My Anglo-Saxon classmate Emily Austin tweeted a common student problem the other day:

raven

Always keep a raven handy

We students were working our way through translating “The Battle of Brunanburh”, and I eventually noticed what she was referring to: “The Raven” has quite a bit of vocabulary in common with the older poem.  Naturally they have ravens in common, but that’s not all. Emily translated “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’.” into Anglo-Saxon down-thread, which is straightforward because all the words are cognate.

There might actually be something deeper there, too. In the opening lines I’ve emboldened words that are in the B of B and underlined other words of Anglo-Saxon origin. Function words and words we got from Romance languages are in normal italics. Clearly, Poe is using Anglo-Saxon words where he wants emphasis on rhyme or rhythm.

Once upon a midnight dreary,
while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

Did he know he was doing that?  I can’t tell. He wrote an extremely dusty essay on “The Philosophy of Composition” about the process of writing “The Raven” without once mentioning word origins. That essay is followed by one entitled “Old English Poetry”, but he means Donne, not Cædmon.

No, I’ve decided that Poe subconsciously sensed that Anglo-Saxon words just have more oomph than Romance words, and gave them starring roles accordingly. That’s why “The Raven” was his most popular work at the time, and remains the only thing most people can remember about him.

Coda

Do you want to hear how good Signum University’s courses are?  My classmates complimented me on how well I read my verses of the poem out loud, so I recorded it to find out what they meant.  It’s not great, but I’m posting it here because this is only Week #8 of the class.  Less than two months into learning any other language, there’s no way I could read a poem this smoothly. Props to Signum U!

By the way, those aren’t pronunciation mistakes. My ancestors came from a border town between the lands of the North Saxons and the West Anglians, so they spoke a unique dialect that I have re-created here.  The villages were all destroyed in a flood, which led the neighbors to refer to us as the “Immercians”.