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The Old English Nominal Compounds in -Rád
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
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In Old English occur seven compound nouns (brimrád, hronrád, hwéolrád, seglrád, stréamrád, swanrád, wígrád) the second element of which is customarily interpreted in dictionaries, translations, handbooks, and critical writings as ‘road’ (via, Weg, Bahn); and this interpretation is the basis for the widespread dogma that the five of these compounds that refer to water are metaphors, or at least figures of speech, “poetic terms for the sea.” Unquestionably, this element is the word, occurring in OE in the simplex, which in Modern English means ‘road: an ordinary line of communication used by persons passing between different places, usually one wide enough to admit of the passage of vehicles as well as of horses or travellers on foot’ (OED). In no extant OE text, however, so far as the recorded instances indicate, does the simplex rád have this meaning; on the contrary, according to the OED the simplex first appears in this sense at the end of the sixteenth century—in 1596, in Shakespeare's I Henry IV II.I.16. Therefore, it is open to doubt that the bound element did actually in OE have the modern meaning in seven of the twelve extant nominal compounds in -rád. The presumption would be that in these seven, as in the other five (éorod, flocrád, setlrád, sweglrád, punorrád), it had a sense, or senses, not too remote from those of the simplex or of the related verb rídan, and that the construction of these compounds as well as the contexts in which they stand should form the basis of conclusions concerning their applications and uses, literal or figurative. The evidence afforded by extant OE texts supports the presumption.
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References
1 Only Kemp Malone speaks out in dissent, so far as I know. See his review of Hertha Marquardt's Die altenglischen Kenningar, in MLN, lv (1940), 74: “the author wrongly attributes to OE rád the modern meaning ‘road’ ... ”; A Literary History of England (New York and London, 1948), p. 29: “... hronrad ‘sea’ (literally 'riding-place of the whale') ... ”; “Some Linguistic Studies of 1945-1948,” MLN, lxiv (1949), 539 f.: Max Förster in connecting Irish rót with OE rád (Der Flussname Themse und seine Sippe, p. 157) “ignores the semantic difficulties.... Like many others, he simply puts back into medieval English the modern meaning (first recorded from the year 1596).” Of swanrád J. R. R. Tolkien does say, Prefatory Remarks, Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment, trans. John R. Clark Hall, rev. C. L. Wrenn, new ed. (London, 1950), p. xiii: “Literally it means 'swan-riding': that is, the region which is to the swimming swan as the plain is to the running horse ... rad is as a rule [not] used ... as its modem descendant 'road,' for a beaten track.” Henry Sweet, The Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1897), does not list the sense 'road'; for four of the five compounds which pertain to water he gives only 'sea,' for stréamrád 'way over the sea,' for wígrád 'war-path,' for hwéolrád 'rut.'
2 C. W. M. Grein, Sprachschatz der angelsachsischen Dichter, ... neu herausgegeben von J. J. Köhier (Heidelberg, 1912)—hereafter cited as GK.
3 Joseph Bosworth, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, ed. and enl. by T. Northcote Toller (Oxford, 1898)—hereafter cited as BT. Toller's Supplement (Oxford, 1921) gives no additional senses. Sweet gives “riding (on horse, in carriage, in ship); journey; warlike expedition, raid; the Runic letter r.” John R. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, 1931), lists “ride, riding, expedition, journey; raid; modulation; name of the rune for r”; the sense ‘road’ he gives under the several compounds pertaining to water, but ‘streampath’ for stréamrád, ‘rut, orbit’ for hwéolrád, ‘war-path’ for wígrád. F. Holthausen, Allenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg, 1934), has “Ritt, Reiten, Zug, Reise; Musik”; of the compounds he lists only éorod 'Trupp, Schar'<*eoh-rād 'Reiterei.'
4 It is not within our province to debate whether or not this is the primary (i.e., “original”) meaning; cf., e.g., Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 11 Aufl.... von Alfred Götze (Berlin u. Leipzig, 1934), p. 478: the German verb reiten and its cognates “vereinigen sich auf germ. *rídan, dessen Bed. jede Art der Fortbewegung umfasst.” We are concerned with all meanings demonstrably in use in OE texts, and shall consider secondary only those obviously derived from established OE senses.
5 All poetic passages except those from Beowulf are quoted from The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, 5 vols. [published] (New York, 1931-42). Punctuation is theirs unless otherwise noted; translations are my own. No note is made of emendations or disputed readings unless the interpretation materially affects our argument. The Rune Poem is in vi, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. Dobbie.
