READING BEOWULF WITH ISIDORE'S ETYMOLOGIES* 

 

 

Roberta Frank 

 

 

Thou shalt not sit

With statisticians nor commit

A social science.

 

W. H. Auden, Phi Beta Kappa Poem

 

 

A book bewitched them. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies charmed the literati of Anglo­Saxon England from Aldhelm, Bede, and Boniface to Ælfric, Byrhtferth, and beyond. His volume was plundered by the author of the Liber Monstrorum, quoted in Alfredian circles, and mined by Wulfstan of Winchester. Anonymous hands added Isidorian glosses to Anglo-­Latin texts written for most conditions of men, some conditions of women, and a few conditions of children. Latin­-English glossaries drew on the Etymologies beginning with the school of Hadrian and Theodore in the seventh century and culminating in the several­thousand entries of Antwerp­-London in the eleventh(1). Vernacular poets were not immune. Whenever Beowulf was composed, Isidore was in the neighborhood, relentlessly channeling the words and things of classical antiquity into the medieval present. Yet literary histories do not treat the Old English poem and the Etymologies as a couple, or even friends with benefits. Nor have source databases such as Fontes Anglo-Saxonici found any trace of a relationship(2). The 190­page introduction to the standard edition of Beowulf mentions Isidore just once, and then only in connection with Irish tradition(3). Recent studies stressing the importance of the Etymologies in Anglo­Saxon culture never depict the Beowulf poet sipping from Isidorian streams(4).

 

The present essay places Isidore and the Beowulf poet side ­by ­side in a conversation that never took place, recording the two men as they disclose trade secrets, how to harvest and extract the truth in words, how to reunite things split apart(5). I then turn to a few vocabulary items used by the poet :  earmbeag ‘arm­ring’, mene ‘neck­ring’, sigle ‘necklace’, and eoferspreot ‘boar­spear’. These and a few other words in Beowulf describing the realia of ancient days are marked in the standard edition of the poem  as ‘not elsewhere found in poetry [but occurring] in prose also’(6). Of the four just listed, however, only sigle ever occurs in prose ; outside Beowulf, the others are found solely in glosses and glossaries heavily influenced by Isidore’s Etymologies, whence the poet may have plucked them(7). They name prehistoric objects, artifacts dispatched by the poet, like spies, to track the stratified residue of a history in retreat. At such moments, this exotic­-seeming terminology appears to underline a discontinuity, a rupture, between the poem’s narrative’s present – the material culture of late fifth­century Scandinavia – and a Romanized long­ago.

 

Dramatis Personae and Setting

 

Two men walk into a bar. One, robed and mitred, exudes importance ; the younger, how young is hard to tell in the darkness, has a distinctive stop-and-go gait. As they enter, the older man is touting the success of his thesaurus of Latin vocabulary, a huge hit, the biggest ever.

 

Isidore : Thesaurus means ‘gold deposit’ (16.18.6) – or so Gregory the Great used to say(8). My compilation (think of it as the Roget of late Romanitas) certainly paid off for me. Curtius called it foundational, ‘the basic book of the entire Middle Ages’(9). Dante placed me in Paradiso (10.130). Gower praised me as ‘the perfect cleric’(10). I’m a veritable Doctor of the Church. More than a thousand manuscript copies of my Etymologies survive. I was recently designated official patron saint of the internet, of computer users and programmers worldwide. Who are you, my child ? 

 

The Beowulf poet : No one knows. My name, family, age, occupation, even my gender and number – all up for grabs. I’m a nobody, someone who picks up words and turns them over, to see what is going on beneath and behind them. Still, everyone tries to date me. Companion after companion embraces me in public - so awkward. My poem survives in a single charred, crumbling, worm­bitten manuscript, its two scribes written off as ‘unintelligent'(11). I’m no saint, yet I am much translated. And marketed : rock operas, graphic novels, comic books, cartoons, pubs, coffee beans, films, video games, fragrances, and other items too embarrassing to mention.

 

A windowless bar-room, two men at a table. They are fossicking among the roots of words, trying to find common ground.

 

Isidore : Did you realize that deer (cervi) are so called from their horns, a cornibus (12.1.18) ?

