Ryan Christensen and Dr. Don Chapman, English
One of the marks of Old English poetic style is the compound word. Malcolm Godden calls compounds “the essence of Anglo-Saxon poetic language.”(1) The lexicon of words exclusive to poetry includes many compounds, and many of these compounds are used only once in the Old English corpus. Thus it seems Anglo-Saxon poem-making consisted not only in using a large number of compound words, but in true compounding, in coining new words by combining two old words.
Many studies of Old English compounds are limited to listing which occur in poetry and which in prose. But there seems to be a difference between the poetic and prosaic compounds; the compounds in the poetic lexicon are there because they are “poetic,” of a poetic type, and not poetic only because they are in the lexicon; Anglo-Saxon poets had rules governing compounding, just as they had rules governing meter and alliteration. Many poetic compounds were of typically poetic subjects such as battle, and some compounds were highly metaphorical. I studied the compounds to see if the noun-adjective compound (that which has a noun as first element and adjective as second) was a syntactic poetic type, and found that the correlation between noun-adjective compounds and poetry was significant, justifying the claim.
Methods
I scoured J. R. Clark Hall’s Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, making a list of all noun-adjective compounds in the extant Old English writings. I then searched the corpus of writings to find all the locations of each word, and categorized each word as poetic, prosaic, or mixed (occurring in both prose and poetry). I found that approximately 60 percent of noun-adjective compounds occur exclusively in poetry and approximately 40 percent of all occurrences are in poetry, even though poetry makes up only about 10 percent of the corpus.
Another striking thing I found about Old English poetic compounds is that they are often semantically unnecessary. Nearly all poetic compounds had non-compound synonyms, and often several compounds had the same meaning. For example, hrimceald (“frost-cold”), isceald (“icecold”), snawceald (“snow-cold”), and winterceald (“winter-cold”) are all synonymous with “very cold.” Also, there are 22 poetic compounds that translate as “battle-brave.”
Further work
The full report has yet to be written. Because the results are so striking, we feel they are worth publishing, so Don Chapman and I will write a paper based on my findings and submit it to a language journal.