4 - The language of symbolic expression

Summary

Old English poetry's primary concentration on the inherent attributes of doers, which accounted for what they did, produced inevitably a preponderantly noun-based vocabulary. This was not a stock of words signifying thoughts and things as such, as we moderns expect from nouns, but more a register of the principal potentials responsible for the actions which society had learned to recognize from long experience. For instance, the sea was traditionally perceived as a mighty, encircling, tumultuous force perpetually to be reckoned with. Maxims formulated the agreed observations that it surrounds all land with its surging mass (‘Brim sceal sealte weallan, / lyfthelm and laguflod ymb ealra landa gehwylc’ (‘The sea surges with salt, a sky-covering and ocean flood around every land’, Maxims II 45b–6), that it imposes its own terms on those who venture into it (‘Werig sceal se wiþ winde roweþ’ (‘Exhausted is he who rows against the wind’, Maxims I 185a)), that it is dangerously fickle (‘Storm oft holm gebringeþ, / geofen in grimmum sælum’ (‘The sea, the ocean, often brings a storm in fierce conditions’, Maxims I 50b–1a)). Sizing up this formidable, contradictory power depended on practical experience and poets used a basic vocabulary which identified the main constituents of the phenomenon thus encountered. For example, the fifteen simplex nouns in Beowulf, referring to the sea – brim, faroð, flod, geofon, hœf, holm, lagu, mere, sœ, stream, sund, wœd, wœg, wœter and yð – designated between them its water, its volume and its vertical and horizontal movements.