 

Beowulf poet : Yes, of course. A hart (heorot) is hornum trum ‘strong in its horns’ (1369) ; it shuns a haunted lake because ‘nis þæt heoru stow’, ‘that’s not a pleasant place’ (1372), i.e., no place for a hart. The Danes’ royal hall, Heorot ‘hart’, towers high and horngeap ‘wide-­horned’ (i.e., ‘with rounded gables’) (82) ; it is a majestic hornreced ‘horn (i.e., gabled) house’ (704). Its roof is geap ‘vaulted, curved’ (836, 1800) like that of a hart’s horns or of a pair of hands clasped bowl­like together (Old Norse gaupr). (Note Grendel’s grap ‘grasp, claw’ suspended under the hall’s geap ‘curved’ roof (836) : a perfect slant­rhyme or skothending with which to end the fitt.) On Beowulf’s last night in Heorot, this wide­-vaulted and gold-­decorated hall, he rests rumheort ‘spacious­hearted’ (1799). Roll over, Shakespeare. If you’re tired of puns, you’re tired of life.

 

Isidore : Gables stand at the end of a pitched roof. ‘The troops of an army who are farthest out are called horns (cornu) because their line is curved’ (9.3.63). ‘A street (strata) is so called as if “worn away” (terere) by the feet of the crowd […] and it is paved, that is “strewn” (sternere, past participle stratus), with stones’ (15.16.6). ‘We call our road measures miles’ (mensuras viarum nos miliaria dicimus) (15.16.1) ; note the rhyme and alliteration.

 

Beowulf poet:  The stræt ‘street’ leading to Heorot is stanfah ‘paved with stones’ (320). The distance to the mere ‘lake’ is ‘measured in miles’, milgemearc (1362);  note the half­-rhyme and alliteration. The door of Heorot is a muþa ‘mouth, opening’ (724) into which Grendel rushes, expecting dinner. Match that. 

 

Isidore : Easy. ‘The mouth (os) is so called, because through the mouth as if through a door (ostium) we bring food in and throw spit out’ (11.1.49). ‘Tribute (tributa) is named because formerly it used to be exacted from each of the tribes (tribus), just as now it is exacted from each of the territories’ (16.18.7). ‘A flood (diluvium) is so named because it destroys (delere) everything’ (13.22.1).

 

Beowulf poet : Scyld seized gombe ‘tribute’ from neighboring ‘tribes’ (11). Beowulf yðde ‘destroyed’ sea­beasts in the yðum ‘waves’ (421). Hrothgar’s gifted sadol ‘saddle’ (1038) was the hildesetl ‘battle­seat’ [of the high king] (1039).

 

Isidore : ‘Saddle (sella) [comes] from “sitting” (sedere), as if the word were sedda’ (20.16.4). ‘The word “seat” (sedis, i.e., sedes) in the singular properly belongs to kingship’ (20.11.9). ‘Footprints (vestigia) are the traces of the feet imprinted by the soles of those who went first, so called because by means of them the paths of those who have gone before are traced (investigare), that is, recognized’ (15.16.13).

 

Beowulf poet :   An inquisitive dragon traces the fotlast ‘foot­print’ (2289) of a thief. Men carry (geferian) Beowulf’s bær ‘bier’ (< beran) (3105) to the place of the funeral pyre (bæl), while others collect wood for the fire.

 

Isidore : ‘A bier (feretrum) is so called because the dead are “carried off” (deferre) on it’ (20.14.7). ‘A pyre (pyra) is what is customarily built up from logs in the form of an altar so that it will burn, for [Greek] pur means “fire”. Now a pyre is a gathering of wood that is not yet burning’ (20.10.9). (Your word for ‘fire’, fyr, corresponds to this Greek word, not to Latin ignis ‘fire’ or French feu.) ‘A hill (tumulus) is a low mountain, as if the word were derived from “swelling earth” (tumens tellus). Likewise, tumulus is the word for heaped­up earth (i.e., a barrow or burial mound), where there is no monument’ (14.8.21; 15.11.2). Even Calvert Watkins agrees with me here(12).

 

Beowulf poet : Your tumulus is our beorh ‘barrow’, a protective enclosure sitting on the earth, just as a byrne ‘byrnie, coat­of­mail’ sits on a warrior’s breost ‘breast’(13). Beowulf, under bord ond byrnan ‘shield and byrnie’, vows  ‘nelle ich beorges weard’ ‘I shall not [flee] the guardian of the barrow […]’ (2524) ; he orders his men: ‘Gebide ge on beorge byrnum werede’ ‘Wait here, protected by byrnies, on the barrow’ (2529). Figura etymologica, no ?

