I was reading the riddle on the website. The bēom and meċ seemed Anglian but the rest seemed standard Old English (West Saxon).
I was surprised by “þonne iċ sēċan ġewite” when I would have written “þonne iċ ġewite tō sēċanne”. I use Steve Polington’s rule of thumb that if “to” can mean “in order to” then I use the inflected infinitive. Is this a quirk of the author or is there more to it than that?
I am reading Don Ringe’s “The Development of Old English” and he appears to say that the –anne ending is West Saxon whereas the –enne ending is Mercian. Is that so? He also says that the ‘nominative/accusative’ –an was expanded in West Germanic to include a ‘genitive’, ‘dative’ and ‘instrumental’. Only the nominative/accusative and the dative (-anne) came down to Old English. I can’t get my head around a ‘genitive’ infinitive. I can only think that it went with verbs taking genitive objects such as nēodian and wundrian. Can you enlighten me?