Medieval Association of the Pacific Benton Award
Dear MAP Members and Friends,
I am writing as the Vice President of the Medieval Association of the Pacific (MAP), in charge of handling the Benton Award, to remind you that specifically independent medievalists and graduate students are encouraged to apply. Please also circulate this announcement to graduate students who might not know about it.
The John F. Benton Award
This award, named in honor of its progenitor, John F. Benton, MAP President 1982-1984, provides travel funds for all members of the Medieval Association of the Pacific–independent medievalists and graduate students in particular–who might not otherwise receive support from institutions.
The award may be used to defray costs connected with delivering a paper at any conference, especially for MAP conferences, or connected to scholarly research. Up to three awards will be presented each year, for $400 apiece. Applications should include a one-page vita, an abstract of a paper submitted to the conference, and a photocopy of the Call for Papers or conference announcement; if the application is for travel to research, it should include a one-page vita, and a letter outlining the research project. Send applications via email attachment by January 5, 2012 to the vice president of the Association, Anita Obermeier (AObermei@unm.edu<mailto:AObermei@unm.edu>).
<http://www.csun.edu/english/map09/static.php?id=grants>
Anita Obermeier
Vice President, Medieval Association of the Pacific
via Mearcstapa
OE weak masculine noun curiosity
For reasons that hardly bear recounting, I found myself trying to fit eaxlgestealla into a sentence last week in a context that demanded it be a genitive plural. Dutifully mimicking my paradigm of nama, I arrived at eaxlgesteallena. That looked odd, never mind a bear to pronounce, so I went combing through the corpus and found Elene‘s gn pl eaxlgestealna at line 64. I then spent a chunk of time going through grammars trying to arrive at a reason for this that was better than “you know those crazy Anglo Saxons and their free-wheeling orthography!”
I imagine there is actually some rule I’ve assimilated poorly. I mean, if one is supposed to know how to decline eaxlgestealla, then someone must have articulated a rule or tendency at some point. But I don’t know where to look for it. None of my grammars treat multi-syllable weak nouns in giving paradigms, and the concept of elision is nowhere to be found. My thinking process:
Now, sometimes nouns are caught in the process of moving from one category into another over time, and you get a mix of forms, like winter which was originally a u-stem but which you’ll also see with a strong gen sg ending as wintres instead of, presumably, wintra. Perhaps that is what’s going on with eaxlgestealna, a switch between classes/categories and thus endings in some places, so where we would expect the -ena gen pl ending for a masc weak noun, we find instead the ending of a strong noun … no, that won’t work, there is no strong -na ending, just the -a ending (I was thinking of scina, but the root is scin-). So such a borrowing would render gen pl eaxlgestealla which is not attested. And in any case I’m not sure that borrowing from other classes occurs with categories other than u-stem nouns.
Now, where elision is not discussed as such, syncopation is, and I don’t imagine there is much in the way of technical difference between the two (though syncopation in the older OE grammars refers to the loss of a vowel between two consonants and I don’t know that elision is that precise, generally, so maybe syncopation is a subset of elision?). But again, the only discussion of syncopation as such that I can find right now is in reference to 1. verbs, and there are fairly precise “rules,” and 2. loss of a vowel when adding endings to two-syllable *strong* nouns (nom sg heafod but acc sg heafdes, though you’ll also see heafodes, so either way is acceptable). It’s not clear that this applies also to weak nouns, though. And it’s tough to tell what might be going on because eaxlgestealla is a rare word in the surviving OE corpus (I only found four instances – one gen pl, two nom sg, and one nom pl), so we can’t even see the noun fully declined “in the wild”).
There is the possibility that eaxlgestealna, which is attested only once in the surviving corpus, is a scribal error. But then one might expect that editors would have simply emended it so that we wouldn’t even know it existed unless we were paleographers or devout readers of editorial notes. That it is not emended to eaxlgesteallena makes me keep looking for the rule or guideline that would account for it.
Assuming there’s some un-doubling rule I don’t know about to account for the loss of the L, I was thinking I couldn’t rule out an alternative -a ending for the genitive plural of weak masc nouns, and it just isn’t Baker, which is the OE grammar I know best; Moore and Knott do mention either -a or -ena as alternatives for gen pl endings of fem o-stems. Perhaps something similar exists for masc weak nouns and, uh, no grammar mentions it because eaxlgestealna is our only surviving example of the variation, and it’s so rare as to not have made an impression? If that were so, then eaxlgesteal(l)ena ought to be an acceptable spelling – it just isn’t attested because we lost so much of the corpus. Sounds unlikely, though… plus that variation gives us eaxlgesteal(l)a and not the -alna ending. So that can’t be it.
Elision – or syncopation – it must be, then, if it is so that elision or syncopation can account for both the consonant *and* the vowel loss in the next syllable, *and* we accept that this is an orthographic variation that is not mentioned in any of the grammars I have around my feet at the moment. Unsatisfying, but in trying to think through other alternatives, that (offered by a friend in another online forum) is the only one that makes sense to me. It’s just these older grammars are so exhaustive you’d think it would have been mentioned.
The most vexing thing is not knowing where to look or who to ask to find a definitive explanation for this.
Anybody got any input?
“baby’s stone coffin” at Whitby?
Jonathan Jarrett has another “for those who couldn’t make it” conference report, which I always love reading even though most of the time I don’t have any idea what he’s talking about (Catalonian charters and Pictish archaeology… out of my depth there). There are some lovely photos of a trip to Whitby, one of which prompts this post.