 

Speaking of byrnies : Did you say that ‘lorica vocata eo quod loris careat ; solis enim circulis ferreis contexta est’ ‘the mail­shirt (lorica) is so called because it “lacks [leather] thongs” (lorum carere), for it is made only of iron rings’ (18.13.1) ? Perhaps I misheard. Later you derive ‘spiced’ (salsus) from ‘sprinkled with salt’ (sale asparses), ‘with the [three] middle syllables taken away’ (20.2.23). And suggest that ‘some people think that filth (lutum) is named using antiphrasis, because it is not clean, for everything that has been washed (lavare, past participle lotus) is clean’ (16.1.4). People are still talking about your infamous lucus a non lucendo derivation : ‘a grove is called from not gleaming’ (14.8.30)(14).

 

Isidore : That etymology is correct : lucus used to mean a ‘clearing’(15). My explications try to package multiple layers of experience – dark woods, pagan fires – into an image or a narrative, thereby strengthening speakers’ understanding of their world. As for lorica ‘mail­coat’, a clause from Varro has dropped out :  ‘quod e loris de corio crudo pectoralia faciebant’(16). Metal mail­shirts from leather cuirasses grow. Objects change but names stay the same : a clothes-­iron is an iron even when constructed of plastic and aluminum. I seek the cause of a term in another word or phrase, not in its paleontological or biological history (1.29.1). As you well know, alliteration and rhyme help people remember things, even the wrong things. True or false, such associations have real­life consequences : if you believe that ‘quicksand’ moves fast, you might too.

 

Beowulf poet:  Recurrent sound ­associations in my verse serve as leitmotifs, heralding the appearance of a particular object or marking a familiar theme(17). Sometimes I use nasals and back vowels to accompany a perilous journey : ‘enge anpaðas, uncuð gelad’ ‘narrow single paths, strange tracks’ (1410)(18). Backward­looking ‘f’s’ and ‘r’s’ recall days long gone : ‘frea sceawode/ fira fyrngeweorc forman siðe’ ‘the lord examined the ancient handiwork of men for the first time’ (2285–1186)(19). The arrival onstage of a byrne ‘byrnie’ is sounded by ‘b’ and ‘h’ alliterations :

 

þær me wið laðum   licsyrce min

heard hondlocen      helpe gefremede;

beadohrægl broden on breostum læg

golde gegyrwed. (550–553)

[There my body­sark, strong, hand­locked, performed help for me against hostile ones ; the woven war­garment lay on my breast, adorned with gold.]

 

The hero’s braided byrnie protects his breost ‘breast’ :

 

Scolde herebyrne  hondum gebroden,

sid ond searofah,  sund cunnian,

seo ðe bancofan   beorgan cuþe,

þæt him hildegrap hreþre ne mihte

eorres inwitfeng,   aldre gesceþðan. (1443-1447)

[The battle­byrnie braided by hands, broad and skillfully ornamented, had to make trial of the sea, the one that knew how to protect the bone­enclosure, so that a hostile­grip, the malicious grasp of an angry one, could not injure his breast, his life.]

 

Here cross alliteration – ‘herebyrne hondum gebroden’ (1443) ; ‘bancofan beorgan cuþe’ (1445) – is buttressed by consonance on b-r stem­syllables (byrn-, -brod-, beorg-) ; a braided byrnie guards (beorgan) the hero’s breast.

 

Wiglaf’s father strips from a slain warrior a ‘brunfagne helm hringde byrnan’ ‘shining helmet [and] ringed byrnie’ (2615) :  the ‘b’ and ‘h’ allit erations form a chiastic pattern, with brun- and byrn- guarding the perimeter. Wiglaf’s own mail­coat comes into focus accompanied by similar alliterations: 

 

hyran heaðosiocum,      hringnet beran,

brogdne beadusercean, under beorges hrof. (2754–2755)

[(he) obeyed the battle­wounded one, bore the ring­net, the woven battle­sark, under the barrow’s roof.]

 

The second line inverts the pattern of the first :  h h-s h b becomes b b-s b h(20),  as a new hero enters the barrow. An unexpressed word – byrne ‘byrnie’ – lies underneath the sounds associated with it, what Jean Starobinski called ‘les mots sous les mots’(21). 

