Native

Abstract

The speaker of The Wanderer (ca. eighth century) experiences cearu twice, further expressing his outcast’s woe with three compounds built on -cearig. Including a glossary, the edition followed permits comparison between its modern equivalents for these five words and those offered by two translators:

One hypothetical version of The Wanderer reconstructed from the above table could center on a figure afflicted with “sorrow” or “sorrows,” “troubled in” or “sad at heart,” and “winter-sad” or “desolate as winter”; another could portray him as subject to “Care” or “cares,” and “wretched with care” or “careworn,” as well as cumbered “with wintry care.” Only “mōdcearig” breaks the pattern, as never given a Modern English equivalent stressing the second of its component parts, even though the obviously cognate “earmcearig” and “winter-cearig” prove readily amenable to being glossed in terms of care. As Roy Leslie notes in his commentary to the edition followed for the original text, the Old English lexicon had additional “compounds of-cearig” with “nouns as their first elements” (69), including two surviving into Modern English: the OED identifies hrëow and sorg as the sources of rue and sorrow. Anglo-Saxon speakers thus did not merely suffer the blues: like a spectacularly ugly bruise, cearu and its companions housed a rainbow’s worth of variegated shades that now seem rather monotonous, however intense.