Carols

[David]

Thanks Bowerthane. I like the words I used but if “For Him niþerbugaþ” has the same meaning lets go with that.
 
Can you do something with Silent Night, verse 2, line 3? I did wonder about dropping “þinum”.
 
I see that I have finished “O Holy Night” so I shall start “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” in a couple of days.

[David]

 
I have now translated the first verse or “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”.
 
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                  Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste,

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                  Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste,
“Glory to the newborn King!”                                   “Wuldor tō nīġawacodum Cyninge!”
Peace on earth and mercy mild,                                Friþ on eorþe and milts mild,
God and sinners reconciled                                       God and gyltend ġesēmende
Joyful, all ye nations, rise,                                         Blīðe, eall ġē þeoda, rīsaþ,
Join the triumph of the skies;                                    Ðæt ōretlof rodores þēodaþ ;
With the angelic host proclaim,                                 Mid  þǣm engellic werode bēodaþ,
“Christ is born in Bethlehem.”                                  “Crist in Hlāfhūse wacnaþ.”
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                   Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste ,
 “Glory to the newborn King!”                                  “Wuldor tō nīġawacodum Cyninge!”

[Bowerthane]

_________
in Hlāfhūse
_________


Ooooh, that was a cheeky bit of etymologizing David! 

Have you studied Hebrew?

[David]

_________
in Hlāfhūse
_________


Ooooh, that was a cheeky bit of etymologizing David! 

Have you studied Hebrew?

 
I’m sorry to disappoint you Bowerthane but I am neither that clever nor that educated. In Luke’s gospel the Anglo-Saxons used Hlāfhūs and hlāfes hūs. I do not think they translated from the Hebrew but from the Latin domus panis.
   

[Bowerthane]

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Can you do something with Silent Night, verse 2, line 3? I did wonder about dropping “þinum”.
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Right, now that I come to have a proper look at “Radiant beams from thy holy face/ Torhte bēamas of þīnum hālgan ansīene” my first blush reaction was no, don’t drop the þīnum because it has a pleasing, personalizing effect which, unless several people disagree with me, I feel is integral to the sentiment the lyricist meant to express.  Now, upon cooler reflection, I still agree with myself on that.

Yet what about this for pruning syllables? Old English definitely has such a word as torhtmód for ‘illustrious, glorious’ as well as háliġdóm for ‘holiness, sanctity’ etc, háliġern ‘sanctuary’ and dear old háliġmónaþ for ‘September’ and maybe others.  Such adjective + noun kennings are nothing if not highly characteristic of Old English, so why not one or both of Torhtbēamas of þīnum hāliġansīene which saves you a syllable or two?

Unless of course there’s something I need to learn about improvising such words, or when not to. I’m not pretending the above is terribly scientific and I’d be grateful to hear your own thoughts on the propriety of improvising unrecorded words.

( So far I caught myself doing this only in one of the short verses in that LOTR chapter I’m using for practise, which at the moment goes:

Lá swancor swá wíþig-lǽl! Lá hlúttra þonne sweotwæter!
Lá hréod be þǽm cwicpóle! Fǽġer éadohtor!
Lá Éastertíma and sumortíma, and Éaster ongéan æfter!
Lá wind ofer þǽm wæterġefeall, and þá léafa hleahtor!’


Which may have begun to resemble:

O slender as a willow-wand! O clearer than clear water!
O reed by the living pool! Fair river-daughter!
O spring-time and summer-time, and spring again after!
O wind on the waterfall, and the leaves’ laughter


Where you’ll notice I plumped for cwicpól for ‘living pool’. This I did on the ever so erudite and professional grounds of, a) exasperation, b) it was late at night, and c) using the present participle as an adjective in that position seemed ungainly and unnatural to Old English, whereas cwicpól looks like the kind of thing the Old English would do.  Cross checking brought me to cwicfýr for ‘sulphur’, cwicbéam for ‘aspen’ and a cwichrerende for ‘moving alive, living’ amongst others, to stiffen my resolve.)




