main index Matthew 11:28 King James Bible : "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." The message of The Seafarer sweord forged in Sweden Words, Words, Swords It is my loss that I do not have £500 at the moment to lay out on acquiring the the full run of Bruce Mitchell's Old English Syntax, 1985, as quoted by Anne Klinck in The Old English Elegies, so, for the time being, I'm restricted to scanning A Guide to Old English, Mitchell and Robinson, which appeared at more or less the same time. Below is a sample from page 264 of M & R's comments on the central crux of The Seafarer, line circa 58. It must have been their mastery of syntax which led their readers to assume their equivalent mastery of lexis, or what one might call vocabulary. Their interpretation of the central crux, in my view, is irretrievably wrong. There must be something inherently seductive about this imaginative fantasy. In passing, one is tempted to ask, what exactly is the seafarer's "goal" ? The mind is not like a bird, and does not leave the speaker's body in order to return to it and urge him to go anywhere. Instead, the anfloga arrives to gather its prey. Anne Klinck below quotes Mitchell, Syntax: "categorically 'magan + infinitive does not express a wish in OE'". Neither Ezra Pound, nor Burton Raffel, can be regarded as adept in the translation of Anglish into Modern English. Nevertheless Pound felt obliged to start his "refraction" of The Seafarer with "May I "; and Raffel is mentioned by Klinck as suggesting, in Deor, "an optative force in mæg". The exact equivalent of mæg exists in German möge, Swedish må, and Modern English may. Rendering the opening words of The Seafarer as "I can" is simply wrong. The Sutton Hoo sword, replicated at right and left, was almost certainly forged in Sweden. A shorter version of this weapon would have been called a seax. This would have been the arm of the Angles manning and maintaining what was called by the Romans the Saxon Shore. Neither the Romans, nor the pre-existing Ancient Britons, or Scots, would have been unduly concerned where these men actually came from, and would have indiscriminately called them Saxons, or Sassenachs, or variants thereof, as they were armed with a seax. In time, these settlers would have mingled with the natives, to create what is now known as the British, or English. Those called Saxons simply because of their weapons, however, would have called themselves Angles. They mainly came from what is now Sweden, where there are over 150 place-names starting Angel-, Engel-, or Ingel-. Moreover, "There are over 1,000 place-names beginning with Ing- in Sweden ". See Burns, A Short Comparison, page 308. The god Ingwe was especially associated with Sweden and seen as the progenitor of the Ingling or Yngling lineage, a dynasty of legendary Swedish kings. A strophe of the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem records that "Ing was first among the East Danes seen by men". The East Danes occupied what is now known as the province of Skåne, in Sweden. There are virtually no place-names in what is now Saxony repeated in modern Britain. Saxony was not established as a province until circa 550 AD. David Burns 1 David Burns 2 commentaries: one, two, three [more than 60 other versions], four, five, six "It is dangerous to be right when authority is wrong". Voltaire "Ignoring pertinent information makes one an idiot". Ethan Indigo Smith, 2014, Truth treads on toes. sweord forged in Sweden © Charles Harrison-Wallace 2018 Wahllos schlägt das Schicksal zu |