on a minute,’ I said, and I rushed over to my bookcase, where I had some ‘origins of names’ books. There she was, Lassarina, an anglicized form of Gaelic Lasairiona, a combination of lasair and fion, ‘flame’ and ‘wine’. I picked up the phone and told her. She was delighted. People usually are when you do a bit of etymological digging on their behalf.
I thought that piece of mini-research might get me a discount on my Hamlet, but no such luck. Maybe if I’d called her Lassie… But I couldn’t do that to a non-canine.
Then, in one of those coincidences that make linguistic life worthwhile, I came across the name again a few weeks later. In Irish writer Padraic Colum’s collection of stories called The King of Ireland’s Son, published in 1916, there is a character called Lassarina.
‘I’m from near Norwich,’ the hotel man replied to my question about his origins. He pronounced it as a single syllable – ‘norrch’. He added: ‘Little place called Caistor.’
Caistor-by-Norwich. I knew it, Horatio. It’s famous – at least to people interested in English historical linguistics. It’s the place where they found the earliest runic inscription known in England. Caistor was originally a Roman base – the name comes from Latin castra, ‘fort’ – and in a cremation cemetery there they found the anklebone of a roe deer. It was probably used as a plaything – perhaps as part of a dice game – but what made it special was the inscription on the side: raihan, written in Germanic runes. Raihan means ‘roe deer’.
The shape of the H rune attracted especial attention. It has a single cross-bar. This is typical of the kind of runic writing found in northern parts of Europe. Further south they wrote H with two cross-bars,
The significance of the find to linguists is that it dates from around the year ad 400. The Anglo-Saxons did not arrive in Britain until 449. This person was using a Germanic language in East Anglia well before the well-known Germanic invasions began.
East Anglia is the place to be if you are looking for early evidence of the English language. In 1981 a farmer found a gold bracteate – a kind of medallion, fashioned with eyelets so that it could be worn around the neck – at Undley Common, near Lakenheath in Suffolk. It dates from around ad 475, within a generation of the Anglo- Saxons arriving. It seems to be modelled after an old Roman coin from the time of Constantine the Great in the early fourth century. It shows a helmeted head of the emperor next to a she-wolf suckling two children – presumably a representation of the story of Romulus and Remus.
And there is an inscription: a sequence of runes, written around the edge from right to left. Transliterated into the Latin alphabet, the runes say gægogæ mægæ medu. It would have been pronounced roughly ‘ga-gog-a ma-ga may-doo’. Inscriptions are often sentences. If so, this is the oldest known sentence in the language which would one day be called English. But what does it mean?
The second and third words aren’t a problem. Mægæ probably comes from mæg, ‘kinsman, companion’. Depending on how the ending is interpreted, the sense is either ‘of a/the kinsman’ or ‘to a/the kinsman’. Medu is likely to be an early form of the word med or meord – meaning ‘reward’. The closest modern equivalent is the archaism meed. An alternative suggestion is that it is something to do with the drink, ‘mead’.
Scholars have puzzled over the first word. It has an unusual phonetic shape, with its three gs, suggesting it might be a nonsense word – a magical formula, perhaps, or a tribal shout of some kind. The form gagaga has been found on a sixth-century spear-shaft from Kragehul in Denmark, suggesting a battle-cry. And lots of magic words use a reduplicated sequence of sounds: abracadabra, alakazam, hocus pocus… Wizzo the wizard (aka American magician Marshall Brodien) says ‘Doodee, doodee, doodee’ to get a trick to work.
On the other hand, it could be a real word. There are words in Old English with three gs in them, such as gegongan (‘conquer’), gegogud (‘relying on’), gegegnian (‘meet’). And there are words with similarities in form to which gægogæ could relate. The first syllable might be a prefix, an early form of ge–, which is common in Old English (as it is in modern German). The root of the word, –go–, might be related to a word such as geomrian, ‘lament’. The ending might be a marker of femaleness. Thinking along these lines, the Swedish linguist Bengt Odenstedt suggested the reading ‘howling female wolf’, referring to the picture on the bracteate. There have been other interpretations.
If Odenstedt is right, then the inscription could mean ‘this howling she-wolf to a kinsman [is] a reward’. It’s certainly a plausible interpretation. But it’s no more than a well-informed guess.
The Undley Bracteate, as it is called, is now in the British Museum, in the study collection of the Department of Medieval and Modern Europe. Other coins in the museum collection show runic inscriptions too, but they are usually even less decodable. The hope is that, as more finds are made, the semantic clues will increase, and things will become clearer. But often the finds just add even more puzzles.
In August 1997 a man with a metal detector found a gold coin at Billockby, a few miles north-west of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. It is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It was a tremissis – a coin with the value of one-third of a solidus – thought to date from around ad 670. A number of coins of the same general type had been found previously – including one at Caistor – but this was the first to display a runic inscription.
The solidus had been used in the Roman Empire since the time of Emperor Constantine, and would stay in use until the tenth century. We remember it in modern English in several words, such as solid, solidarity – and soldier. Roman soldiers were paid with the solidus.
The inscription is very faint in places – perhaps through wear and tear, or perhaps it was badly stamped when the coin was made. It is possible to make out a sequence of l, t, o, e, and d, and there may be an i at the beginning and an h or g at the end. Nobody has any idea what this might mean.
‘I know Caistor,’ I said to the man from the hotel. I should have said ‘know of’, I suppose, for I have never been there; but it’s a curious fact that when you study the linguistic history of a place, you quickly develop a sense of intimacy about it. I do feel I ‘know’ Caistor. It’s much more than ‘know of’.
I was spared an interrogation, however, because a loud bell sounded, and the man dashed away to deal with it. Maybe it was a fire alarm. People at the Portmeirion hotel would be especially sensitive to that. The present hotel isn’t the one that was originally developed by Clough Williams-Ellis. That burned down during the night of 5 June 1981. It didn’t reopen until 1988.
‘Fire’ was the symbolic meaning of one of the runes: <, called cen (pronounced ‘cane’). An Old English poem has been preserved, in which each symbol in the runic alphabet is given a poetic gloss. This is what the poet has to say about cen. (The p and ð letters are pronounced as modern ‘th’.)
Cen byp cwicera gehwam, cup on fyre
blac ond beorhtlic, byrnep oftust
ðærhi æpelingas inne restap.
‘The torch is known to everyone alive by its pale, bright flame; it always burns where princes sit within.’
