Old English *<i>Lēttan</i> ‘To Gleam’ in the Translation of Gregory’s <i>Dialogues</i>

In the second book of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, devoted to the life of Saint Benedict, Gregory’s interlocutor Peter asks him to explain more fully the meaning of a story he has told about the saint: ‘Iam quidem prolati testimonii mihi aliquantum intellectus interlucet, sed tamen hoc plenius exponi postulo’ (Now some understanding of the story that has been told is manifest to me, but yet I ask that it be more fully explained).1 In the Old English translation of the Dialogues attributed to Wærferth, bishop of Worcester, the rendering of this sentence appears thus in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 322, one of the two witnesses to the unrevised version of the text: ‘nu me betwyh læteð hwæthugu andgytes þyssere forðlæddan cyðnysse, ac þonne hwæþre ic bidde, þæt me þis geredelicor sy gerihted’ (now some understanding of this testimony that has been brought forward me betwyh læteð, but yet I ask that it be more plainly explained to me).2 While me betwyh læteð clearly corresponds to mihi ... interlucet in Gregory’s Latin, the meaning of betwyh læteð is not obvious. Since the adverb betwyh (between) evidently renders the Latin verbal prefix inter-, læteð ought accordingly to render -lucet and to mean something like ‘shines’ or ‘is apparent’. No such sense, however, can be attributed to the verb lǣtan (to permit), to which læteð would seem formally to belong, nor can any other obvious sense be made of the construction by taking læteð as a form of lǣtan. The close syntactical correspondence of the Old English construction to the Latin, assuming that hwæthugu is a pronoun meaning ‘a certain amount’ on which genitive andgytes depends, in imitation of aliquantum intellectus, suggests rather that another verb is involved here, one that could be used together with betwyh to form a phrase (or a verb with a ‘quasi-prefix’) rendering interlucet. Yet læteð, preceded by betwih or betweoh, also occurs in the other manuscript that transmits the original version of Wærferth’s translation, London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C. i, vol. 2 (see folio 34r), and in the revised version found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 76 (see Hecht’s edition, where the latter is printed beside the edited text of the original version, based on CCCC 322). It seems probable therefore that læteð was present in the archetype from which these witnesses are derived. The likeliest explanation of the problem is that læteð is the corruption of a form of another verb with the desired meaning: other verbs with an initial l, namely līhtan (to shine) and līxan (to gleam, glitter), readily suggest themselves. Yet liht- (lioht-, lieht-, lyht-) and lix- do not resemble læt- enough to render the miscopying of either a plausible explanation. Gothic and Old High German, however, provide grounds to posit the existence of an otherwise unattested Old English verb with the requisite form and meaning. The translation of Luke 17:24 in the Gothic Bible uses the participle lauhatjandei, rendering Greek ἀστράπτουσα, to characterize lightning as ‘flashing’ from one end of the sky to the other.3 This is the only attestation of Gothic lauhatjan, in which lauh- represents the o-grade *lowk- of the Proto-Indo-European root *lewk-, the e-grade of which is represented in Old English lēoht (light), as well as līhtan and līxan. In Old High German the verb lohazzen is much better attested, often glossing Latin verbs consistent with a meaning ‘to shine with flashing light, gleam, glitter, sparkle’, such as coruscare, rutilare, and scintillare.4 Another verb that lohazzen was equated with is lucere. In Williram of Ebersberg’s Expositio in Cantica Canticorum, lohezent renders lucent in the phrase der minnon liehtuaz brinnent unte lohezent (the lamps of love burn and shine), which is derived from Haimo of Auxerre’s explanation of the ‘lamps of fire and flames’ (lampades ignis atque flammarum) in the Vulgate text of Song of Songs 8:6 as the lamps of love that ‘burn in the heart through love’ (in corde ardent per amorem) and ‘shine outwardly through works’ (exterius lucent per operationem).5 A gloss instance equating lohazzen with lucere also survives in the loizet (with loss of intervocalic h) that glosses lucet in a copy of Arator’s Historia apostolica at 1.691.6 The existence, then, of Gothic lauhatjan and Old High German lohazzen gives us good reason to suppose a Proto-Germanic verb *lauxatjanan. The Old High German verb is the expected outcome of the latter, its loh- resulting from the development of au to ō before h and the subsequent shortening of ō before intervocalic h.7 It is therefore possible that there was an Old English reflex, inherited from West Germanic, of the ancient verb implied by lauhatjan and lohazzen. Such an Old English verb would have lost the intervocalic h (the result of