The Scarcity of Formations in -ere in Old English Poetry

Abstract

To denote personal agents, the poet of Beowulf very frequently resorts to words in -a and -end (ca. 70 and ca. 40 different instances respectively, including compounds such as æsc-wiga 2042, gar-wigend 2641, etc.) while this heroic epic provides only one instance of a derivative in -ere, i. e. leas-sceaweras (253). This article examines formations in -ere in Old English verse texts as opposed to prose texts and demonstrates the rare occurrence of the suffix -ere in verse, for which different factors are shown to be responsible: some formations in -ere seem to have entered the language later in Old English so that they would have found little acceptance in conservative poetic diction; others could not have been readily adapted for use in verse on metrical grounds; the formations in -ere would have been blocked by the great number of synonymous lexemes already available; some words in -ere might not have found their way into poetic language since they might have been used only within a narrow range of technical vocabulary or they might have been nonce words. The paper concludes with a brief examination of the use of -ere words in Old English prose texts, especially in Ælfric's and Wulfstan's works, to show that these two contemporary authors differ noticeably as to the use of words in -ere.