[HN Gopher] When did the English discover the Anglo-Saxons? (2018)
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When did the English discover the Anglo-Saxons? (2018)
Author : HeckFeck
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-10-29 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.etymonline.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.etymonline.com)
| macintux wrote:
| I had no idea how close we came to losing _Beowulf_. I wonder how
| many other Old English poems have been lost.
| retrac wrote:
| The great majority. In Anglo-Saxon times, England had a
| population of about 1 - 2 million and several percent were
| highly literate. There would have been hundreds or thousands of
| authors in each generation, tens of thousands of priests,
| bards, etc.
|
| In the generations after, only the manuscripts that impressed,
| or writings that were the most celebrated as literature, were
| preserved or duplicated. Those not held in high regard were
| sometimes recycled for paper, or ultimately lost when the last
| copy fell apart. Cultural biases play a role too. There wasn't
| much interest in preserving pagan legends in newly
| Christianized England, and so much of the Anglo-Saxon
| literature we do have is from the later period and usually
| utilitarian or Christian in nature.
|
| The scale of the loss is clearer further south. We have book
| lists from the Roman and Greek classical era. The playwright
| Aeschylus is thought to have written about 100 plays, of which
| 6 survive. Julius Caesar and Aristotle were prolific authors,
| and celebrated individuals almost continuously since their
| deaths, and yet the majority of their works did not survive.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Keep in mind that a fair-sized codec was generally written on
| _velum_ , not paper, and would have required a sizeable herd
| of sheep merely to provide the hides. The _material_ cost of
| a book of such times could well approach or exceed 1 million
| dollars by present reckoning, even before labour of
| approximately 1 man year to copy it out by hand _per copy_
| was added.
|
| Gutenberg's revolution hinged not only on moveable type, but
| on rag-based paper (wood pulp wasn't widely used until the
| 19th century), and reduced the cost of a book by about an
| order of magnitude, possibly two. Far less expensive than
| before, but still phenomenally expensive contrasted with a
| paperback or digital download.
|
| That said, yes, the production, reproduction, preservation,
| and distribution of books was very highly limited. Much
| official practice relied strongly on individual memory and
| recollection, with minimal recordkeeping via media. See the
| use of tally-sticks used for recording and reconciliation of
| debts (and the burning down of Parliament, eventually), as an
| example.
|
| As with most works of antiquity, a large part of the present
| ascribed value is due to the failure of most such works to
| survive.
|
| There's also the historiography of early records, and how and
| in what form(s) early documents did survive, where and when
| they did. Often it's only through quotations or citations
| that any record exists at all.
|
| I've found it delightfully ironic that one of the more
| tedious forms of online debate, popular with top-quoting
| users of Usenet and email lists, of citing passages and
| responding to them directly in-line, was apparently pioneered
| thousands of years ago, and that it is often the harshest and
| most strident critics of earlier works who are to be credited
| with even a partial survival of them, by virtue of their
| anacronistic Fisking.
| ghaff wrote:
| If you look into medieval northern European history at all, one
| of the things that is striking is how incredibly fragmentary
| what has been discovered/passed down is. Large swaths of what
| we "know" are often based on one ecclesiastical book. Or a
| single archaeological discovery in a field somewhere like
| Sutton Hoo.
| mwaitjmp wrote:
| Gildas, Bede, Asser and to the people who duplicated and
| preserved their works we thank you.
|
| Take Offa's Dyke for instance, very little is known about its
| purpose from historical records (though we can guess). A
| structure which ran the length of what is now the English and
| Welsh border.
| macintux wrote:
| I got partway through _The Swerve_ ; really should pick that
| back up.
| gerdesj wrote:
| You don't have to go back so far for language to get tricksy. I'm
| 50, British and speak en_GB_en (lol etc) with a roughly RP
| accent. My mum also had a similar accent when I knew her, except
| she was a Devonian farmer's daughter born 1942. If she reverted
| her accent and language back to how her peers spoke in South
| Devon in the 1950s and 60s then she was quite hard to follow and
| that was my mum. Granny and Grandad (b. 1902) could really make
| themselves unintelligible if they wanted to. Mind you, Granny was
| from Manchester and Grandad from Totnes.
|
| We also seem to have forgotten that quite a few other languages
| have been lost in the UK and far more recently. Cumbric and
| Cornish for starters. Both are Brythonic ie like Welsh, Scottish
| and Irish. Cumbric was spoken in Cumbria ie top left of England
| and Cornish in Kernow - Cornwall - bottom left, next door to
| Devon. It's not quite that simple but good enough. Cornish is
| being revived, Cumbric not so much although I'm sure I read
| somewhere that shepherds still count in Cumbric - someting like
| yan, tan, tithera, methera.
|
| You have to be careful when you pin languages into your display
| cabinets. Unlike insects the bloody things persist to get up and
| tell you to piss off in a variety of amusing ways. Sadly what
| seemed routine and boring to our forebears was often not
| documented or obliterated and ultimately lost. Painstaking
| research gets us some of the way but it is absolutely that:
| painstaking.
| toyg wrote:
| Even just the slang evolving can make the nominally-same
| language into something alien. My parents' '70s slang from a
| specific Italian city is full of funny words that don't mean
| anything anymore.
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| further reading, How England got its name.
| https://www.persee.fr/doc/onoma_0755-7752_2009_num_51_1_1506
| jefftechentin wrote:
| > They expanded the search to include other Germanic relatives,
| such as Icelandic and older forms of German, to shed light on Old
| English.
|
| Interesting, is this 17th century German fandom the basis of
| Tolkien's work? His Middle Earth was so fleshed out, I guess it
| would make sense.
|
| > By 1720 intellectual interest in England had turned to Druidry,
| Celtic heritage, Stonehenge, and the imaginary world of
| Phoenician Druids bringing the Abrahamic religion to Britain,
| complete with chariot races around Stonehenge.
|
| Reminds me, of the Hindu Nationalists view of history. Maybe not
| in form but in motivation. State/Church wanting to found its
| origins in itself.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| And, how and why Old English was rediscovered. Fascinating piece.
| luxpir wrote:
| It's good, isn't it. There are some stellar Reddit, Discord and
| Youtube communities forming around OE. All intertwined really.
| That crossover period is really understudied. At least by me. A
| great book is The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, in a pseudo/shadow
| English about the English resistance to Norman incursion.
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