Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore

by Elizabeth Mary Wright

The Survival of Rare Words

We have already seen that numbers of familiar words which we were wont to look upon as dead bodies embalmed in the prose or verse of bygone centuries, are yet alive and active in the dialects of to-day. But not only have the familiar words been thus preserved, but also, sometimes, the rare and unfamiliar. Where scholars have been unable to discern the true meaning, or where the sense has been merely deduced from the context, the discovery of the living word in some rustic dialect has supplied the missing clue, or turned vague conjecture into well-grounded certainty. There exists in Sussex and Hampshire the word crundel, used to denote a ravine, or a strip of covert dividing open country, always in a dip, usually with running water in the middle. In the Codex Diplomaticus edited by Kemble, more than sixty crundels are mentioned, but the meaning of the word had always remained a puzzle. Sweet, in his Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, defines it as a cavity, a chalk-pit(?), a pond(?); Bosworth-Toller as a barrow, a mound raised over graves to protect them; Leo as a spring or well; Kemble as a sort of watercourse, or a meadow through which a stream flows. It was the discovery of the existence of the word in the dialects which placed the correct meaning beyond doubt. In the Old English epic poem Beowulf, occurs the following passage: Ofer þǣm hongiað hrinde bearwas, Over which [lake] hang ... woods. The question as to the meaning of hrinde has formed the subject of frequent discussion, and various translations have been suggested, e.g. barky, rustling, placed in a ring or circle, standing in a ring, or gnarled(?), v. Beowulf, by W. J. Sedgefield, Litt.D., 1910. Dr. Richard Morris, however, proved fairly conclusively that the right meaning should be rimy, frosty. The word hrinde was taken to be a corrupt form of O.E. hrīmge, rimy, covered with hoar-frost, and this amended reading was adopted in subsequent editions of the text. Now the word for hoar-frost in several northern dialects is rind, and from a philological point of view, it is quite possible to connect the two words, and justify the retention of the MS. reading, whilst corroborating the accepted translation.

Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight

About the middle of the fourteenth century were produced four remarkable poems, Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, a romantic story of the adventures of an Arthurian knight; Pearl, a Vision; Cleanness; and Patience, stories taken from the Bible. We know nothing of the life of the author, we do not even know his name. Perhaps the little ‘Marjory’ who ‘lyfed not two yer in our thede [country]’ was the poet’s own daughter, and the Pearl the In Memoriam outpouring of his life’s sorrow. If so, it is the only shred of his biography which we possess, and some scholars would rob us even of that, by affirming that the lost ‘Pearl’ was purely a poetic creation. We can only guess at the man through his works. Judged by them, he appears to have been a literary country gentleman, born and bred in Lancashire, a man equally at home in his study, pen in hand, describing armed knights, and embattled castles, the tumultuous surgings of the Deluge, and the woes of Jonah in the ‘maw’ of the ‘wylde walterande whal’; or, in the saddle, following the ‘wylde swyn’, or ‘reynarde’ ‘þe schrewe’ to the sound of horn and bugle and the ‘glauerande glam of gedered rachchez’ [yelping cry of a pack of hounds]. He possessed, on the one hand, a real vein of poetic imagination, coupled with learning and knowledge, and on the other, all the instincts of a keen sportsman. He was a lover of nature and outdoor life, with extraordinary powers of accurate observation, and an artist’s eye for picturesque detail. Thus his memory was stored with a rich and varied vocabulary which the exigencies of his alliterative verse brought into full play. Many of the words he used are not found recorded anywhere else in literature, but they have remained in the dialect of the district to which the poet belonged. Sir Gawayne especially, by reason of its more secular subject-matter, abounds in words which are common in the North-country dialects of to-day, and it is these modern instances which have brought to light previously hidden meanings, and have confirmed contextual deductions, and thus enabled us to appreciate more fully the skilful handling of a wide range of vocabulary which characterizes this unknown poet, sportsman, and man of letters. In the description of the wondrous caparison of the Green Knight’s horse are mentioned ‘his molaynes’. The Glossary to the text gives this word as signifying: round embossed ornaments, but with a query. Stratmann’s Dictionary gives ‘Molaine, sb.? some ornament of a shield’. No other instance of the use of the word occurs in literature, but it is found in the Midland and South Midland spoken dialects: Mullen, the head-gear of a horse; the bridle of a cart-horse. Similarly, ‘toppyng’, another word peculiar to this poem. The Glossary and Dictionary suggest the meanings ‘mane(?), or top, head(?)’; the correct meaning as shown by the dialects is: a horse’s forelock. When the Man in Green ‘gedereȝ vp hys grymme tole, Gawayn to smyte’, he ‘mynteȝ at hym maȝtyly’, l. 2290. Obviously the verb ‘mynt’ means, as the Glossary says, to aim, or strike, but the more exact sense, and the one required by the story, is shown by the modern dialect mint (Sc. Irel. and n.Cy. dialects), to make a feigned attempt at, to make a movement as if to strike a blow but without doing it. The Green Knight had appointed his ‘grene chapelle’ as the place where Sir Gawayne was to receive this blow, and it proves to be ‘nobot an olde caue, Or a creuisse of an olde cragge’:

Now i-wysse [of a truth], quod Wowayn, wysty is here.

l. 2189.

This word ‘wysty’ is translated in the Glossary by: desert, waste, but with a query; the marginal paraphrase gives: ‘a desert is here.’ The word does not, as far as I know, occur in any other literary monument, but it has been preserved in the poet’s native dialect, cp. wisty (Lan. Chs.), spacious, empty, bare, large, often used in the sense of needlessly spacious. This meaning is exactly in accordance with the rest of the speech, and it adds a realistic touch, which was wanting in ‘desert’. Sir Gawayne was looking into the chapel, and he sees it all big, and bare, and empty—it was an uncanny place:

Now I fele hit is þe fende, in my fyue wytteȝ,

Þat hatȝ stoken [set] me þis steuen [tryst], to strye [destroy] me here.

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