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I do not think they translated from the Hebrew but from the Latin domus panis.
 ________________________________________________________________


Thanks, that was interesting. Once I nosed about to see how much the Old English could have known of Hebrew, to draw the conclusion that even the best educated ones knew little beyond what a reflective person could deduce from the proper nouns in the Old Testament, for instance that the Canaanites spoke a language closely related to that of the Ancient Hebrews ( baal is ‘lord’ in both languages).  Also I found that those Anglo-Saxon pilgrims to Jerusalem who took the sea route could have heard Phoenician spoken ( as you may know, a Phoenician is just a Canaanite in a boat) since it was still a living language on the southern and eastern shores and some islands of the Mediterranean into Early Medieval times and, if memory serves, lingered in nautical terminology there after it died out.

My attempt to teach myself Hebrew got as far as mistranslating “rose of Sharon” as “daffodil of Sharon” when using The Song of Songs for practise. Yet it was fun trying: Hebrew is the only non-Indo-European language I’ve studied in any depth and it was a real expanding-headband experience to deal with a language that has no tenses, in that a Hebrew verb settles only whether its action is completed or uncompleted.  For whether it was washing or hanging out in the past, present or future, you look to an adverb.  The whole Semitic language family works like this, seemingly.

Most queer’n’disturbin’...

[David]

Bowerthane, I think I will stay with my original on this. Your compounding of words seems to have cut down the number of words but only seems to loose one syllable.


I would not worry about your compounding. Early Germanic seems to have been very restricted on this but old English appears to have been much more liberal.

[David]

 
I have now translated the first two verses of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”.
 
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                  Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste,

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                  Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste,
“Glory to the newborn King!”                                   “Wuldor tō nīġawacodum Cyninge!”
Peace on earth and mercy mild,                                Friþ on eorþe and milts mild,
God and sinners reconciled                                       God and gyltend ġesēmende
Joyful, all ye nations, rise,                                         Blīðe, eall ġē þeoda, rīsaþ,
Join the triumph of the skies;                                    Ðæt ōretlof rodores þēodaþ ;
With the angelic host proclaim,                                 Mid  þǣm engellic werode bēodaþ,
“Christ is born in Bethlehem.”                                  “Crist in Hlāfhūse wacnaþ.”
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                  Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste ,
 “Glory to the newborn King!”                                  “Wuldor tō nīġawacodum Cyninge!”
 
Christ, by highest heav’n adored:                              Crist, ġeēaþmēded be hīehstum heofone
Christ, the everlasting Lord:                                      Crist, se ēceliċ Dryhten:
Late in time behold him come,                                   Sīþ in tīde sēoþ hine cuman,
Offspring of a virgin’s womb.                                     Tūdor of hrife fǣmnan.
Veilled in flesh, the Godhead see;                              Ġebehylod in flǣsce, sēoþ godhād:
Hail, the incarnate Deity:                                            Halettaþ, se ġeflæscoda  God:
Pleased, as man, with men to dwell,                          Ġelysted, swā mann, mid mannum wunian,
Jesus, our Emmanuel!                                                Iesus, ūre Emmanuhel!
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                   Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste,
“Glory to the newborn King!”                                   “Wuldor tō nīġawacodum Cyninge!”
 

[Michael Æðeling]

David, this is outstanding. Christmas is going to be awesome this year - my daughters will never forgve me!

I am wondering if here is a particular metre used for "Hark!!"?

[Bowerthane]

______________________
David, this is outstanding.
______________________

I'm enjoying this too, so don't get me wrong    . But...


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Long lay the world in sin and error pining. Lange liþ eorþe in gylte and dwilde weorþaþ.
_____________________________________________________________________


It’s no use I still don’t get it.  As a rule weorþan means ‘happen, be made ( of peace), be fulfilled ( of God’s will); come into being, arise; become’, or at least that’s the gubbins of its entry in my The Student’s Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon by Henry Sweet.  And whilst I’m aware it’s capable of some subtle syntactical significations the Old English understood better than I do, I still can’t see how you get the meaning of ‘pining’ out of it. Anyhow shouldn’t it be weorþende not weorþaþ ( which looks like the imperative plural)?

