It is remarkable how many episodes from the annals of early British history owe their preservation in popular tradition to the wit and playfulness of the words in which they were recorded. Thanks to a quip uttered by a post-Conquest wag on discrepancies between a royal name and royal deeds, posterity was made permanently aware of the disastrous reign of Ethelred the Unready. And everyone knows what happened when Gregory the Great saw some English boys in the marketplace and started (...) to meditate on Angles and angels. Like Gregory, the Old English poet was adept at putting similar-sounding words together. Like Gregory too, he could have serious reasons for such an exercise: “In meeting magic with a higher magic, in promoting a superior and more comprehensive rationality, the chief instrument of Christian champions was the art of words.” In the Old English prose dialogue of Solomon and Saturn, Solomon vanquishes his pagan opponent by means of this higher magic. Saturn demands: “Saga me for hwylcum pingum heofon sy gehaten heofon” . Solomon replies: “Forðon he behelað eal pæt him be ufan bið” . Solomon wins the round: not only has he managed to recapture the sounds of heofon in his etymological explanation , but he has approximated in Old English the newest and most deliberately Christian of the several Latin etymologies for caelum: caelum a celando superiora . He wins because he has shown Saturn how Christian learning — operating through God-given words — can fathom the secret significances of things. jQuery.click { event.preventDefault(); }). (shrink)