 

Isidore (suppressing a yawn) : Enough. It’s closing time and the tavern­-keeper wants us out. I of all people don’t need to be told that the extraordinary often lies just below the surface of the ordinary. But I gather that you have more such gems up your sleeve – pull them out (I promise not to interrupt) as we totter back to our respective lodgings. But no more contending in strife: our little game is over.

 

Behind, Beneath, and Around the Prehistoric North

 

Earmbeagas ‘arm-rings’

 

Gold arm­rings, preferably in pairs, were the archetypal reward for servicein a royal court. Among the objects Beowulf received in Heorot from the Danish king were two earmreade ‘arm­ornaments’ (1194), a compound  that occurs only here in the Old English corpus(22). This gift belongs to the fifth-­century narrative present of the poem(23). The Beowulf poet employs a different compound for the thousand­year­old arm­bands retrieved from the dragon’s hoard, earmbeagas ‘arm­rings’ (2763), which in its single Old Norse attestation designates an arm­ring worthy of a god(24). Old English earmbeag does not occur again in verse or prose ;  it is cited five times, however, in the Isidorian glossarial tradition, in collections ranging in date from the late eighth century (armilla ‘ermboeg’; dextralia ‘armbages’ :  Leiden and Werden) to the early eleventh (dextrochirium ‘brad earmbeah’ : Antwerp-­London), where the word also glosses Latin bracchiale and dextrale(25).

 

Isidore carefully distinguishes women’s arm­bands from men’s : ‘Bracelets (dextras, i.e. dextrale) are worn by both men and women, because both sexes wear them on the right hand (dextera). Armbands (armillae) are, properly speaking, for men (vir), conferred on soldiers in recognition of a victory for their valor (virtus) in arms (arma)’ (19.31.16). In Old English verse beag ‘ring’ is the basic term for a circular ornament of any dimension (finger­ring, arm­ring, neck­ring, collar, torque, or crown) : in poetry, shape and essence matter, not size, weight, metallic content, or location on the body. For some reason, the Beowulf poet opted for lexical specificity when naming his prehistoric arm­rings. Perhaps the echo of armilla in vernacular earm-/arm- was the impetus for three centuries of Anglo­-Saxon glossators placing earmbeagas on men’s arms, and the Beowulf poet extracting them from an ancient warrior­-hoard. Arm-­bands with this name do not appear in charters, wills, or inventories. Both context and rarity suggest that the compound would have lent an object so named the patina of age, an antiquity beyond and behind that of the poem’s North. 

 

Mene ‘neck-band’

 

In Old English poetry and prose, the simplex mene ‘necklace’ (1199)(26) occurs only in Beowulf ; it is at home, however, in dozens of glosses to Latin monile ‘necklace’ (in Aldhelm, the Harley and Antwerp­London glossaries, and Aelfric’s Grammar and Glossary),27 and to Latin lunula ‘little moon, ornament’ and crepundium ‘neck-­adornment’ (in the Corpus, Épinal­-Erfurt, and Cleopatra glossaries).Isidore explains that the monile was an ornament given as a gift (munus) to a woman (19.31.13 ); lunulae, shaped like the moon (luna), are also destined for women (19.31.17) – if on occasion worn by boys and horses. In Beowulf the word mene designates a famous mythological necklace associated with a goddess. Hrothgar presents Beowulf with:

 

                                           healsbeaga mæst

þara þe ic on foldan           gefrægen hæbbe.

Nænigne ic under swegle  selran hyrde

hordmaððum hæleþa        syþðan Hama ætwæg

to þære byrhtan byrig        Brosinga mene,

sigle ond sincfæt –            searoniðas fleah

Eormenrices. (1195–1201)

[the greatest of neck­collars that I have heard of on earth. I have learned under the heavens of no better hoard­gift of warriors, since Hama carried off to that bright fortress the necklace of the Brosings, gems and ornamental setting – he fled the treacheries of Eormenric.]

