Chaucer and the Future of Language Study

Abstract

Chaucer and the Future of Language Study Ralph Hanna Keble College, Oxford University One of my second-year students, who will be a fine Old English philologist (as he hopes) in a few years, gave me a linguistic commentary on Ancrene Wisse last week. In it, he commented aptly on the repeated form sustren by pointing out that it showed the late Old English/early Middle English weakening of vowels of unstressed syllables (presumably to neutral schwa). But in our discussion, he came to see three further, more important details: (a) that the Old English plural for sister ends in either -er, -ra, or -ru, and that, as in many southerly dialects, the AB language here generalises the Old English weak plural -an (rather than expected strong -as), in this word perhaps specifically under the analogical force of the anomalous plural brethren; (b) that the Old English etymon is sweoster, a form analogous to that of modern German, and that the scribe here uses a Scandinavian loan (cf. Old Icelandic syster), probably testimony to the recorded Herefordshire Danish community;1 (c) that the vocalism underlying the spelling sus- indicates the retention in AB language of earlier (Old English / Old Norse) y as a rounded vowel, a southwestern and southwest Midland feature, rather than general unrounding to i (cf. Middle English spellings like fuyre, kunne). My student is learning rapidly to internalize the variety of detail that sophisticated early language study involves. Some of this may indeed be only ‘‘lore’’ and the kind of thing that will just ease and improve his comprehension as he reads further texts (not so much glossary– thumbing). Some is of general literary-historical import, that there were 1 See E. J. Dobson, The Origins of Ancrene Wisse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 118–21, 170–71, 369–79. 309 ................. 9680$$ CH11 11-01-10 12:36:08 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Danes in Herefordshire, for example. And some will just keep him from public embarrassment, predicating critical arguments on puns that aren’t historically feasible. My student is a bright boy, and you will, I’m sure, read his work in future. Thus, he’s already pretty adept at knowing how to use the big reference tools, the new MED and the Edinburgh Linguistic Atlas of Later Mediaeval English. But what he doesn’t know is the kind of problem that reference tools won’t get at.2a Ultimately, only the experience of Middle English—that you, as a mature scholar, carry with you in your head a lexical and grammatical sense of the totality of the language—addresses detail of this sort. But Chaucer has for most of the last century stood apart from such study, as too evident, only offering materials dèjá lu by the great Victorian founders of the discipline, the Skeats and ten Brinks. In one notably exceptional case, a great philologist, J. R. R. Tolkien, demonstrated the precision of Chaucer’s linguistic parody, the derision directed at an extreme northern dialect of Middle English, the students’ language in The Reeve’s Tale. Yet, so far as I know, neither Tolkien, nor anyone since, noted the ironization of that parody in ‘‘so theek’’ (A 3864) or in the rhyme ‘‘melle: telle’’ (A 3923–24), the first apparently well recognised fourteenth-century Norfolk joke.3 In this context, the appearance of Christopher Cannon’s study of Chaucer’s romance lexicon is salutary.4 Its general argument strikes me 2 One might consider, as a tiny example of LALME limitation, LP 5, which describes the language of BL, MS Egerton 927, inferentially from Salley, a Cistercian house on the Lancs./(WR) Yorks, border; it contains the unique copy of the adaptation of Grosseteste ’s Chateau d’amour ascribed to a Salley monk, ed. C. Horstmann, The Minor Poems of the Vernon Manuscript, EETS os 98 (1892). pp. 407–42. LALME states that the scribe’s rendition of OE hw is overwhelmingly wh, with a very small minority of spellings in qw. But the scribe offers clear evidence that, whatever inherited/traditional spelling he usually wrote down, in his speech, where and queer, when and queen were only distinguished by...