. . . I had spent a morning of such joy as is difficult of communication to any other. This particular feeling has been with me for a few days now, a sort of twitching desire to share a discovery which seems impossible to share with anyone, even with family and friends who seem to have strangely drooping or rolling eyes as I speak. . . .
The other day (as opposed to this day, I suppose) I was making my way through the Old English poem Andreas and was struck by a phrase:
Saga, þances gleaw þegn, gif ðu cunne,
hu ðæt gewurde be werum tweonum . . .
— ll. 557-558
[“Tell me, thane wise of thought,
if you know how it came about
among the doubtful men . . .]
(Please ignore my translation until you finish reading the next paragraph.)
The phrase which sent me on this morning reverie, which makes up the second half of line 558, Be werum tweonum, which is in bold above, is usually construed literally as “be-men-tween”, or, “among men”. The splitting of the prefix, itself a preposition, from the second element of betweonum is interesting in itself, if not unheardof in Old English poetry: the word, at its root, a compound of the preposition be “by, among” and the numeral “two” (or adjectival forms thereof). In the present context we have a prepositional phrase consisting of the preposition, be, the object of the preposition, werum, and an adjective, tweonum, describing the object of the preposition. The phrase is accepted to mean “among all humans of the world” rather than simply “by men twain” or “between men”. The construction here (and in a number of other poems, for example in Exodus ll. 443 and 563, and in Beowulf ll. 858 and 1297) is a marvellous little syntactical jewel as it places the object of the prepositional phrase, both temporally and on the page, between the two halves of the preposition, which itself means “between”. The rhetorical possiblities of this construction, even more than those of the split infinitive, are tools to boldly embrace — if only they had not been allowed to quietly slip away, be fingers tween of English linguistic history.
With more specific reference to the passage from the Old English poem: there is an extra connotation of tweonum when it stands alone, a connotation of “doubtful, untrustworthy”, and, perhaps, by etymology, “ambivalent, of two minds”. This adjective is ultimately derived from the Indo-European root *dwóh₁, which is also the root of “two” and of the second element of “between”. “Doubtful” is doubtless descriptive of all of fallen humanity in the Medieval Christian world-view. And so, when I came to translate Andreas, this Old English poem, I explicitly included the “doubtful” meaning in the line without compromising the primary meaning of this interesting prepositional phrase.
None of the etymological details I point out here are new discoveries. What I am presenting here is not in any way particularly original research. This story is just a part of my ongoing rambling self-education. But if only I could give you a hint of the joy that comes with this rambling and learning!
The other day (not this one) I spent much of a morning rushing about the house consulting volumes I’ve collected and squirrelled away for a few decades now, from Kenneth Brooks’ still very useful 1961 edition of Andreas and The Fates of the Apostles, through Bruce Mitchell’s wonderful Old English Syntax, into a page or two of Bessinger and Smith’s A Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, flipping past various editions of Beowulf from Wyatt to Klaeber, and finally arriving at the still reliable Bosworth and Toller Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon, which very matter-of-factly confirmed the conclusions I’d just washed up on the shores of: “IV. sometimes the case is placed between be and tweonum . . .” (p. 96). But B & T didn’t tell me (because I didn’t look ’em up) about the other meaning of tweonum, and the strange parallel course the two “twains” had run over the last many thousands of years to come together in that moment of particularly good poetry in (the often unremarkable) Old English poem Andreas.
I had spent a morning of such joy as is difficult of communication to any other. This particular feeling has been with me for a few days now, a sort of twitching desire to share a discovery which seems impossible to share with anyone, even with family and friends who seem to have strangely drooping or rolling eyes as I speak. But, just imagine: to have this vast, six-thousand-year sweep of human linguistic history opened up in what feels to be (and really has been) an emotional and physical revolution in one brief morning by means of a single, very common little English preposition! Between is a preposition that isn’t really a thing in a lot of European languages: most of them have something deriving from the Latin inter, which really just means “among” (like the first element of between). “Between”, in contrast, has a very concrete spatial implication: the object of the preposition is situated in the middle, equidistant from two, and only two, subjects. If someone is “inter” a Senate or a pair of horses, or a crowd of rowdies at a tavern, that someone may be in the back row or the Presidents seat of the Senate, riding one of the horses or attempting to climb the fence of the corral, tending bar or in the thick of a ferret legging competition. “Between” is the current stop on a linguistic journey for these sounds we make each day, between waking and slipping off again to dreams.
But, to hear, distantly, the voices of horsemen on the Central Eurasian steppes long before Genghis Khan, of hunters in the Caucasus long before the mythical Jason abused Medea, of priests in Brahman temples before Prince Gautama, of pig farmers in Lucania before Romulas, and of sailors on the North Sea before the Vikings sailed, and countless thousands of others using words something like “be” and something like “tween” and to know that these sounds have rolled around in my mouth, and in your mouth, and in their mouths for six thousand years and more, and that their meanings have rolled around in all our brains for all that time. And all of this for the single, wonderful purpose of moving thoughts between two doubtful but momentarily trusting human beings.
This is a rare pleasure, but one that happily seems to occur more frequently to me as I age and as I continue to read.
And none of this would or could have happened without the human knowledge trusted to be held between the covers of actual, physical books.
My translation of Andreas and the other poems of The Vercelli Book is in progress and will appear, with luck and a bit of good management, later in 2023. The Vercelli Book will be Volume 2 of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records in Modern English Verse. Three volumes of this six volume series, The Exeter Book, Beowulf and Judith, and The Old English Scatterlings are currently available at Amazon and a number of other online and real world booksellers.
Behind the Hedge 