Mountain Grill

[Eric Siegerman]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 02:44:57PM +0000, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
> Wrætlic is þes wealstan; wyrde gebræcon, burgstede burston, brosnað enta
> geweorc. Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras, hrungeat berofen,
>            hrim on lime, scearde scurbeorge scorene, gedorene, aeldo
> undereotone.                   Eorðgrop hafað waldendwyrhtan,
> forweorone, geleorene heard gripe hrusan,                   oþ hund cnea
> werþeoda gewitan. Oft þæs wag gebad, ræghar and readfah,
>  rice  æfter oþrum, ofstondem under stormum; steap geap gedreas ....

So, can the German-speakers here read this stuff?  I sure can't,
though it mostly makes sense when I compare it to the
translation.

What makes me ask is that the Anglo-Saxon King Aelfred the Great
had a ring, whose inscription said something like "Aelfred mec
haet gewyrcan", "Aelfred had me made".  Well, "wyrc" must be
"work", but the rest -- word order, affixes, the "ae"s, the "c"
in "mec" -- is all far more Deutch than English.  That ring gave
me quite a shock when I saw it (on my one trip to England when I
*didn't* get to see HW, and so settled for the British Museum
instead :-)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics at telepres.com
|  |  /
The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that's why so
many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it's hard to
represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus.
        - Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum"