Alphabetical (42 page)

So, though life and history would be much simpler if it were more like the maps we drew in my first year at grammar school
in 1957, for archaeologists and linguists, it's much more complex – and three cheers for that.

The vikings arrived speaking what's known as Old Norse, though they didn't say, ‘We speak Old Norse.'

They ended up occupying what we now call ‘the North' of England plus East Anglia, Pembrokeshire, the Scottish islands and the Orkneys, the north and east coasts of Scotland, and the south-east corner of Ireland. It's almost certain they did get to the North American continent – Kensington Runestone or not – and it's completely certain that they got to Turkey and into the Arab-speaking lands of the Middle East.

Anyone who speaks, reads or writes English cannot avoid talking Viking. Words of Old Norse origin are everywhere. If you read this list aloud, it's almost a free-verse poem about the effect the Norse-speaking peoples had on those around them in Britain:

    
Anger, bag, bask, birth, blunder,

    
both, bull, cake,

    
call, choose, clip,

    
club, die, dirt, dregs, egg, fellow, flat, fog,

    
freckle, gap, get, gift, haggle, hit, how,

    
husband, ill, knife, knot, law, leg, loose,

    
low, mistake, muck, muggy, odd, outlaw, raise,

    
ransack, rid, rotten, rugged, run, same, scare,

    
scarf, score, seat, seem, shape, skid, skill,

    
skin, skip, skirt, skull, sky, sly, snare,

    
snub, sprint, stagger, sway, take, their, they,

    
though, tight, trust, ugly, until, want, weak,

    
whisk, window, wing,

    
wrong.

The patterning of the alphabet on a page of English writing would look fundamentally different if the Vikings had decided to give the British Isles a miss. No ‘take' or ‘get'. No ‘their', ‘them' or ‘they'. No ‘window' which holds within it the beautiful metaphor ‘wind-eye'. No ‘egg'. No ‘sky'. Indeed that ‘sk' combination would hardly have reached Britain. Of course, it goes without saying, there were non-Norse ways of saying these things and we have ways of saying them with words of French origin or from many other places which have influenced speakers of English.

This is a risky thing to state, but it seems as if the Scandinavians who arrived in the British Isles were not particularly literate. However, we can be fairly certain that they were storytellers and poets.

Those Vikings who wrote, wrote in runes. Depending on their age, their alphabets are called ‘Elder' or ‘Younger Futhark'. At the point at which the Germanic peoples (Frisians, Jutes, Saxons, Angles, Franks) first started arriving they wrote in runes too. Their alphabet is called ‘Futhorc'. What has survived of this kind of writing is found on clay pots, metal swords, amulets, and brooches, on bone, stone and occasionally on wood where it has been preserved in airless mud. The British Isles represent a site in which a spectrum of different kinds of runic writing meets over a period of some eight hundred years. Beyond saying that, the runic field is clogged with debate and disagreement. The First Law of Thermodynamics concerns heat and energy. According to the runologist D. M. Wilson, the First Law of Runo-Dynamics states that ‘for every inscription there shall be as many interpretations as there are scholars working on it.'

Even so, the subject is worth more than a glimpse. It may seem strange, but at the height of the 1960s, with the air full of protest and revolt, civil rights and anti-war demonstrations, I found myself being excited by something utterly distant and
different from Martin Luther King, the Tet Offensive and Wenceslas Square. It was the extraordinary tally between, on the one hand, a mystical Old English poem about the Crucifixion, found on a manuscript in a library in Vercelli in northern Italy, and, on the other, a runic inscription on a stone cross in a church in Dumfriesshire in Scotland. The poem is called ‘The Dream of the Rood' and a narrator talks of his dream of the Cross; the Cross itself tells the story of the Crucifixion; the narrator reflects on what he has heard. Written in Anglo-Saxon runes on the fragments of the Ruthwell Cross is a text that overlaps with what is written on the manuscript in Italy: ‘I raised up a great king, lord of heaven. I dared not bow down. Men reviled us both together. I was drenched in blood.' And it continues.

Quite apart from the power of personification which I have always enjoyed in poetry, I was drawn to the idea of a line between Vercelli and Ruthwell, at a time when travel was so precarious and time-consuming; a trade route of ideas and feelings preserved by chance in these objects tucked away in libraries or in inscriptions in rural places. In fact, in this case, it was the stone that was more at risk than the parchment manuscript, as seventeenth-century Puritans identified the cross as idolatrous and smashed it up.

The Viking runes in the British Isles are often quite simple: ‘A good comb Thorfastr made', ‘Dolfin wrote these runes on this stone', or ‘Ginna and Tóki had this stone laid'. On a font in Cumbria there's a poem:

    
Richard, he me wrought

    
and me, to this splendour, brought.

On a cross at Kirk Michael, on the Isle of Man, it says: ‘It is better to leave a good foster-son than a bad son.'

A vision of the popular culture of Viking warriors comes from some graffiti they scratched on the walls of a prehistoric stone grave-chamber at Maeshowe in the Orkneys, where they sheltered or held their meetings:

‘Úframr Sigur∂arsonr cut these runes'

‘Ingibjorg the lovely widow'

‘It's true what I say, the treasure was moved out of here. The treasure was taken away three days before they broke into the mound.'

‘Happy the man who can find the great treasure'

‘Thorni f****d. Helgi carved.'

R. I. Page, who died in 2012, was regarded as the world's greatest expert on runes. He wrote about these graffiti, pointing out that one of them was ‘an inscription I would like to have cut myself: “The man who wrote these runes knows more about runes than anyone else west of the sea.”'

