A History of English Language

Old english 61
a saddle, the shield-bearer a warrior. Warriors in their woven war-shirts, carrying battlebrand
or war-shaft, form the iron-clad throng. A boat is the sea-wood, the wave-courser,
the broad-bosomed, the curved-stem, or the foamy-necked ship, and it travels over the
whale-road, the sea-surge, the rolling of waves, or simply the water’s back. Synonyms
never fail the Beowulf poet. Grendel is the grim spirit, the prowler on the wasteland, the
lonely wanderer, the loathed one, the creature of evil, the fiend in Hell, the grim monster,
the dark death-shadow, the worker of hate, the mad ravisher, the fell spoiler, and the
incarnation of a dozen other attributes characteristic of his enmity toward humankind. No
one can long remain in doubt about the rich and colorful character of the Old English
vocabulary.
51. Old English Syntax.
One of the most obvious features of syntactic style in any language is the degree to which
grammatical and semantic relationships are expressed by subordinate clauses. A high
proportion of long sentences with subordination, as in the prose of Edward Gibbon or
Henry James or the poetry of John Milton, is known as hypotactic style, whereas shorter
sentences and a higher proportion of principal clauses, as in the prose of Ernest
Hemingway, is paratactic. Parataxis may also be interpreted as immature and childish, as
in examples given by S.O.Andrew:
Then I asked him; then he replied…
They came to a place on the road; there stood a temple.
There lived in the convent a certain monk; he was called Martin:
he said… 16
16 S.O.Andrew, Syntax and Style in Old English (Cambridge, UK, 1940), p. 87.
There are clear differences in our modern perceptions of Old English written in this
paratactic style and Old English written with many embedded clauses. The problem is in
determining whether a particular clause is independent or subordinate, because the words
that do the subordinating are often ambiguous. Thus, Old English þā the beginning of a
clause can be either an adverb translated ‘then’ and introducing an independent clause, or
a subordinating conjunction translated ‘when’ and introducing a dependent clause.
Similarly, can be translated as ‘there’ or ‘where’, þonne as ‘then’ or ‘when’, swā
as ‘so’ or ‘as’, as ‘formerly’ or ‘ere’, siððan as ‘afterward’ or ‘since’, nū as ‘now’ or
‘now that’, þēah as ‘nevertheless’ or ‘though’, and forðām as ‘therefore’ or ‘because’. In
each pair the first word is an adverb, and the style that results from choosing it is a
choppier style with shorter sentences, whereas the choice of the second word, a
conjunction, results in longer sentences with more embedded clauses. Current research in
Old English syntax aims to understand the use of these ambiguous subordinators and
adverbs. The conclusions that emerge will affect our modern perception of the