6 See Dobbie's notes to the passage, vi, 154.
7 Ecclesiastical History, MS. Corpus Christi Coll. 279, ed. Jacob Schipper, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa, iv (Leipzig, 1897-99), 349. Ride for rade in Thomas Miller's edition, The Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, EETS, O.S., Nos. 95-96 (London, 1890), p. 260.
8 Oswald Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England (London, 1864-66), i, 76; also p. 2.
9 F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 4 vols. (Halle a. S., 1903-16), i, 175 f.
10 Liebermann, i, 160.
11 Liebermann, i, 204, 328. Cf. also p. 192, Hundredgemot, 2: “Đæt men faran on ryd æfter ęfan.”
12 Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford, 1892-99), i, 72.
13 Laws of Ine, 13, 1, Liebermann, i, 94: “Đeofas we hata o vii men; from vii hlo o xxxv; sian bi here.” See also Instituta Cnuti, iii, 2, Liebermann, i, 613; and the other passages to which Liebermann refers in his glossary entry, ii, 116.
14 It is regarded as Primitive Germanic, indeed “evidently pre-Germanic,” by Charles T. Carr, Nominal Compounds in Germanic, St. Andrews Univ. Publ., No. xli (London, 1939), pp. 46 f.
15 It appears to be preserved in a passage in Maxims I, where the “horse-riders” are distinguished from the “foot-men”: “Eorl sceal on eos boga, / eorod sceal getrume ridan, // fæste feæa stondan” ‘the earl shall [ride] on the shoulder [back] of the horse, the horse-riders shall ride in a band, the footband stand fast’ (ll. 62-63a); however, the MS. actually reads worod, the eorod of the printed text being an emendation proposed by Grein and accepted by later editors to regularize the alliteration—though scarcely “without change of meaning,” as Krapp-Dobbie, iii, 306, would have it.
16 See Krapp-Dobbie, notes to the passage, iii, 333 f.
17 Aelfric's Lives of the Saints, ed. Walter W. Skeat, ii, EETS, O.S., Nos. 94, 114 (London, 1900), p. 138.
18 See notes, Krapp-Dobbie, iii, 331 f.
19 ‘Swift in his progress’ is W. S. Mackie's translation of rynestrong on rade, in The Exeter Book, Part ii, EETS, O.S., No. 194 (London, 1934), p. 109.
20 So MS. Krapp, I, 94, emends to sunne, following the proposal of James W. Bright, “Notes on the Cædmonian Exodus,” MLN, xvii (1902), 425. The passage (ll. 107b-111a) does present difficulties, lying primarily—in my opinion as in Napier's, “The Old English Exodus, ll. 63-134,” MLR, vi (1911), 168—in the verb beheold (l. 109b); but neither Bright's nor Napier's proposed emendation nor the other solutions thus far proposed leads to thoroughly satisfactory interpretation. See Krapp, notes, p. 203, and the references he cites there. It is certain, however, that after sunnan setlrade is a syntactic unit that will not bear tampering with.
21 This contrast precludes the possibility, which otherwise might be quite strong, that rád- here has the sense ‘swinging,‘ not found in the simplex nor as the sole sense in the bound element, but well documented for the verb; see below, pp. 549-552.
22 Supp gives as an instance of the verb in the sense ‘to ride in a carriage’ Orosius, ii. 4: “ ponne hie hamweard foran, ponne sceoldon hiera senatus ridan on crætwænum wiæan pæm consulum” (King Alfred's Orosius, ed. Henry Sweet, EETS, O.S., No. 79 [London, 1883], p. 70); but the verb here means only 'to travel,' 'to be borne,' and the notion “in a carriage” is stated explicitly in the context.
23 In ON, indeed, the simplex in this sense is used metaphorically in kennings, such as rýnnis rei 'head,' literally 'vehicle of knowledge,' Egill Skallagrímsson, Sonatorrek, 19; heiis rei 'arm,' 'vehicle of the hawk,' Snorri Sturluson, Háttatal, 48; rei Rínar glóar 'woman,' 'vehicle of glowing coals of the Rhine,' i.e., 'of gold,' Bjorn Arngeirsson hitdcelakappi, Lausavísur, 3; rei áar horna 'woman,' 'vehicle of the rivers of horns,' i.e., 'of ale,' Egill Skallagrimsson, Lausavisur, 16.