Page divided runologists into two categories: the imaginative and the unimaginative. Unless an interpretation could be proven, he would declare he was an unimaginative runologist and clearly liked it that way. With barely concealed scorn, he stepped round the New Age enthusiasts who have found comfort in the pagan knowledge expressed through runes. Of the Kensington Runestone, he wrote: ‘It is a stirring story, with the sort of detail about Norsemen in midwest America that is not recorded anywhere else. Only the unimaginative runologist will fail to be impressed, but I have already declared myself an unimaginative runologist.'

THE STORY OF

•
CHARLEMAGNE'S SCRIBES CREATED
a sign by placing two Us side by side with a space between. It signified a ‘w' sound in the late Latin, German and French of that time, i.e.
AD
900. It was described as ‘two Us'. So when printers adapted it they started off by printing ‘VV' – two Vs next to each other. Only later, by about 1700, did they set in lead a new letter ‘W' which was of course still called a ‘double u'. In French, though, it is known as ‘double v'.

There used to be another sign to indicate a ‘w' sound, the ‘wyn', which you can find in ‘D is for Disappeared Letters'.

w

The lower-case ‘w' standing for the sound ‘w' had to wait till the upper-case ‘W' had been fixed.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

As we've seen, this derives from the Carolingian handwritten double letter.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

On its own at the beginning of words, it does service in ‘witch' and ‘wonder'. Most English speakers pronounce ‘w' in the same way as they pronounce ‘wh' in ‘why', ‘where', ‘what', ‘when' and ‘whence'. In ‘who' and ‘whole' the ‘h' does its work, reminding us that in Old English the formation for that breathy sound was ‘hw', where the ‘w' was a ‘wynn'.

‘W' combines with vowels to make ‘raw', ‘new' and ‘now'.

It combines with ‘r' in unpronounced ways: ‘wrong', ‘wright' and ‘write', and again in ‘two' and ‘answer'. The
initial ‘w's were once pronounced but unlike some initial ‘h's, once pronounced now not, the ‘w' hung about.

You can put ‘s' in front of it to make ‘sweet' but only when imitating people who pronounce ‘r' as ‘w' do we write things like ‘fwee', ‘bwight'. ‘Twice' reminds us that the ‘w' in ‘two' was once pronounced as it is in ‘between' and the neologism ‘tweenies'. ‘Dweeb' is doing well at the moment too. ‘Kwik' was once a word that advertisers liked. Talking of ‘once', it's a word that deserves a ‘w' on the front to match ‘wonder' but we get by without.

Following ‘w' we write consonants as in ‘newt', ‘gawp', ‘news', ‘Newfoundland' (a bit of a cheat as it was once three separate words), ‘trawl', ‘hawser', ‘town' and ‘shawm'.

‘Awkward' manages two Ws in place, in front of and following a consonant.

Norman French brought in ‘William' from ‘Guillaume', the ‘warranty' and the ‘guarantee', the ‘ward' and the ‘guard'.

Sound-play with ‘w' can involve crying: ‘woo-woo-woo'. Owls go ‘woo' or ‘whoo' or ‘tu-whit-tu-woo'. We stop horses by saying, ‘Whoa!' which can also be used to show people you don't want them to go on doing what they're doing or saying: ‘Whoa, man!' We can do a ‘wee' or a ‘wee-wee' or a ‘widdle'. Something good is a ‘whizz'. We're pleased when we say ‘wow!' Things that aren't straight are ‘wonky'. ‘Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town', because he comes from Scotland where ‘wee' means ‘small'.

If you're a parent you're probably wondering ‘Where's Wally?' though in the US it'll be ‘Where's Waldo?' If you can't get to the bottom of the matter, your mind is full of the ‘whys and wherefores'. Two old chants go: ‘Why are we waiting?' and ‘We won't, we won't, we won't be buggered about . . .'

W
IS FOR WEBSTER

D
ICTIONARIES HONOUR ALPHABETS.
American dictionaries, like
Webster's Collegiate
, honor alphabets. As a child I thought that the big dictionaries on my parents' shelves were language. They had captured language. All of it. They sorted it into the right order and anything you wanted to know about language was there. I would say now that if words were bricks, dictionaries put them into neat piles but they don't design houses.

The dictionaries I knew best – two huge books,
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, A–M
and
N–Z
– had a joke. If these were shorter, what were the longer ones like? Written inside was ‘H. Rosen 1950'. My mother was C. Rosen and her absence implies that while the dictionary housed the words, housing a dictionary was a man's job. By the time I came to study these things, the big names in dictionaryland seemed to be men too. To bring full weight to the words in
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles
, they are adorned with a bevy of credits:

    
William Little, M.A., late Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, H.W. Fowler, M.A. Oxon., J. Coulson, B.A. Leeds, C.T. Onions,
C.B.E., F.B.A., M.A. Lond., Hon. D.Litt.,Oxon., Hon. F.R.S.L., Fellow of Magdalen College; Reader in English Philology in the University of Oxford, Joint Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

It all adds up to telling us that words are safe here. And they were. We loved the two volumes of these blue dictionaries, each entry a tiny essay in the history of the word, jam-packed full of abbreviations: a special scholarly code that only people like my father could unpack.

    
†Bawdstrot. ME. [OF.
baudetrot
, suggesting earlier OF.
baldestrot, baudestrot
, f.
bald, baud
‘bold, gay' (see BAUDE) + ? Teut.
strut/STRUT
.] A BAWD, male or female – 1483.