compilerbitch

The first printer in England, William Caxton, wrote people bringing him manuscripts to print, and how he would modernise the English in them, replacing "thridde" for instance with "third"; but also that he would turn away manuscripts in Old English, because he could not understand them at all.

Musing about this, I wondered if there was a time when knowledge of Old English was lost, and subsequently painstakingly recovered, or was Caxton's problem simply that he relied on his own abilities, and didn't call in scholarly experts? So I did what one does under such circumstances and asked ChatGPT.

Turns out that when thinking of, for example, the twelfth-century mini-Renaissance, I had forgotten to take into account that English was at that time the despised language of a conquered people, and all official business took place in Latin and French. Old English was not studied at all, and all knowledge of it had lapsed. What is interesting, though, is why scholars later went to the considerable effort (considering Old English's highly complex grammar and many words which had dropped out by the Early Modern English period) of deciphering the language.

It was during the English Reformation, and scholars wanted to prove that the early English Church had traditions independent of Rome, which is why they began studying Anglo-Saxon texts.

Early scholars included the Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker, the antiquarian historian William Camden, and Elizabeth Elstob, who wrote one of the first grammars of Old English in 1715, and came from my old stomping grounds in Newcastle upon Tyne.

I went to Sheer Hell the other day. But it's not what you might expect.

On a map from around 1850, to the southwest of the then village of Tempelhof (now deeply embedded in Berlin), one sees a pond labelled „die blanke Hölle“, or sheer Hell.

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Wondering what could lie behind that name, I asked ChatGPT (though as it turned out, I could have just gone to Wikipedia).

Turns out the pond was originally called Hel-Pfuhl or Hels-Pfuhl, referring to the Germanic goddess of the underworld.

According to legend, the pond formed an entrance to the underworld, the realm of the dead. On its wooded shores stood an altar of Hel, which a priest tended to. Twice a year Hel sent a black bull to the priest to plough the fields. The priest's successor, though, a Christian monk, ceased the offerings to Hel. The following spring, when the bull appeared, it did not plough the fields but devoured the monk.

Until the twentieth century the rumour remained in the unsettled and rugged area that the lake would claim victims every year. These rumours had a grain of truth to them, as several people did indeed drown in the apparently harmless waters.

To my surprise, given that the majority of fishponds on the map (frequently labelled Karpfen Pf[uhl] as you can see here) no longer exist, it turns out that „die blanke Hölle“ not only does still exist, but I've even been there! It's now called „Blanke Helle“ on Google Maps, reverting to the older vowel in the name, and is in the middle of Alboinplatz.^* (There's no reference to its name at the actual site, though.)

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The reason it still exists is probably due to its geology. It is, I learned, a kettle hole (Toteisloch). Apparently, when bits of glacier break off, they are called dead ice. As the glacier flows past, dead ice can get surrounded with and eventually covered in sediment. This happened here during the Ice Ages, but when the ice subsequently melted, the ground over it subsided, leaving a pit which got filled with rainwater to form the pond.

Commemorating the legend concerning the site, sculptor Paul Mersmann the Elder was commissioned in 1931 to create a monument depicting the bull. By the time it was finished in 1934, the Nazis were in power; they didn't like it and threatened to tear it down. The dislike, however, was mutual: according to the sculptor's son there is, inside the bull, a capsule denouncing Hitler signed by various artists and sculptors.

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* Hardcore Tolkien fans may recognise the name of the king of the Lombards who brought them to (i.e. conquered) Lombardy, and a cognate of Old English Ælfwine (the English sailor who learned the stories that later became The Silmarillion on sailing to Tol Eressëa in The Book of Lost Tales), or in modern English, Alvin,^† meaning "elf-friend", and therefore a reincarnation (?) of Elendil in the sadly abortive work The Lost Road.

† Has anyone reading this ever come across that name other than in the name of Alvin Stardust?