THE LEXICAL FIELD “WARRIOR” IN LA3AMON’S BRUT – A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE TWO VERSIONS

Abstract

Brut is landmark in the transition period between Old and Middle English. After the period, which was highly prolific in literary output, the Norman Conquest accelerated the decline of Old English, that is the West Saxon dialect, as written language. The aftermath of the Conquest saw the substitution of English as official language both by Latin and Norman French. Nevertheless, Old English continued to be copied in certain centres of learning, for example Worcester and Bury St Edmunds.1 Some examples of early Middle English writing in the twelfth century, for instance the poem Durham (c. 1100), which is close in spirit to the tradition of Old English poetry, and prose texts originating in the south-west Midlands, in particular the saints' lives of the Katherine group and Ancrene Wisse, and the glosses of the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, further testify to this lasting interest in England.2 John Frankis has even posited Anglo-Saxon revival circle in Worcester,3 and he suggests that La3amon may have been in contact with this circle.Since the poem first attracted scholarly attention, the version of the Brut extant in British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A. ix, has frequendy been remarked upon as having or rather archaic nature. Frederic Madden considered a remarkable circumstance, that we find preserved in many passages of poem the spirit and style of the earlier writers.4 Henry Wyld posited that La3amon's language is not merely the ancient speech of Englishmen, almost free, at least in the older text, from foreign elements, but that it is the language of their old poetry.5 Eric Stanley suggested that La3amon made conscious effort to make the language of his poem archaic: His antiquarian sentiments seem to have led him to the creation of idiom in tune with his love of the English past.6 The Caligula manuscript displays this apparently conscious backward orientation on various linguistic levels, such as its phonological, morphological and lexical features.The second extant version of Brut, British Library, Cotton MS Otho C. xiii, is more concise and modernized rendering of the story of Britain's Celtic rulers. It has long been regarded as inferior in poetic quality to the Caligula Brut, its uldmate point of reference. Only in recent decades has there been perceptible shift in scholarly opinion, thus granting the Otho Brut the status of work of art in its own right.7In this article, I intend to examine certain aspects of lexicon as represented in the lexical fields hero and in both versions of the Brut. These lexical fields, which potentially convey notions of Old English heroism, are particularly suited to unravel connection with the past. In the following sections, I consider the two Brut texts separately, each in its own right. First, I concentrate on the distribution of lexemes in the Caligula Brut. Secondly, I present the equivalent usage of terms in the Otho redaction. In last, summarizing step, I contrast my findings from both the Caligula and the Otho Brut to highlight certain tendencies of compositional design.The lexical field in the Caligula versionThe Caligula version displays variety of terms in the wider sense designating both groups and individuals. It has twenty-two words for an individual warrior and fourteen denoting an army or retainers. These words do not form homogeneous etymological, semantic or stylistic unity which continuously remained in use throughout the Middle English period. Not all of the words are of origin; some were exclusively poetic in Old English, some do not occur outside Brut, while some are widespread in other Middle English texts.I consider necessary to untangle this cobweb of mixed terms in order to get better understanding of La3amon the poet as represented in Caligula A. …