Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Old English Poets and their Word-Craft
- 1 Beowulf and the Art of Invention
- 2 Juliana 53a Revisited (hætsð hæþenweoh)
- 3 Wounds and Compensation in the Old English Soul and Body Poems
- II Old English Homiletic Tradition
- 4 Defining and Redefining: Ælfric's Access to Gregory's Homiliae in Evangelia in the Composition of the Catholic Homilies
- 5 Lambeth Homily 4 and the Textual Tradition of the Visio Pauli
- 6 ‘A Vision of Souls’: Charity, Judgment, and the Utility of the Old English Vision of St. Paul
- 7 The Vocabulary of Sin and the Eight Cardinal Sins
- III Anglo-Saxon Institutions
- 8 The King (and Queen) and ‘I’: Self-Construction in Some Anglo-Saxon Royal Documents
- 9 Anglo-Saxon Maccabees: Political Theology in Ælfric's Lives of Saints
- 10 Nunne in Early Old English: Misogyny in its Literary Context
- IV Lexis of the Quotidian
- 11 Cingulum est custodiam: Semiotics and the Semantic Range of gyrdels
- 12 Island Time: The English Day and the Christian Hours
- 13 ‘Revising Hell’: The Voices of Teachers in Anglo-Saxon Studies and Anglo-Saxon England
- V The Task of the Lexicographer
- 14 Cryptography and the Lexicographer: Codifying the Code
- 15 Genre and the Dictionary of Old English
- Epilogue: Word-Hord
- 16 Reading Beowulf with Isidore's Etymologies
- An Old English Lexicon Dedicated to Toni Healey
- Toni Healey: A Tribute
- List of publications of Antonette diPaolo Healey
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
- Anglo-Saxon Studies
2 - Juliana 53a Revisited (hætsð hæþenweoh)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Old English Poets and their Word-Craft
- 1 Beowulf and the Art of Invention
- 2 Juliana 53a Revisited (hætsð hæþenweoh)
- 3 Wounds and Compensation in the Old English Soul and Body Poems
- II Old English Homiletic Tradition
- 4 Defining and Redefining: Ælfric's Access to Gregory's Homiliae in Evangelia in the Composition of the Catholic Homilies
- 5 Lambeth Homily 4 and the Textual Tradition of the Visio Pauli
- 6 ‘A Vision of Souls’: Charity, Judgment, and the Utility of the Old English Vision of St. Paul
- 7 The Vocabulary of Sin and the Eight Cardinal Sins
- III Anglo-Saxon Institutions
- 8 The King (and Queen) and ‘I’: Self-Construction in Some Anglo-Saxon Royal Documents
- 9 Anglo-Saxon Maccabees: Political Theology in Ælfric's Lives of Saints
- 10 Nunne in Early Old English: Misogyny in its Literary Context
- IV Lexis of the Quotidian
- 11 Cingulum est custodiam: Semiotics and the Semantic Range of gyrdels
- 12 Island Time: The English Day and the Christian Hours
- 13 ‘Revising Hell’: The Voices of Teachers in Anglo-Saxon Studies and Anglo-Saxon England
- V The Task of the Lexicographer
- 14 Cryptography and the Lexicographer: Codifying the Code
- 15 Genre and the Dictionary of Old English
- Epilogue: Word-Hord
- 16 Reading Beowulf with Isidore's Etymologies
- An Old English Lexicon Dedicated to Toni Healey
- Toni Healey: A Tribute
- List of publications of Antonette diPaolo Healey
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
- Anglo-Saxon Studies
Summary
Juliana 53a has long been recognized as a crux. This verse is part of Juliana's warning to her importunate suitor Eliseus that she will never marry him if he practices pagan religion:
Swylce ic þe secge, gif þu to sæmran gode
þurh deofolgield dæde biþencest,
hætsð hæþenweoh, ne meaht þu habban mec
ne geþreatian þe to gesingan. (Juliana 51–54)
So too, I tell you, if you commit your deeds to a weaker god by way of devil-worship, hætsð hæþenweoh, you will not be able to have me or compel me to be your spouse.
The identity of the two words that constitute 53a in the form in which it is transmitted is not a matter of dispute. The first (hætsð) is a second-person present singular form of the verb hātan, which usually means either ‘to name, call’ or ‘to command’, the final -sð being an orthographic variant of -st that is not uncommon, especially in early West Saxon; the second (hæþenweoh) is a compound, unattested elsewhere, having the constituents hǣþen ‘heathen, pagan’ and wēoh (or wīh) ‘idol’, probably also ‘altar’ and ‘(pagan) shrine, temple’. What the verse means in its context is nonetheless doubtful. No sense can be made of it if hætsð means either ‘you call’ or ‘you command’, and the various interpretations that have been proposed accordingly all assume that hātan is used here in some extraordinary or even unparalleled sense.
One such interpretation was offered by Krapp and Dobbie, who provided ‘dedicate a heathen idol’ as a rendering of hætsð hæþenweoh in a textual note without further explanation. This reading involves two obvious difficulties. The first is that hātan does not appear to mean ‘to dedicate’ elsewhere. It is true that this sense may be present in some few instances of the ge-prefixed verb, especially in contexts that concern pagan offerings, although in these cases the possibility cannot be excluded that hātan means ‘to vow (a future offering)’ rather than ‘to dedicate (a present offering)’.
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- Old English Lexicology and LexicographyEssays in Honor of Antonette diPaolo Healey, pp. 37 - 50Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2020