Illness as a Burden in Anglo-Saxon England

Abstract

As a culturally constructed concept, illness may be conceptualised through various metaphors across different times and cultures. This paper presents evidence based on readings from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form (Healey et al. 1998) and the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) that in Old English illness is conceptualised as a heavy burden. The significance of the illness is a burden metaphor in Old English is greater than in Present Day English, in which, as pointed out by Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014) it would not be usual to speak of a heavy illness. The paper also investigates whether there is evidence for a nascent form of the military metaphor for illness and medicine, as identified by Sontag (1978/1991) and exemplified in Middle English by Diaz-Vera (2009). The military metaphor suggests a different approach to illness, in which one ‘fights’ the affliction. This is not well-evidenced in Old English, and it is argued in this paper that these two conceptual metaphors are based on distinct cultural schemas (Quinn 1987). While illness is a burden is to an extent grounded in embodied experience (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), the conceptualisation in Old English cannot fully be understood without also taking into account cultural schemas influenced by the humoral theory of disease aetiology, and by the religious context.