Also liþ is the present tense which anyhow should be líþ ( I’m in the habit of using acute accents instead of macrons because my machine won’t let me use macrons consistently) if my grammars speak true.

Left to my own devices I’d’ve gone for something like Lange læġ eorþe on gylte and dwilde seofiende, using that handy seofian ‘sigh, lament’ verb I unearthed for “Mama misses her”/ Módor seofeþ be híe for one of my early versions of  Ryan Stone’s soliloquy in the Soyuz from Gravity, since I wasn’t confident that Old English missan meant much more than ‘miss ( mark); escape the notice of’.

Yet Linden rounded up the following suggestions on that thread, too:

___________________________________________________________________
for-þolian - go without, miss, lack (+ dative)
 þolian - to suffer lack or loss of something (gen.), to lose what one has, to fail to get what one desires; in many cases the loss or failure is the result of wrong either done or suffered by the subject of the verb, to forfeit, be (wrongfully) deprived of
 cwanian - to bewail, deplore, lament, mourn
 geomrian - to be sad, to sigh, groan, murmur, mourn, sorrow, lament, bewail
___________________________________________________________________


So Lange læġ eorþe on gylte and dwilde þoliende also looks like a contender ( although  Lange læġ eorþe on gylte and dwilde ġeomriende has poetic merits, wouldn’t you say?) granted that I’m right that pínian itself is out as it then meant ‘torture; afflict (mind)’ only, which strikes me as a bit too severe for modern ‘pine’, which seems to be a post-Chaucerian development.

So either something is amiss or, of course, I’ve joined all the wrong dots and you have really done something over my head.  I’d love to know which/ what it is!  What’s your thinking, David?


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Your compounding of words seems... only seems to loose one syllable.
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Ah, so you wouldn’t pronounce the final -e as a distinct syllable?  ( I’ve also developed the habit of treating diphthongs as disyllabic, but I can’t recall where I got that idea from.) 






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The moral right of the author to identify footballers for the FBI, intellectual heroes of the twenty-first century, has been asserted.

[David]

 


Starting with 
 
Long lay the world in sin and error pining.                 Lange liþ eorþe in gylte and dwilde weorþaþ.
 
I made a mess of the verbs – I did miss out the macron on līþ and in should have been in the past tense so læġ.
As for “weorþaþ”. That was an error for “weorpaþ”. I could not make up my mind as to whether it should a normal verb (of course it should have been the past tense), an infinitive or a present participle. I thought that I had plumped for the infinitive but, in fact I wrote the normal verb (wrong tense). Now I tend to the present participle. So maybe I should have written “ Lange læġ eorþe in gylte and dwillde weorpiende.”
 
I would pronounce a final “e”. Did I miscount the syllables?
 
I had expected you to complain that I translated Bethlehem but not Emmanuel. I wondered about these. It seems that the Anglo-Saxons tended to give the original Hebrew and to translate these. I was not prepared to do that. I thought that I found an example where Bethlehem only appeared in translation and where Emmanuel only appeared in the Hebrew. However I am now feeling I should use the modern English convention and not translate them.

I am wondering if here is a particular metre used for "Hark!!"?

Æðeling I’m afraid that I did not understand what you said. Can you explain it.

[Michael Æðeling]

I meant poetic metre, like 10, 8, 6, 7:

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/meter.html

[David]

I can assure you that if I did some good poetic metre that is pure coincidence. Poetry is a closed book to me.
 
Maybe you can start a new thread on stress. I am a simple soul so I always pronounce the following words as shown nū, se, tō, þū and wē. However I’m told that stress can change the length of the vowel but does not always do so.

[Bowerthane]

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Till he appeared and the spirit felt its worth.Oð hē cōm and se gāst onġeat his weorð.
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I’m a weeny bit puzzled as to why you bother with ongieten here, which certainly can mean ‘feel’ as well as ‘perceive’ and ‘recognize’ amongst other things, when Old English has our verb ‘feel’ as félan already in the modern meaning and ( I think importantly) no other meaning.