lenition of earlier x) around the time that the archetype of the Épinal and Erfurt Glossaries was produced, that is, in the later part of the seventh century.8 The preceding diphthong that had developed from au would have been preserved in West Saxon as ēa, yielding *lēattan from prehistoric *lēahettan after loss of h and contraction of ēa with e.9 In the Anglian dialects, however, the diphthong would have been monophthongized before x was lenited to h, as a result of ‘smoothing’ before a velar consonant.10 Here two outcomes are theoretically possible, inasmuch as the smoothing of the diphthong that would otherwise have become ēa seems to have been either a gradual or variable development. In the early Mercian glossaries, both ǣ and ē appear as the product of smoothing of the antecedent of ēa (beside a number of instances of unsmoothed ēa). This vacillation is not evident in other Anglian texts, which regularly have ē (apart from instances where low stress may have led to shortening to æ), and thus appears to be either a peculiarity of the dialect of the early glossaries or to reflect a stage in which ǣ was giving way to ē as the ultimate product of the smoothing.11 In any case, if ǣ was the product of smoothing when lenition of x occurred, the resulting *lǣhettan would have yielded *lǣttan; if ē was produced by smoothing, *lēhettan would have yielded *lēttan.12 It appears that the latter situation obtained in the west Mercian dialect of the Vespasian Psalter gloss: there the counterparts of West Saxon smēagan (consider) and þrēagan (reprove) regularly exhibit the stems smēg- and þrēg- in alternation with smēa- and þrēa-, the former seemingly indicating *smēxej- and *þrēxej- before lenition, resulting from pre-Old English *smauxōj- and *þrauxōj- respectively.13 Alistair Campbell evidently found the occurrence of smēg- and þrēg- in the Vespasian Psalter surprising, since he remarked that smǣg- and þrǣg- should be expected, presumably on the supposition that the ‘final stage’ of smoothing to which he ascribed ē could not have been reached before lenition of intervocalic x and the subsequent loss of h.14 It seems better to suppose that ē had in fact developed from smoothing in the dialect of the Vespasian Psalter gloss before lenition, or at least a vowel intermediate between ǣ or ē that was ultimately identified with the latter; this assumption is implicit in the discussion of the Vespasian Psalter paradigms for these verbs in more recent works on Old English morphology.15 In the dialect of the Vespasian Psalter gloss, then, one would expect *lēttan as the reflex of Proto-Germanic *lauxatjanan. Since the variation between ǣ and ē for the smoothing of the antecedent of ēa that appears in the early Mercian glossaries is not reflected in later Anglian texts, *lēttan seems likely to represent the normal development in Anglian generally, even if an alternative development *lǣttan in some variety of Mercian is theoretically possible, when the reason for the variation in the early glossaries is not certain. If we posit an Anglian *lēttan meaning ‘to gleam’, a third-person singular present form of this verb could easily have been altered in transmission to the læteð that occurs in all the witnesses to the Old English Dialogues. The geminate t in *lēttan would have developed regularly only in the forms of the verb in which j preceded the ending in West Germanic; lēteþ, with a single t, would be the expected result in Anglian of West Germanic *lauxatiþ(i).16 When written, however, leteþ or leteð would have been indistinguishable in Mercian, the dialect in which the Dialogues were composed, from the third-person singular present of lētan, the Mercian counterpart of West Saxon lǣtan.17 Given the frequency of the latter verb, it would not be surprising if a southern copyist involved in the transmission and partial West-Saxonization of the Dialogues erroneously altered an instance of leteð in his exemplar to læteð, especially since the verb intended by Wærferth may have been alien to West Saxon or have become obsolete in it by the time of the text’s copying. The problematic læteð that appears in the manuscripts of the Dialogues is thus explicable as the result of a scribal alteration in the text’s transmission that would have seemed like a routine dialectal correction. The underlying verb is then an Anglian *lēttan cognate with Gothic lauhatjan and Old High German lohazzen, both used in reference to flashing or sparkling light. While the phrase betwih leteð that Wærferth may be conjectured to have chosen to render Gregory’s interlucet is evidently an element-by-element translation rather than a native Old English collocation, it would seem to have the basic meaning ‘gleams in between (areas or periods of darkness)’. In the context, then, the sense of Peter’s words transmitted as me betwyh læteð hwæthugu andgytes is ‘I have some glimmer of understanding’.

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