Anglo-Saxon Exclamations

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I was looking that up just now :-). The thing about Old Welsh poems is that they are written in a completely different style, even the narrative ones. Stylised, gnomic (who knows what they mean?). I'm not an expert here but I'd say even the oral style doesn't very often seem to have an obvious first person singer addressing his audience.

Another problem with Y Gododdin is that there are no line divisions in the earliest surviving manuscript - the work is written out continuously as if it were prose! Whole research careers can be built on trying to reconstruct the "original" metrical structure - from which narrative tone derives so much.

But there are Welsh and Anglo-Saxon poems where the narrator is very clearly communicating a personal response/experience - as in The Dream of the Rood that DracoM pointed out, or poems of loss such as The Seafarer or The Birchwood Bower - but these are lyric rather than epic poems. So many tantalising fragments, written down centuries later from an oral source - maybe it's different in the contemporary Irish poetry, more of which exists extant, I believe - but this is way over the head of someone who has really only dipped his toes in the edge of the ocean.

[DracoM]

Do you think the DG ought to see this thread to reveal what R3 listeners talk about in their spare time? Might shake him a bit.

[french frank]

Do you think the DG ought to see this thread to reveal what R3 listeners talk about in their spare time? Might shake him a bit.

We may get AD showing us the way: he has an Oxford MPhil in Old Icelandic

[DracoM]

Then he definitely ought to see it!! Make him warm to our cause?

[gurnemanz]

I've never thought about any of this before and the idea that it might not be an exclamation at all but a rhetorical question appeals to me.

For some reason from O Level Latin, the exclamation "Eheu!" comes back to me across the decades, rendered by the Urban dictionary as "What a bummer!"

[Pabmusic]

I wonder whether just an echo of the AS declamatory/exclamatory hwaet (which of course is our what) survived in the old buffers' favourites, "eh what, old boy/fellow/chap?" and "lovely legs on that young filly, what?"

[jean]

Or maybe the old buffers were picking up the mistranslation?

[Pabmusic]

Or maybe the old buffers were picking up the mistranslation?

Indeed.

[french frank]

OED defines the usage:

As an interrogative expletive (sometimes with eh) usually at the end of a sentence, esp. in recent trivial or affected colloq. use.

And gives as an example

1785 F. Burney Diary 19 Dec. (1842) II. 398 He [sc. George III] said,—‘What? what?’—meaning, what say you?.. ‘..it is not possible. Do you think it is?—what?’

'Dontcha know' ?

And:

In rhetorical questions, implying an emphatic contrary assertion.

(Doesn't work here, though? 'Do we not know?')

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I wonder whether just an echo of the AS declamatory/exclamatory hwaet (which of course is our what) survived in the old buffers' favourites, "eh what, old boy/fellow/chap?" and "lovely legs on that young filly, what?"

That's it - I won't be able to read it now without hearing Nigel Bruce's Watson!

[Pabmusic]

That's it - I won't be able to read it now without hearing Nigel Bruce's Watson!