Apparently a stone, er, thing is on display at the nearby Church of St. Mary with a sign next to it saying “Saxon Baby’s Coffin.” To which I can only say “what?” I am no archaeologist, and it’s been a while since I’ve researched death, interment, etc, but a stone “Saxon Baby’s Coffin” strikes me as an improbable thing. I am going to find out what I can (since I would rather chase down obscure interesting bits of possibly-misidentified material culture than put these references into Chicago style), but if anybody wandering by knows about stone Saxon baby coffins, or (more likely) about this non-Saxon-non-baby-coffin artefact at Whitby, please do tell. I presume they call it a coffin and not a sarcophagus for a reason, [*] and I presume there is some reason other than whimsy for its being identified as a “Saxon baby coffin,” but as of yet I don’t know a thing.
ETA: I’ve found a photo from a photographer’s trip to the abbey and church – scroll down (and ignore the caption asking about your “knowledge of Old English words” under a photo of some perfectly modern English). And in Googling about, I’ve discovered another thing on-site also frequently referred to as a stone coffin, which you can see here. I bet it’s actually some sort of watering-trough.
ETA2: Nothing at the Whitby Abbey Headland Project page, last updated in 1999 (except for the mention that the 18 graves excavated as part of the project contained bodies probably wrapped in shrouds and placed directly in the earth – as usual – rather than inhumed in coffins, never mind stone coffins, if such a thing as a Saxon-era stone coffin even existed.
ETA3: They did eventually find evidence of a scant handful of wooden coffins at the Whitby cemetery.
ETA4: The Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture in England: Northern Yorkshire does mention the excavation of a “portion of a Saxon headstone” at Whitby, which is in itself quite rare as mortuary practice, I think, so it may be that there are other unusual or uncommon features of interments here. However, the same volume also records the excavation of a “portion of a Saxon stone used as a mould,” among various other bits which, broken up, might resemble other things to some people – like a baby-sized stone coffin 🙂 [see pp 232-33 and thereabouts]
ETA5: Ok, maybe I have to allow that there may have been such things as AS-era stone coffins after all, much to my surprise: the above volume led me to the description of the following, from the work of Seaton (NZ785178):
1. Coffin. Present Location: Lost? Evidence for discovery: Three stone coffins together with human remains were found prior to 1860 and the location was marked on the Ordnance Survey 6-inch map, 400 m to the east of Seaton Hall. . . . One of the coffins, decorated with interlace, was noted in 1874 ‘doing duty as a water-trough on the slope of the hill to the left of the approach to a farm house . . . ” [. . . ] “Discussion: Coffins hollowed from a single stone, as this appears to have been, are uncommon monuments in the pre-Conquest period, but a decorated stone sarcophagus of this type is known from St. Alkmund’s church, Derby, which Radford dated to the ninth century.”
SO… maybe I was wrong to be so incredulous about Saxon stone coffins (except note use of “sarcophagus” in same paragraph, which might be part of the problem. [**] But I remain unconvinced concerning Baby-Saxon-Stone-Coffin.
ETA6: Ooh, I found a creative commons image of the St. Alkmund’s Sarcophagus, so I can have a picture in this post after all. But please note the obvious sarcophagus-ness of this sarcophagus – I insist that this is not a coffin.
St. Alkmund's Sarcophagus
And now I really must give up this wild goose chase and get back to the dissertation which has absolutely nothing to do with any of this (which is probably why this was so alluring in the first place…)
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[*] I’m allowing for interment in stone, or within stone structures, in the case of burial beneath church floors, within sarcophagi inside churches (I would assume mostly for high-ranking clergy and the wealthy), and in crypts (I would assume mostly not in Anglo-Saxon-era English churches). It’s the Saxonness of a stone coffin, and the abbey-ness of its original location, and the baby-ness of its supposed inhabitant/recipient given its Saxonness and abbey-ness, that I’m having a problem with. (St. Cuthbert didn’t even get a stone coffin!) There are some extant wills outlining donations to the monastery associated with the deceased’s burial in the ambulatory or other parts of the monastery, but these date from the 15th century.[1] Were infants buried in stone coffins at abbeys prior to 867? Was anyone? Is this infant supposed to be a member of a Northumbrian royal family? Did they find this thing in/under the site of the original abbey itself or in the surrounding cemetery or what? Basically, who says it’s a Saxon baby coffin?
[**] I suspect there may be difficulties with terminology here – to my thinking, if it is a structure meant to stand above ground or be built into or form a part of the architecture of a church or other building, it’s a sarcophagus – maybe a tomb – but not a coffin. Maybe I have the wrong operative definition of a coffin, in thinking of it as a container for a body which is inhumed completely? (Still… I’m not buying a Saxon baby sarcophagus either.)
Here, for instance, is where William II (Rufus) supposedly lies, in Winchester Cathedral; scroll down just past the tomb of Matilda Queen of Flanders, awash in a pretty pink glow in the photograph.
Not a coffin! Also neither Saxon nor Anglo-Saxon. (And actually probably not containing William II, for that matter.) But maybe someone would call that a coffin. Would they?
The Wirksworth Stone is sometimes called a coffin-lid, but I would not call the resting place from which it was taken a coffin at all, not least of all because this magnificent carving was clearly not meant to be buried, but to be seen. Indoors. Above ground. And so St. Betti (or whoever this was beneath it) was placed inside a vault, not a grave. (Even assuming the stone vault uncovered in the 19th century in St. Mary’s was original and contemporaneous with the stone, which I don’t know very much about and don’t know to be true.) ……Wow, I desperately miss England.
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[1] George Young, A History of Whitby and Streoneshalh Abbey, vol. 1 (Whitby: Clark and Medd, 1817): 352-353.
Slouching Towards Extimacy 