All of a sudden I have renewed respect for Microsoft.

A colleague who regularly brings superb home-cooked cakes into work sent a general e-mail around the office containing a 14th century recipe for almond-filled pastries baked in honey and wine.

"Frytour blaunched. Take almaundes blaunched, and grynde hem al to doust withouten eny lycour. Do þerto poudour of gyngeuer, sugur, and salt; do þise in a thynne foile. Close it þerinne fast, and frye it in oile; clarifie hony with wyne, & bake it þerwith."(**)

There was, as might be expected, some laughter over "do þise in a thynne foile", but sadly this humour was misplaced since the 'þ' symbol is not a modern letter 'p': it is the symbol (called a 'thorn') introduced into Old English from Scandinavia and which represented the letters 'th' until its use began to die out in the 1500s. Therefore "do þise" correctly translates as "do this"; and why would I know this (apart from the fact that I am a collector of arcane and unusual (some would say useless) information) ?

Some time ago I decided it was time I read Beowulf and bought Seamus Heaney's prize-winning translation (++). If you haven't read this piece of Heaney's work, you have missed a gem; and I don't just mean the Beowulf translation itself: I would have paid double the price of the book for Heaney's 20-page introduction alone.

I have a love of English, as a language, which is due in part to my parents and in part to my primary school teacher, John Holmes.  Every week as children in a Norfolk county primary he firmly but kindly required us to learn the spelling of ten words and the meaning of ten more.  I left that school with a grounding in English which has stood me in good stead throughout my life, and I here acknowledge the measure of that debt.

Reading Heaney's introduction was pure pleasure; its vocabulary and its structure flow effortlessly into the main translation.  (As a keen reader of Tolkien's work I was interested to learn that one of Beowulf's major academic critiques was written by Tolkien (“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”) and delivered to the British Academy on 25 November 1936).

Having read and re-read both Beowulf introduction and translation I spent some further time reading about the Old English in which Beowulf was written. As part of that research I learned of the existence of the 'þ' character (which is lower case) and its upper case version 'Þ'.

Any why the new-found respect for Microsoft?

Users of MS Office will know that Word and Outlook automatically capitalise the first letter of a sentence if you have mistakenly typed that first letter in lower case. In my reply to the e-mailing pastrycook I intended to say "þ is the lower case version, while Þ is the uppercase version"; to my astonishment, Outlook automatically capitalised þ to Þ !

Contrary to what I had always assumed, someone in Seattle knows his Old English!

Tech Tags: Seamus Heaney Beowulf Microsoft AutoCorrect Old English thorn Tolkien



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** Hieatt, Constance B. and Sharon Butler. Curye on Inglish: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth-Century (Including the Forme of Cury). New York: for The Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1985
++ Seamus Heaney 1999, ISBN 0-571-20376-0, Faber and Faber