24 Because the phrase under swegles gang in And. 208 and 455 means 'under the circuit of the sky,' various editors wish to emend 869b in one way or another, and Krapp comments, ii, 114 f.: “The phrase does not fit the context very well, but it may have been taken bodily from stock phraseology for the sake of the rime with sang.” But a noun swegl 'music,' 'melody' occurs in Gen. 675: “ic mseg swegles gamen // gehyran on heofnum”; and gang frequently means 'going,' 'forward movement,' senses quite associable with music.
25 The forward movement of thunder, without the additional movement up and down, is expressed by the verbs feran and faran in Riddle 3, 44b-46a: “ond gebrecu fera” // deorc ofer dryhtum / gedyne micle, // fara feohtende“ ‘the crashes trawl..., proceed fighting.‘
26 The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century, ed. R. Morris, EETS, O.S., Nos. 58, 63, 73 (London, 1880), p. 145.
27 An Old English Martyrology, ed. George Herzfeld, EETS, O.S., No. 116 (London, 1900), p. 30.
28 Jacob Grimm's theory (Deutsche Mythologie, 4 Ausg. besorgt Elard Hugo Meyer [Berlin, 1875-78], i, 138) that the frequent use of the ON simplex rei (usually in the plural) in the sense of 'clap of thunder,' 'thunderstorm' (one of the principal senses, together with ‘riding on horseback’ and ‘vehicle‘) is associated with the notion of pórr traveling through the sky in his wagon, certainly will not hold for OE, where the simplex punor is a common word for thunder and in the compound does not represent the name of the god.
29 Supp gives a sense i(4), “of transport by land as opposed to that by water,” and cites Liebermann, Die Geselze, [i], 438, 22. What really is opposed in this passage in Liebermann (Excommunicationis formulae, vii, 7) is kinds of activities, not kinds of transport, and ridan most assuredly means ‘riding on horseback’: “Beon hi awergode etende 7 drincende! ... gangende 7 sittende ... sprechende 7 swígiande ... wadende 7 slæpende ... rowende 7 ridende ... hlehhende 7 wepende!”
30 Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Fr. Klaeber, 3rd ed. (New York, 1936).
31 This sense is well established in ON, where the verb ría frequently has reference to a semi-circular movement, turning about a center like the radius of a wheel, in a swing between two limits: it may be used of a tree swaying or falling, of a brandished ax falling on a victim, of a sword swinging, or of a body on the gallows; or it may be used of a turn of events, of a thing in balance, of a result reached after vacillating between two alternatives, possibilities, or extremes.
32 Various editors wish to emend; see Krapp-Dobbie, notes to the lines, iii, 323. But see Ernst A. Kock, “Jubilee Jaunts and Jottings,” Lunds Universitets Årsskrift, N.F., xiv (1918), Avd. 1, Nr. 26, p. 60.
33 Compare the use of ON ría in Mariu Saga, udg. C. R. Unger (Christiania, 1871), Jartegnir, xlv, p. 605: “pa ridr at batinum sua auflugt, at honum huelfir, rekr pa klerkinn i kaf.”
34 Krapp, following Sievers and others, emends to gerad; see note, i, 208. But though the emendation may “complete the line metrically,” it does not improve the sense, for the action demanded by the context is not perfective.
35 Krapp-Dobbie: comma after purhrœse, not after ride.
36 See Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie, begründet von Christian W. M. Grein,... hgg. Richard Paul Wülker, ii (Leipzig, 1894), 61, note to l. 1260; George P. Krapp, Andreas and the Fates of the Apostles (Boston, 1906), p. 141. BT under brycgian translates ‘the ice bridged over the water-streams’; under clingan, ‘the glory of water shrank over river streams: ice bridged a pale water-road’; under éastréam, ‘over the river-streams the ice bridged a pale water-road’; under ofer, ‘the ice threw a bridge across the rivers.‘
37 Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar, hgg. Julius Zupitza, 1. abt. (Berlin, 1880), p. 212: “marceo ic clinge, marcesco.”
38 In “Zur Textkritik der angelsächsischen Dichter,” Germania, x (1865), 423; but not in his edition, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie (Goettingen, 1857-58), ii, 40.
39 The MS. reads heofon, but the emendation does seem to be demanded by the context; see Krapp's note to l. 393, A-S Poet. Rec, ii, 109. However, W. M. Baskervill, Andreas: A Legend of St. Andrew (Boston, 1891), keeps the MS. reading, translating ‘the lamentation ceased’; Wülker also keeps heofon, but Grein, 1858, does not.