 

After mentioning a great Danish necklace (later called hring and beah), the narrator directs our gaze back, far back, to another necklace, the Brosinga mene, belonging to Freyja in the Norse pantheon, a treasure out of the deep past, here stolen by Hama from Ermanaric, fourth­-century king of the Goths. In Old Norse, the word men ‘necklace, torque’ occurs widely in both eddic (c. 10x) and skaldic (c. 45x) verse, as well as in prose. One eddic poem names Freyja’s men Brisinga three times ; an early ekphrastic poem by the skald Þjóðolfr ór Hvíni (c. 900) refers to Loki as girðiþjófr Brísings ‘thief of Brísing’s girdle’ (perhaps referring to a neck­band, perhaps tosome other cincture)(28). In the Beowulf poet’s day, mene need not have been a recherché term. Ælfric employs it in his Grammar when reviewing Latin demonstratives (hoc monile, þes myne), a use suggesting that the simplex had some currency at the end of the tenth century. The Beowulf poet’s mene with its late Roman and Norse associations may have colored the ancient neck-lace of the Brosings older and darker, more female and perhaps more Roman than the great Danish torque bestowed on Beowulf. But relative obsolescence is hard to detect in a dead language like Old English, in a corpus meager in extent and with few chronological or regional signposts.

 

Sigle ‘neck-ring’

 

The Beowulf poet varies mene with sigle ‘neck­ring’ or ‘jewel’ (1200), a simplex that occurs in Old English verse only in his poem(29). On each of its three verse outings, the word refers to ornaments from a distant past : the Brosings’ necklace ; the siglu ‘necklaces, brooches’ (1157) looted from Finn’s fortress generations before the poem’s main action ; and the ancient siglu ‘necklaces, brooches’ (3163) of the dragon’s hoard. The compound maððumsiglu ‘precious jewels’ (2757), unique to Beowulf, similarly refers to ornaments retrieved from the ancient barrow. The Old Norse cognate of sigle ‘neck­ring’, sigli, names some kind of jeweled object ; the word appears in two eddic poems and in the woman­-kenning : sigli-Saga ‘goddess of the neck­ring’(30). Old English sigle ‘necklace’ appears three times in prose, twice in the Old English Bede, translating Latin monile and referring to a woman’s necklace,31 and once in an anonymous homily(32). Isidore explicates sigillum as follows : ‘Likewise the signets (signum) of rings are, as a diminutive, called sigilla. A signum is larger, and a sigillum is like a smaller signum’ (19.32.1). In the Isidorian glossarial tradition, in collections ranging from the Épinal­Erfurt and Corpus glossaries to those of Harley and Cleopatra, the Old English word sigl/sigil frequently translates Latin bulla and fibula(33). The prehistoric ornaments of Beowulf enjoyed long lives – if mainly in these glossaries.

 

Eoforspreot ‘boar-spear, boar-pole’

 

The scenic fullness of Beowulf’s pursuit of Grendel through wild, steep terrain and narrow passes before reaching the mere (1408–1441) has struck more than one reader as typically Vergilian(34). The ninth-­ or tenth­-century poem Waltharius has its own Aeneid-­echoing angusta callis ‘narrow track’ (916) and semita ‘narrow path’ (957), both nouns explicated by Isidore (16.8.9–10)(35). The Beowulf poet animates his wilderness with the sounds and sights of a hunt. Here are hound and stag, trackers on horseback, wild animals, horns, bows, arrows, and barbed boar­spears, an inventory reminiscent of the fateful, storm ­interrupted hunt of Aeneas and Dido (Aeneid 4.129–59), only this time it is Grendel’s mother who grapples with the hero in a cave. The compound eoforspreot ‘boar­spear’ occurs just this once in Old English poetry, when the men tracking Grendel use barbed spears to hook a sea­-beast :

 

Hræþe wearð on yðum mid eoferspreotum

heorohocyhtum             hearde genearwod,

niða genæged,              ond on næs togen,

wundorlic wægbora. (1437–1440)

[The water­monster] quickly became hard­pressed in the waves with barbed boar­spears, addressed with hostility, and dragged onto the headland, the strange wave­traveler.

 

