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Before him lowly bend! = Ǣtforan Him bugaþ hēanlīċe!
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[F]ewer syllables so fits the tune easier
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How’s this for irony? When I’m translating lyrics I don’t aim for singability. Long ago I decided that making lyrics actually singable was beyond my ability and I’d better stick to Getting The Meaning Right until I improved. You’ll notice I took no account of syllables or stress in my rendition of the Hymn to Elbereth that I posted on the ‘folk rock’ thread, though I’m under the impression Professor Tolkien penned it as a metrically correct hymn, viz, it fits the Classical verse form and you could sing that in church, too. The very first translation into Old English I ever attempted was some of Kate Bush’s lyrics in my teens, and I still practise using those and The Lord of the Rings on account of my lifelong battle with my poor memory. I know all Kate’s lyrics by heart and, when reading The Lord of the Rings auf Deutsche, I rarely have to look up words I don’t know* because I can guess from memory! Yet for the same reason, whenever I get a clear run at ‘improving’ my Old English, I spend most of my time relearning and reminding myself of most of what I forgot since last time, so overall improvement over the years has been incremental.
However [ insert emoticon for long, nervous cough here] if there’s one thing I’m tolerably certain of in this uncertain world, it’s that for on its own in Old English can and did mean ‘spatially before, in front of’ ( if not often) so, if it’s syllables you’re worried about, then For Him bugaþ hēanlīċe! ought to be quite sufficient.
Now that I make myself check, I notice that whilst my trusty old The Student’s Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon by Henry Sweet definitely lists for under that meaning, and gives the examples for eaxlum stód þǽs cyninges and weorþode híe for ealle menn, he adds in italics “These meanings are not W. [ = West Saxon]; they are probably the result of transliterating A. [ = Anglian] fore into for.
However, in that Old English Syntax ( ISBN 0-19-811935-6, Clarendon 1985) by Bruce Mitchell that by some minor miracle I’ve still got out on the long loan, he says “On for = ‘before’ ( temporal) in Gregory’s Dialogues see Timmer 1934, pp. 52-3. OED ( s.v. for) remarks that ‘in OE. for and fore seem to have been used indiscriminately as preps.’ And Wülfing ( ii. 339 and 354) observes that, while fore is less frequent than for in ‘Alfredian texts’ it does not differ from it in meaning or use... One tendency, however, should be noted: a general preference for for immediately before its case and the use of fore in other positions. Belden ( p. 61) puts it thus:
For and fore, distinct in Gothic.. are confused in Ags., especially in Bede. In the other texts read for this work [ Alfred’s Pastoral Care, Orosius, the Chronicles, Ælfric’s Homily and Grammar], though distinction of meaning is not firmly held to, there is a distinction in syntactical function: for is the preferred form, in most categories, for the preposition proper, immediately preceding its case, while fore is always used when the particle is removed from its case and more closely united with the verb.”
In other words it looks like an adverb when it functions like an adverb. Otherwise it’s a preposition whose shades of meaning include the ‘spatially before, in front of’ one, albeit seldom. For neither Mitchell nor any other authority he quotes says anything about this knock-off-from-Anglian business Sweet seemed to think important; and since I’ve noticed nothing in my 1987-impression Sweet to suggest it has undergone any significant revision since the 1896 first edition, whereas Old English Syntax was first published in 1985 ( which by Anglo-Saxon-scholarship standards must make it our answer to the discovery of cosmic gravitational waves, or at least the Human Genome Project) I’d be tempted to quietly ignore Sweet and use for in the requisite sense, if yer bleedin’ well feel like it.
Also, I can’t help but notice that Sweet also lists for in the sense ‘in the sight of, as regards’ and gives the exemplars ríce for worulde and módigode for his fæġernesse which can cover somewhat similar conceptual ground and, in your context, any ambiguity would only be to your advantage. Then there’s foran too, it says here.
Likewise, what say you to *niþerbugaþ so as to prune two syllables off bugaþ hēanlīċe? Sweet gives a niþerbogen as ‘bent down’ which looks like the past participle of that very verb, and there’s at least half a dozen verbs built on that pattern. It’s hardly your fault if some village idiot misses the intention of For Him niþerbugaþ!
Or have I gone wrong again?
One other thing: are you familiar with the book Is that a Fish in your Ear? by David Bellos? Only that sheds light on how professional translators do things. They are unanimous that the old saying that poetry is “that which is lost in translation” is a myth. They can translate Alexander Pope into the style of France Prešere and vice versa, seemingly. More to the point, though, if memory serves no professional translator attempts too strict a word-for-word translation because they know that, in one way or another, the grammar, syntactical conventions and idioms of the target language are forever hatching little conspiracies against that. What they aim for is an authentic ‘feel’. This is why the fact that for is “the most common preposition in Old English to express cause or reason” is the kind of thing I take mental ( and frantic ink) notes of, since Old English Syntax is due back on the tenth and I haven’t a clue how I got away with renewing it, last time. It’s the British Library that wants it back!
* If you, like I, are interested in how the translators handled the word “dwimmorlaik”, since Professor Tolkien was drawing upon his professional knowledge rather than the OED, then Dernhelm’s dialogue runs: «Fort mit dir, du abscheuliches Geistergeschöpf, Herr über Leichen! Laß die Toten in Frieden!». Granted that the “dwimmor-” is from Old English dwimor for ‘spectre; illusion, delusion’ and the “-laik” is most likely a variety of Old English líc, which is poetically ‘living body’ but otherwise ‘corpse’ ( if memory serves this survives in “lychgate”, through which one enters a graveyard) then it looks as if the translators, Margaret Carroux and E-M von Freymann, were earning their money.