40 On the compounds in -lád see Hertha Marquardt, Die allenglischen Kenningar, Schriften der Königsberger Gelehrten Gesellschaft, geisteswissenschaftliche Klasse, xiv, 3 (Halle [Saale], 1938), 171 f.
41 Cf. Marquardt, p. 123: “Fern dem Lande der Menschen erscheint ihm das Meer im wahrsten Sinne als Heimat und Wohnsitz der Tiere, die seine einzigen Gefährten sind.”
42 The phrase “ofer seolhpau” is not equivalent to “ofer hronráde”: the reference is not to the expanse or the surface of the ocean, but to a certain way or course (in its spatial sense) to be taken on it; the gist of the passage is that Andreas sets out on the waves (“on yum,” 1. 1713a) along the paths (plural, note) ordinarily followed by the seals. The compound may contain a metaphor if in OE the central element of meaning in pœ is still and always ‘trodden by feet,‘ but it is not in itself a metaphorical term for “sea” in general.
43 Épinal Glossary, ed. (facsimile) Otto B. Schlutter, Das Epinaler und Erfurter Glossar, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa, viii: 1 (Hamburg, 1912); Erfurt (First Amplonian) Glossary, ed. G. Goetz, Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum (Leipzig, 1888-1923), v, 337-401; Corpus Glossary, ed. (apograph) J. H. Hessels, An Eighth-Century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary (Cambridge, 1890); The Corpus Glossary, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Cambridge, 1921); Glossary xi, from MS. Cotton Cleopatra A, iii, in Thomas Wright, Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies, 2nd ed., ed. Richard Paul Wülcker (London, 1884), I, cols. 338-473.
44 Lindsay traced to its source the item in the Épinal, Erfurt, and Corpus Glossaries: see The Corpus, Épinal, Erfurt and Leyden Glossaries (London, 1921), pp. 28, 12 f. The item in Wright-Wülcker's Glossary xi at 460, 1 occurs in a batch (458,30-460,7) taken from some source closely related to the Corpus Glossary, possibly from a MS of Corpus other than the sole one extant; see H. Lübke, “Über verwandtschaftliche Beziehungen einiger altenglischer Glossare,” Archiv, lxxxv (1890), 394.
45 Pauli Orosii Historiarían Adversum Paganos Libri VII, ed. C. Zangemeister (Leipzig, 1889), p. 24.
46 Herbert D. Meritt, “Studies In Old English Vocabulary,” JEGP, xlvi (1947), 425. It is of interest that in this same glossary, at 426,32, uia is glossed ‘twegra wsena gangweg.‘
47 Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911).
48 Marquardt saw this, p. 123, but evidently did not see the full implication.
49 So Lindsay, The Corpus, Épinal, Erfurt and Leyden Glossaries, p. 23.
50 Ibid., p. 12.
51 See the alveus, glossed ‘streamracu,‘ of Isidor, Etym. xiii.xxi. 18; below, p. 566.
52 King Alfred's Orosius, ed. Henry Sweet, EETS, O.S., No. 79, p. 74.
53 Also, with the same meaning, 4 Regum 3.17. Lübke, p. 403: items 345, 16-23 are from the four Books of Kings. The six lemmata preceding alueum are from 3 Regum 3.1, 5.9, 6.32, 19.12, 22.34, 22.38; the one following, from 4.4.39.
54 This glossary draws heavily on Isidor, and all but four of the lemmata in the batch 177,27-178,14 occur, although not in the same order, in Etym. xiii.xix-xxi, De Lacis et Stagnis, De Abysso, and De Fluminibus; of the four not in these sections, one is in xiii.xvii and one in xiii.xviii. The remaining two, unfortunately, are those immediately preceding and immediately following alueus. The preceding lemma, crepido, glossed ‘brerd, uel ofer’ (following litus in the glossary), is in xvi.3.3; the following lemma, riuulus, glossed ‘lytel ri,‘ does not seem to occur in the Etymologies and may well be the glossator's addition: see H. Lübke, “Zu den Rubensschen Glossen,” Archiv, lxxxvi (1891), 398.
55 Interestingly, Grein emends to stréamracu.
56 My comma; see E. A. Kock, “Interpretations and Emendations of Early English Texts,” Anglia, xlvi (1922), 66 f.
57 In accord with Grein-Wülker and other editors as opposed to Krapp; see note, A-S Poet. Rec., ii, 107; Andreas, pp. 90 f.
58 Not a series of appositives, as Krapp would have them, Andreas, pp. 90 f.