English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day | Page 4

bolter." Trench further points out that many
of our pure Anglo-Saxon words which lived on into the formation of
our early English, subsequently dropped out of our usual vocabulary,
and are now to be found only in the dialects. A good example is the
word eme, an uncle (A.S. _{-e}am_), which is rather common in
Middle English, but has seldom appeared in our literature since the tune
of Drayton. Yet it is well known in our Northern dialects, and Sir
Walter Scott puts the expression "Didna his eme die" in the mouth of
Davie Deans (Heart of Midlothian, ch. XII). In fact, few things are

more extraordinary in the history of our language than the singularly
capricious manner in which good and useful words emerge into or
disappear from use in "standard" talk, for no very obvious reason. Such
a word as yonder is common enough still; but its corresponding
adjective yon, as in the phrase "yon man," is usually relegated to our
dialects. Though it is common in Shakespeare, it is comparatively rare
in the Middle English period, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.
It only occurs once in Chaucer, where it is introduced as being a
Northern word; and it absolutely disappears from record in the tenth,
eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Bosworth's _Anglo-Saxon Dictionary_
gives no example of its use, and it was long supposed that it would be
impossible to trace it in our early records. Nevertheless, when Dr Sweet
printed, for the first time, an edition of King Alfred's translation of
Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care, an example appeared in which it was
employed in the most natural manner, as if it were in everyday use. At
p. 443 of that treatise is the sentence--"Aris and gong to geonre byrg,"
i.e. Arise and go to yon city. Here the A.S. geon (pronounced like the
modern _yon_) is actually declined after the regular manner, being duly
provided with the suffix _-re_, which was the special suffix reserved
only for the genitive or dative feminine. It is here a dative after the
preposition to.
There is, in fact, no limit to the good use to which a reverent study of
our dialects may be put by a diligent student. They abound with pearls
which are worthy of a better fate than to be trampled under foot. I will
content myself with giving one last example that is really too curious to
be passed over in silence.
It so happens that in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem of Beowulf, one of the
most remarkable and precious of our early poems, there is a splendid
and graphic description of a lonely mere, such as would have delighted
the heart of Edgar Allan Poe, the author of Ulalume. In Professor
Earle's prose translation of this passage, given in his Deeds of Beowulf,
at p. 44, is a description of two mysterious monsters, of whom it is said
that "they inhabit unvisited land, wolf-crags, windy bluffs, the dread
fen-track, where the mountain waterfall amid precipitous gloom
vanisheth beneath--flood under earth. Not far hence it is, reckoning by

miles, that the Mere standeth, and over it hang rimy groves; a wood
with clenched roots overshrouds the water." The word to be noted here
is the word rimy, i.e. covered with rime or hoar-frost. The original
Anglo-Saxon text has the form hrinde, the meaning of which was long
doubtful. Grein, the great German scholar, writing in 1864,
acknowledged that he did not know what was intended, and it was not
till 1880 that light was first thrown upon the passage. In that year Dr
Morris edited, for the first time, some Anglo-Saxon homilies
(commonly known as the Blickling Homilies, because the MS. is in the
library of Blickling Hall, Norfolk); and he called attention to a passage
(at p. 209) where the homilist was obviously referring to the lonely
mere of the old poem, in which its overhanging groves were described
as being hrimige, which is nothing but the true old spelling of rimy. He
naturally concluded that the word hrinde (in the MS. of Beowulf) was
miswritten, and that the scribe had inadvertently put down hrinde
instead of hrimge, which is a legitimate contraction of hrimige. Many
scholars accepted this solution; but a further light was yet to come, viz.
in 1904. In that year, Dr Joseph Wright printed the fifth volume of the
English Dialect Dictionary, showing that in the dialects of Scotland,
Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire, the word for "hoarfrost" is
not rime, but rind, with a derived adjective rindy, which has the same
sense as rimy. At the same time, he called attention yet once more to
the passage in Beowulf. It is established, accordingly, that the suspected
mistake in the MS. is no mistake at all; that the form hrinde is correct,