Since you are counting syllables I’m guessing this is a simple oversight. However, whilst it isn’t every day I grumble about Old English ( which I love to bits, can sleep with my sister and I will defend with a whip and chair) I confess to an occasional exasperation with the sheer range of meanings some Old English words, usually verbs, have.  Including three with no semantic or etymological connections to one another, sometimes ( that I can see).  This makes me anxious because of one of my ‘ten commandments’ I mentioned: always take a machete to any risk of ambiguity unless there is some special or compelling reason to do otherwise.  If memory serves the military call this the KISS principle: standing for Keep It Simple, Stupid.  This is why, when I came to the line in Sucker Punch “These are your weapons.  When you take them, you begin your journey. Your journey to freedom.” which at the moment runs Ðás sind þín wǽpenu.  Ðá nimest þú híe, þú onġinnest þín weġfór.  Ðín weġfór tó fréodóme. I plumped for weġfór rather than, say, weġ on its own, rád or two or three other choices, because weġfór only means ‘journey’.

Ġesíþas may recall that when Horsa posted his translation from Spongeblob Squarepants I got mǽġþ/ mǽġeþ for ‘maiden, girl’ etc. mixed up with ‘ġe-, mǽġþ for ‘power’. 

This is just the sort of slippery patch that makes me risk averse when rendering...


 

[David]

Thanks Bowerthane. I never even thought of fēlan. So we can have
Oð hē cōm and se gāst fēlde his weorðes.

[David]

This is the full translation of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”.
 
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                  Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste,

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                  Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste,
“Glory to the newborn King!”                                   “Wuldor tō nīġawacodum Cyninge!”
Peace on earth and mercy mild,                                Friþ on eorþe and milts mild,
God and sinners reconciled                                       God and gyltend ġesēmende
Joyful, all ye nations, rise,                                         Blīðe, eall ġē þeoda, rīsaþ,
Join the triumph of the skies;                                    Ðæt ōretlof rodores þēodaþ ;
With the angelic host proclaim,                                 Mid  þǣm engellic werode bēodaþ,
“Christ is born in Bethlehem.”                                  “Crist in Bethleheme wacnaþ.”
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                   Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste ,
 “Glory to the newborn King!”                                   “Wuldor tō nīġawacodum Cyninge!”
 
Christ, by highest heav’n adored:                              Crist, ġeēaþmēded be hīehstum heofone
Christ, the everlasting Lord:                                      Crist, se ēceliċ Dryhten:
Late in time behold him come,                                   Sīþ in tīde sēoþ hine cuman,
Offspring of a virgin’s womb.                                     Tūdor of hrife fǣmnan.
Veilled in flesh, the Godhead see;                              Ġebehylod in flǣsce, sēoþ godhād:
Hail, the incarnate Deity:                                            Halettaþ, se ġeflæscoda  God:
Pleased, as man, with men to dwell,                          Ġelysted, swā mann, mid mannum wunian,
Jesus, our Emmanuel!                                                Iesus, ūre Emmanuhel!
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                   Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste,
“Glory to the newborn King!”                                    “Wuldor tō nīġawacodum Cyninge!”
 
Hail! the heaven-born Prince of peace!                     Halettaþ! se hēofonbyrde Ðēoden friðes!
Hail! The Son of Righteousness!                              Halettaþ! Se sunu rihtwīsnesse!
Light and life to all he brings,                                   Lēoht and līf tō ealle hē bringþ,
Risen with healing in his wings                                 Astigen mid hǣlinge in his fiðrum
Mild he lays his glory by,                                          Milde hē legþ his wuldor be,
Born that man no more may die:                              Awōc þe mann ne mā mōt sweltan:
Born to raise the sons of earth,                                Awōc þā suna eorðe tō fēdanne,
Born to give them second birth.                               Awōc him oþer byrde tō giefanne,
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,                                  Heorciaþ! Singaþ Þā Englas Ǣrendfæste,
“Glory to the newborn King!”                                   “Wuldor tō nīġawacodum Cyninge!”
 
Now I am translating In the Bleak Midwinter. To give you time to digest the translations I will do that in two parts and will wait at least a week before giving the first part.