from Medieval Academy News

Language Made Strange
by Candace Robb

After the publication of my sixth novel, A Gift of Sanctuary, a reader wrote that he had enjoyed the book but for two words. He was not among the number of reviewers and readers who complained about the difficult Welsh names. He took exception to my using a pair of Middle English words—“certes” and “gentilesse”—when the book’s language was otherwise modern. My reply was that the words were gifts to myself. I prefer the sound of “certes” to “certainly” or “to be sure” in some sentences. “Gentilesse” has for me no true synonym in modern English, graciousness with a sense of nobility. And I enjoy giving readers the gift of a few Middle English words, because it was the language that first drew me into the medieval world.

My epiphany came in an undergraduate Chaucer class. It was the second meeting of the class, which I was taking most unwillingly. The professor was reading to us in a language that I was struggling to follow when suddenly she shouted, “Awak! And be not agast so, for shame!” and then paused to laugh at our reactions, a true belly-laugh. Now that she had our attention, she began again at the beginning of “The Hous of Fame,” book 2, and by the time she returned to “Awak!” I wondered why I’d had such trouble understanding Chaucer’s English. Within a few classes I was hooked—I wanted to read everything Geoffrey wrote, and in his own words, because the way familiar words were made strange yet richer, the sound of the language, the slight tweak of my ear necessary to understand it and of my mind to comprehend it all made me feel as if Geoffrey had reached out from the past and transported me back in time (fortunately not in “hys grymme pawes stronge, / withyn hys sharpe nayles longe . . .”). I delighted in the existence of the words “newefangel” and “newfangelnesse” in the fourteenth century; the various meanings of the word “solas”—entertainment and refreshment—forever changed the word “solace” for me; the use of “slyly” for “cautiously” hinted at one word’s journey through time. It’s true that the study of any language, whether old or modern, teaches one a great deal about one’s own language. But that this was a voice stuck in time made it all the more intriguing to me.

Four years later I sat at my carrel in the graduate reading room bent over Bright’s Old English Grammar and Reader translating the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer for class, trying to express in modern English the grief and consolation shown to me by the poet who wrote of exile so long ago. I stood at the helm of a ship tossing on a wintry sea. Hail battered me, icicles hardened on my clothes, in my hair. I listened as he grieved for home, friends, and kin, for the gentle kiss of spring on the land. He phrased his elegy in a two stress rhythm that mirrored his sadness and the rolling of the ship; the history of his people resonated in his kennings. His was my world, but different, even more distant than Geoffrey’s.

Long after graduate school the fourteenth-century Scottish poet John Barbour brought his country’s Wars of Independence alive for me in his poem The Bruce. I felt a chill at the words “A! Blind folk full off all foly, / Haid ye umbethocht you enkrely / Quhat perell to you mycht apper / Ye had nocht wrocht on that maner.” Blind indeed. Soon “. . . Schyr Edward the mychty king / . . . / To Scotland went he than in hy, / And all the land gan occupy / Sa hale that bath castell and toune / War intill his possessioune / Fra Weik anent Orknay / To Mullyr Snuk in Gallaway, / And stuffyt all with Inglismen.” Here was a language that sounded more Anglo-Saxon than Chaucer’s, but far more familiar than the Seafarer poet’s. It struck me as the perfect language in which to immortalize the bloody struggle. As I wrote A Trust Betrayed, the words “stuffyt all with Inglismen” rang in my ears.

I use Middle English translations of Gilbertus Anglicus (Healing & Society in Medieval England, ed. Faye Marie Getz) and of Macer Floridus de Viribus Herbarum (ed. Gösta Frisk) in my work. Reading the medicinal recipes in Middle English crystallizes for me the concept of medicine in the Middle Ages in a way that translations cannot, perhaps because the syntax preserves the tone. Translations might be easier as reference material, but I welcome the excuse to read the language.

It was the languages that drew me to the past, to the people who had spoken them. I wanted to experience their worlds with all my senses, to understand what they believed, what drove them, how wars and plagues touched their lives, what frightened them, what cheered them, what they thought when they looked up at the stars at night or held their newborns in their arms. I am fortunate to have a career in which my task is to re-create the past every time I sit down to write. You will understand now why each morning before I begin my work, I read for a while—Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Pearl poet, John Barbour, Middle English prose, sometimes an Anglo-Saxon lyric—usually aloud. Now and then a word stays with me and slips unobtrusively onto the page I’m writing. It’s meant as a gift.

Editor’s note: Candace Robb is the author of the Owen Archer mysteries, set in late-fourteenth-century York, that feature as sleuth the former captain of archers for the duke of Lancaster, now a spy for John Thoresby, archbishop of York. A Trust Betrayed is the first in a new series of mysteries set in medieval Edinburgh. Her Web address is http://www.candacerobb.com.