Thanks to Hana Videen of the Old English Wordhord (whose book is coming out soon in the UK, not so soon in the US), I learn about Alcuin’s commentary on the Book of Genesis in the form of a FAQ. It was long, bloated, and Latin, so my man Ælfric of Eynsham translated it into Englisc and cut it down to match Anglo-Saxon attention spans.
His answer to the question, “Why did God make a rainbow after the Great Flood?” contains a line that jumped out at me: Forþan þe he wiste gif he swa ne dyde þæt men woldan forhtigan þæt he mid flode eft fornumene wurdon þonne hy gesawon swiðlice renas. In Modern English, “because he knew that if he didn’t do that, every time it rained heavily men would think they were going to be destroyed by a flood.” God used the rainbow much the same way we now use an emoji to soften a harsh-sounding tweet.
“By a flood” hasn’t changed much in a thousand years; “mid flode” is still kind of readable. The word that did the jumping was “destroyed”: fornúmene. I wonder if J.R.R. Tolkien consciously took that as the source of the word “Númenor”, or if it was just one reason that the root “numen” sounded right to him, given the context.
Tom Hillman
Very cool connection, Joe, or just astonishing coincidence?
Go not to the Tolkien’s for suspicious etymological parallels, for they will say both yeah and may.
On the other hand, not idly do the words of Tolkien fall.
(The other day I noticed something that looks exceedingly cool in LotR, but I am not going to tell you mathematical types, or you will just crunch the numbers and Rob me of my fun.)
Joe
We must find a way for mathematical analyses and the purely verbal to complement one another in a way that increases total fun. That’s actually the reason I spend so much time working with graphs.
Tom Hillman
I might have a proposal on how we could work together towards this. Email me if you want to hear about it.