Caroline Brady declared eoforspreot the ‘most prosaic of all’ the compounds for spear in Beowulf, ‘a literal bipartite designation of a particular type of barbed (heorohocyht) throwing spear used in hunting, in this instance used by the Danes and Geats gathered round the edge of the mere to drag on to the bluff the mere­ monster which had been killed by bow and arrow’(36). Prosaic or not, the compound never appears in Old English prose ;  it does, however, occur six more times : in glosses to Aldhelm’s prose De virginitate (11, 240.5) (‘ferratis virtutum venabulis’ ‘with the iron­tipped spears of the virtues’) and in the Third Cleopatra Glossary ; the term is also found in the Épinal­-Erfurt and Corpus Glossaries, where it probably interprets the spears of the hunting scene in Aeneid 4.131: ‘lato uenabula ferro’ ‘hunting spears with broad iron (point)’(37). Although both Vergil and Aldhelm mention iron barbs, neither refers specifically to boars. But Isidore does : ‘Hunting­spears (venabulum) are so called as if the term were venatui (h)abilis “suitable for hunting”, or because they “catch one coming” (venientem excipere), as if they were excipiabula “receptacles”’. Indeed, ‘they intercept (excipere) boars, lie in wait for lions, and penetrate bears, if only one’s hand is steady (cf. Martial, Epigrams 14.50)’ (18.7.4). Aldhelm himself scoured the Etymologies in a search for rare words, especially those concerned with war and games(38).The scholars who glossed Aldhelm’s work sometimes extracted entire phrases from Isidore, including his extended discussion of venabulum(39). The Old English gloss eoforspreot ‘boar­spear’ derives from the second part of Isidore’s etymology for venabulum. The Beowulf poet’s eoforspreot ‘boar­spear’ may have shared the same ultimate source.

 

Applications, or The Uses of Error

 

Twenty-­five years ago, Martin Irvine wrote : ‘Most of the poems in the Old English corpus, as we have them in their written form, presuppose a larger network of Latin texts and textuality for their very articulation and intelligibility’(40) Ten years earlier, Nicholas Howe had proposed that Isidore ‘served as a major, perhaps the major, source text for the Latin  language in the intellectual tradition in early Anglo-­Saxon England’(41).  Isidore’s Etymologies, like Wallace Stevens’ jar, took dominion everywhere.

 

Most of the things that rule our lives are invisible, from gravitational force and electric current to taste and passions. Isidore’s impact on Anglo-Saxon culture was, like these, a kind of weather. His fascination with linguistic detail became ‘a whole climate of opinion’, surrounding and touching even those without access to his books(42). Tracking Isidorian strains in Beowulf has practical benefits. Sometimes light is shed on the meaning of a puzzling passage, or the particular effect that the poet sought. Often it teaches wary attention. Isidore teases apart the strands of our snap judgments, forcing us to look again at apparent oddities in the poem. When a column of warriors reaches Grendel’s mere, the narrator says : ‘horn stundum song / fuslic (fyrd)leoð. Feþa eal gesæt’ ‘a horn at times sang an eager war­song. The foot­troop all sat’ (1423–24). The infantrymen have reached the monster­ infested lake ; unknown danger surrounds them. Yet the sound of a horn seems to precipitate a general sit­down – of foot­soldiers, no less. Isidore’s explication of Latin classicum ‘horn’ incorporates the notion of assembly : ‘Classica are horns made in order to call people together, and they were called classica from “call together” (calare)’ (18.4.5). Was the horn’s blast in Beowulf the signal for a particularly Anglo­Saxon version of convocation (calare), a sitting down and waiting for orders? Was it intended to flush out the water­-monsters, like so many game­birds? Or to announce to local landowners the presence of visitors ?(43) Probably none of the above. As Eric Weiskott has pointed out,the sounding of horns and  sitting down of soldiers are not related as cause and effect, as the modern punctuation of the text suggests, but are pieces of the preceding mosaic and conclude the tableau(44). Isidore’s Etymologies, like ill­fitting reading glasses, only sometimes allows the world of Beowulf to come into sharper focus.

 

Isidore derives ‘friend’ (amicus) ‘from the phrase “guardian of the spirit” (animi custos)’ and continues : ‘amicus is from “hook” (hamus), that is, from the chain of love, whence also hooks are things that hold’ (10.A.4). The term wine ‘friend’ in Beowulf, rooted in vernacular poetics, is cognate with Latin venus ‘love, beauty’ as well as with Old English words such as wynn  ‘joy’, wunian ‘to dwell’, wenian ‘to accustom’, winnan ‘to strive’, wenan ‘to believe, hope’, and wen ‘expectation’, all alliterating with one another and with stems that chime familiarly, like old acquaintances(45).This essay is dedicated to Antonette diPaolo Healey, friend of a half­century, whose radiance warms and nourishes all in her orbit. Through thick and thin, from ‘A’ through ‘D’ and culminating in ‘H’, she has led the Dictionary of Old English project to its current excellence and preeminence(46). Toni has shown us, over and over again, that no word is so small that it cannot be seen to overshadow mountains if poets and philologists pay attention to it for a long time and close up.