The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English by Hana Videen looked at Old English vocabulary by theme. Chapters were divided into subjects such as Eating and Drinking, Learning and Working, Making Friends and Enemies, Caring for Body and Mind, Wildlife, Travel, among others. What seemed undecipherable text at first soon became meaningful, once I applied Videen’s rules for pronunciation and remembered what some prior contexts were. As a student of German and Middle High German as well, I could grasp the meanings of these Old English words since many of the roots are still in use in the German language today. However I must say that there is no way I could read Beowulf in its original text, yet I did feel good when I was able to decipher some words Videen wrote about before reading their definitions.
Before Videen wrote about any Old English, she devoted part of the first chapter to the runic alphabet. She discussed the symbolism underlying each character. The letters we use today for B, F, M, R, S and T are all based on their runes, which represented the same sounds.
I was surprised to learn that the corpus of literature written in Old English is not as great as I might I have thought. Videen wrote about the number of instances some words were used, and a significant number of them she discussed were hapaxes. In these cases, linguists have only one context and sometimes the circumstances were ambiguous, so there are differing opinions about the meanings of some words. I enjoyed the Old English tradition of kenning, which meant using a compound set of words to denote a concept, such as bān-hūs ( = bone house, for the body).
Since most of the writers of Old English were monks and nuns, the lives of peasants (who were mostly illiterate) were left for others to write about, if they wrote about their lives at all. An underlying theme throughout every chapter was the expectation people had to tell the truth. If one said something, one kept one’s word, for to utter a lie was unthinkable, and a scribe who was a monk or nun would never knowingly write down falsehoods. I recall the same faith people had in others when I studied the Minnesang texts in university. Thus these Old English texts did make for some particularly gruesome reading, especially when it came to treating ailments or infections. I can’t imagine that any of the potions or ointments that Videen wrote about were never applied in real life. The end of each chapter had an alphabetical index to review the vocabulary yet I often grew frustrated in my attempts to find words later since some words were not bound by subject to any particular chapter heading and were not easy to relocate. A general index at the end of the book would have been helpful.