks partly I suppose to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The “weird sisters” in Macbeth were prophetic witches, but they derived mythologically from the three norns, sister-goddesses in Norse mythology who together wove a man’s destiny and could thus foretell it: Urd or Wyrd (the “ur-norn” or norn of the past) spun the yarn or thread of a man’s life, Werthandi (the norn of the present) took the measure of this yarn in the present (think “worth”), and Sculd (“should,” the norn of the future) represented that which was yet to pass, the world in which we pay our debts, fulfill our obligations, and die. (Sculd cut the yarn of a man’s life after Werthandi had measured it out.)

Wyrd comes from the AS word weorthan, “to become,” which in turn came from the Indo-European root wer-, meaning to turn or spin (hence the “spinning” of the yarn of our life). Although it is usually translated as “fate” or “destiny,” those Latinate words imply a predetermination that is not present in wyrd. Rather, wyrd, as becoming and as turning, really represents “what has turned out” or “what will have turned out” as well as “what you are turning into” or “what you will have turned into.” There is definitely a sense of a man working (from AS wyrcan, “to do”) with his wyrd to weave his future—working actively with the strands of his past life to make something new of it, to become something else.

Because of its sense of turning, weorthan connotes direction. Our suffix -ward, as in toward, inward, backward, upward, and so, on comes from -weard. (In AS, andweard meant the present, and froweard, the future.) The AS root weardan is derived from a different Indo-European wer- cluster that has to do with watching, seeing, and guarding, but the sense of direction is often there—as in guarding (warding) or looking in a certain direction. From this root we get aware and wary, ward (from weard, keeper) and warden, as well as award and reward and wares (things that are guarded or watched). Rearward, interestingly, originally meant “rear-guard” (not “toward the rear”). (Guard, in itself, is an interesting story—see below.)

The sense of turning or bending in the wer- family of words also creates a cluster of interesting words to do with the pitfalls of emotion and destiny. There is writhe, to twist/turn (AS writhan), which may produce a wreath, or if it is a person, a wraith—a twisted and anguished soul, or even an undead spectre. If you twist something (like a towel or a neck), you wring it. And a ring, AS hring, is like a turning, or wreath, of metal. The state of being tortured or twisted in anger is wrath, or wroth. Worry comes from wyrgan, to strangle. There is also wrangeln, “to wrestle,” from which we get wrangle. And if you are turned aside from the straight and narrow—the riht (“right”)—then you are wrong (wrang). There are a host of other English words that have this ‘bendy, twisty’ connotation: wrinkle, wrench, wrap, warp, and worm (from AS wyrm), to name a few.

Wrecan (“to inflict, or punish”), whence wreak, is related to weorthan, and is the source of the words wretch (which meant an exile or someone punished) and wretched. Some of wrecan’s descendents have a ‘twisted’ or ‘crumpled’ connotation, as though they have been conflated with the descendents of weorthan over the centuries. Words like wreck. There is also wrought, a word that is often confused as a past tense of wreak, but is actually an alternate to worked, past tense of work, from the AS wyrcan, “to do”—which also gives us a wright, a craftsman or producer of something, like a playwright or a cartwright (a maker of carts).

Turning connotes change, so wer- words are to be found in ideas like worth, which meant what something has turned or changed into—which in the realm of commerce means what or how much a thing can be traded or exchanged for, hence our modern, monetary sense of the word—and worthy. There is also stalwart (“steadfast”), which combines –wart with stathol (“foundation”). Note that wort, as in St. John’s Wort, meant plant (whence we get root), and derives from a different Indo-European root, wyrt, but one with obvious resonances in the whole group of wer- words, with their twists and turns and bends, as well as their veerings (veer is also from wer-, but via the French -vert, equivalent of -ward—think words like vertical or introvert). To root (as in rummage or “root around in the dirt”) came from the AS verb wrotan.

There are also a number of wer- words that have somewhat separate genealogies etymologically but are related philosophically.

Importantly, there is write, which is usually considered to derive from writan, which means to cut or mark or scratch, but which could just as easily (to my mind) come from weorthan in the sense that writing is a turning, not only of lines/letters, but also of turning out. You have only to think of the elaborately wrought Lindisfarne Gospels to see writing as something that twists and turns upon itself—something wrought as well as writhed. And there is of course word, which also has slightly different roots etymologically but ‘goes with’ this whole family of things that turn, or which we turn, and which can be written.

My other favorite ‘other’ wer- word is, well, wer, which meant “man.” Wer has its echoes in the Latinate vir (man) and its derivatives virile (manly) and virtue. But the AS wer only survives in two places in modern English. One is the word werewolf (literally “man-wolf”), a verbal echo of a time when the world was full of shape-changers, or things that turned into other things. The other hiding place of the AS wer is all around us: the world. In AS, this was weorold or “age of man” (wer+old or eld, whence elder). The world in this sense was not the spatial world we think of nowadays, but the temporal, finite time during which men walk upon the eorth, before the end of days (the Norse Ragnarok, or the Christian domesdaeg, the day of doom or “judgment”).

This brings us to the gr-words. The spatial sense of the modern English world was expressed by the AS word middangeard, which J.R.R. Tolkien famously translated as “middle earth” but is more literally translated as “middle enclosure.” Geard, whence yard, once meant any enclosed or walled area, ranging from a fort—something guarded—to the whole inhabited world as a kind of vast enclosure. It is related to the AS verb gyrdan, which meant to encircle or surround, and gives us the modern words gird (as in “gird your loins”), girt, and girdle (from AS gyrdel).

Geard/yard assumed diminished, increasingly domestic meaning over the centuries, and now tends just to mean the grounds attached to a house; it is related to the French jardin, whence the modern English garden. Orchard comes from AS orceard, thought to be an alteration of ortgeard or wyrt-geard—an enclosure for cultivating plants. But the old sense of geard as a vast encircled enclosure is also related to the modern English horizon, which comes (via French) from Greek horizein, “to limit/encircle,” from horos, meaning boundary.

Surely horos must be connected with the Greek hora, meaning time (whence we get words like hour, horoscope, etc.). In the same way, geard, the enclosure of the world, must connect to the AS gear, whence year. The seasons, of course, were marked by where the sun fell on the horizon, so a connection between the ideas of the horizon and cyclical time would have been a natural one to make in the geardagum, the “olden days” or days of yore (from AS geara). What about linear time? Perhaps it is a reach, but gearn (“string”), whence yarn, is what the norns spun, measured, and cut, symbolic of a man’s finite life and wyrd.

The word great, meaning large in size, I connect with the horizon too. Because it is the horizon that gives us our sense of scale. Something great is, to me, something that stands tall against the horizon, or that might even rise up from beyond it.

And what about yearning, from AS giernan or gyrnan? To yearn is to long or desire something in a kind of extreme, painful or melancholy way, to regret the loss of something. One yearns for what has, indeed, passed far away, as beyond the horizon, out of one’s geard.