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

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, being a contraction of hrindge or hrindige, plural of the adjective hrindig, which is preserved in our dialects, in the form rindy, to this very day. In direct contradiction of a common popular error that regards our dialectal forms as being, for the most part, "corrupt," it will be found by experience that they are remarkably conservative and antique.
CHAPTER II
DIALECTS IN EARLY TIMES
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