When the Prancing Pony Podcast did their March 2019 Questions after Nightfall, Legolas’s proverb came up: “Rede oft is found at the rising of the sun.” My brain has alliterative-verse infection, so I dropped a note in the mailbag to point out that the proverb is an Anglo-Saxon alliterative long line. Why would Legolas say something so Rohirric, I wondered. Do proverbs wander around Middle-earth and get picked up by faraway Elves who think they sound exotic? Or is there something in the water around Rohan that makes people alliterate? Treebeard does it too, after all.
What rede, rosy-fingered Dawn?
Barliman passed the note to Shawn. (In less than a month, it should be noted. Old Butterbur is picking up his game.)
My phrasing was ambiguous, so Shawn asked whether it was actually Anglo-Saxon, or just Tolkien writing modern English in that style. Which turned out to be a much better question. I looked around the various stockpiles of Old English proverbs. I couldn’t find rede and sunrise together anywhere on line.
If Legolas’s observation were an actual proverb in Old English, it would be something like Oft is ræd æt dægred gefunden. There’s nothing there to alliterate with. But then the penny dropped: this is the cliché folk-witticism “You can’t spell X without Y”. Like, “you can’t spell ‘awesome’ without ‘me’.” Or, the Internet being the Freudian sort of place it is, “You can’t spell ‘subtext’ without ‘sex’.” The letters of “ræd” are all there in “dægred”.
This isn’t a new joke. Something similar can be found in the 1st Century BCE, when people wondered whether wood burns because the Latin word for “fire” is in the word for “wood”. Lucretius delivered the smackdown:
Non est lignis tamen insitus ignis.
– Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
As Shawn put it, “I’ll never underestimate Tolkien’s ability to include an oblique pun requiring knowledge of another language.” In fact, he pointed out that the Bosworth-Toller dictionary includes a citation of one manuscript where the scribe spelled it “dægræd”, which makes it an even better joke. JRRT actually preferred Mercian. Could “dægræd” be a dialectical spelling? Thanks to the Mercian aversion to putting books in places where they’d survive to the 21st Century, I only speak West Saxon, so I don’t know.
I’m going to say we’ve found another Easter egg, especially since (1) it was Easter when we found it, and (2) a sunrise pun is seasonally appropriate.
tom hillman
Joe,
I have little doubt that Tolkien is punning on “dægred” and “dægræd”, now that I see them.
Nicely observed.
Tom
Joe
We’re not looking forward to translating the entire book into Old English to find the others.