In the country inns of a small corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land
connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people
talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect of English. Occasional snatches
of it even make sense, as when they say that the "veather ist cold" or inquire of
the time by asking, "What ist de clock?" According to Professor Hubertus
Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University, the language is "very
close to the way people spoke in Britain more than 1,000 years ago."
[ Quoted in The Independent, July 6, 1987. This shouldn't entirely surprise us.
This area of Germany, called Angeln, was once the seat of the Angles, one of the
Germanic tribes that 1,500 years ago crossed the North Sea to Britain, where
they displaced the native Celts and gave the world what would one day become
its most prominent language.
Not far away, in the marshy headlands of northern Holland and western
Germany, and on the long chain of wind-battered islands strung out along their
coasts, lives a group of people whose dialect is even more closely related to
English. These are the 300,000
Frisians, whose Germanic tongue has been so little altered by time that many of
them can, according to the linguistic historian Charlton Laird, still read the
medieval epic Beowulf "almost at sight."
They also share many striking similarities of vocabulary: The Frisian for boat is
boat (as compared to the Dutch and German boot), rain is rein ( German and
Dutch regen), and goose is goes ( Dutch and German gans).
In about A.D. 450, following the withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain,
these two groups of people and two other related groups from the same corner of
northern Europe, the Saxons and Jutes, began a long exodus to Britain. It was
not so much an invasion as a series of opportunistic encroachments taking place
over several generations. The tribes settled in different parts of Britain, each
bringing its own variations in speech, some of which persist in Britain to this day
—and may even have been carried onward to America centuries later. The broad
a of New England, for instance, may arise from the fact that the first pilgrimswere from the old Anglian strongholds of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, while the
pronounced r of the mid-Atlantic states could be a lingering consequence of the
Saxon domination of the Midlands and North. In any case, once in Britain, the
tribes variously merged and subdivided until they had established seven small
kingdoms and dominated most of the island, except for Wales, Scotland, and
Cornwall, which remained Celtic strongholds.
That is about as much as we know—and much of that is supposition. We don't
know exactly when or where the invasion began or how many people were
involved. We don't know why the invaders gave up secure homes to chance their
luck in hostile territory.
Above all, we are not sure how well—or even if—the conquering tribes could
understand each other. What is known is that although the Saxons continued to
flourish on the continent, the Angles and Jutes are heard of there no more. They
simply disappeared…although the Saxons were the dominant group, the new
nation gradually came to be known as England and its language as English, after
the rather more obscure Angles. Again, no one knows quite why this should be.
The early Anglo-Saxons left no account of these events for the simple reason
that they were, to use the modern phrase, functionally illiterate. They possessed
a runic alphabet, which they used to scratch inscriptions on ceremonial stones
called runes (hence the term runic) or occasionally as a means of identifying
valued items, but they never saw their alphabet's potential as a way of
communicating thoughts across time. In 1982, a gold medallion about the size of
an American fifty-cent piece was found in a field in Suffolk.
It had been dropped or buried by one of the very earliest of the intruders,
sometime between A.D. 450 and 480. The medallion bears a runic inscription
which says (or at least is thought to say): "This she-wolf is a reward to my
kinsman." Not perhaps the most profound of statements, but it is the earliest
surviving example of Anglo-Saxon writing in Britain. Is is, in other words, the
first sentence in English.
Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan, a
fact rather quaintly presereved in the names of four of our weekdays, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, which respectively commemorate the gods
Tiw, Woden, and Thor, and Woden's wide, Frig. (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday,to complete the picture, take their names from Saturn, the sun, and the moon.)
It is difficult to conceive of the sense of indignity that the Celts must havefelt at
fining themselves overrun by primitive, unlettered warriors from the barbaric
fringes of the Roman empire. For the Celts, without any doubt, were a
sophisticated people. As Laird notes: "The native Celts had become Civilized,
law-abiding people, accustomed to government and reliable police, nearly as
helpless before an invading host as most modern civilian populations would be."
Most of them enjoyed aspects of civilization – running water, central heating –
that were quite unknown to the conquering hordes and indeed would not become
common again in Britain for nearly 1,500 years. For almost four centuries they
had been part of the greatest civilization the world had known, and enjoyed the
privileges and comforts that went with it. A tantalizing glimpse into the daily life
and cosmopolitan nature of Roman Britain surfaced in 1987 with the discovery
of a hoard of curse tablets in Bath near a spring once dedicated to the goddess
Suli Minerva. It was the practice of aggrieved citizens at that time to scratch a
curse on a lead tablet and toss it with a muttered plea for vengeance into the
spring. The curses were nothing if not heartfelt. A typical one went: "Docimedes
has lost two gloves and asks that person who has stolen them should lose his
minds and his eyes." The tablets are interesting in that they show that people of
Roman Britain were just as troubled by petty thievery (and, not incidentally, just
as prone to misspellings and lapses of grammar) as we are today, but also they
underline the diversity of the culture. One outstandingly suspicious victim of
some minor pilferage meticulously listed the eighteen people he thought most
likely to have perpetrated the deed. Of these eighteen names, two are Greek,
eight Latin, and eight celtic. It is clear that after nearly four centuries of living
side by side, and often intermarrying, relations between the Romans and the
Celts had become so close as to be, in many respects, indistinguishable.
In 410, with their empire crumbling, the Roman legions withdrew from Britain
and left the Celts to theur fate. Under the slow pagan onslaught, many Celts were
absorbed or slaughtered. Others fled to the westernmost fringes of the British
Isles or across the Channel to France, where they founded the colony of Brittany
and reintroduced Celtic to mainland Europe. Some Celts – among them the
semilegendary King Arthur – stayed and fought and there is evidence from place
names to suppose that pockets of Celtic culture survived for some time in
England (around Shaftesbury in northeast Dorset, for example). But little isknown for sure. This was the darkest of the dark ages, a period when history
blends with myth and proof grows scant.