394
NOTES AND QUERIES, [ii s. XIL NOV. 20, 1915.
Degsastdn, and I feel quite sure that it was
not due to Bede. The nature of this attempt
at elucidation shows that the interpolator
could not parse the phrase and did not
know that Degsa was an elided possessive.
In the Chronicles the MSS. A, BC, and E
severally yield " set Dsegstane," " set Egesan
stane," and " set Dsegsanstane." A southern
or midland scribe, if called upon to turn the
phrase into Latin, would have written
Degesonis lapis, or the like. Now, if the
elision of n had already taken place in 603
the southern scribes would not have had the
necessary knowledge to prompt them to
restore it any more than the interpolator
who had access to Bede's original before
737 had that knowledge. Consequently, we
may assume that final n fell away from
words of more than one syllable in Northum-
brian at a much later date than A.B. 603.
That the elided form is not accidental in Bede is demonstrable, first, from the in- scription on the famous Ruthwell cross of c. 750. Therein we find the elided infinitives buga, gistiga, and hoelda ; cp. ' Our English Dialects,' by the late Prof. Skeat, 1911, p. 19. It is demonstrable, secondly, by other elided possessives in Bede's ' Historia ' itself, e.g., Dorca-caestrse [MSS.-cic : : ca\, Granta- caestir, Kselca-caestir,* Tunna-caestir, and several more. We may, therefore, date the elision of final n between, say, 620 and 731.
The Moore MS. will help us to a much closer approximation. At the end of it a short hymn of nine lines has been preserved " nearly in the original form as Csedmon dictated it" (Skeat, u.s., p. 17). In this hymn, and in its first line, there occurs the un-elided infinitive hergan, to praise. If we turn to Mr. Plummer's Note (A) to IV. xxiv. (vol. ii. p. 251), we shall find this little hymn printed with critical apparatus. Mr. Plummer tells us that the hand is " nearly contemporary with that which wrote the bulk of the MS." It is old Hiberno-Saxon minuscule, and students of ' Widsith ' will be interested in four out of the five palseo- graphical peculiarities I am about to enume- rate.
The scribe of post 737 did riot understand the un-elided infinitive and wrote con- fusedly ; he copied ih and d where we should expect 5 (cp. amothingum, rodingum, hrceda, and folgade in * Widsith ' ) ; he mistook c for n in drictin (cp. deanum and cenenutn in ' Widlsith ' ) ; and he mistook d for n in middungeard (cp. ongend [with en : : ea] for
- Kseba= *Kselican ; cp. Cselic ( \ *Calic) of
' Widsith,' 1. 20.
pngean in ' Widsith ' ). It is noteworthy that
all these scribal correspondences occur in
nine short lines of Csedmon.
We do not know when Caedmon died. He was well advanced* in years before 680, in which year the Abbess Hilda died, aged 66. Her monastery at Whitby, where Csedmon served as herdsman, was founded in 657. The Venerable Bede was born in 673. He was educated by Abbot Ceolfrid, who was born in 642. Now Bede invariably drops the n of the possessive case of weak nouns in Old Northumbrian place-names. He retains that n in Sussex and Lincolnshire place- names. There can be no suggestion of ignorance, and I would assign the wavering in the use of final n to the period of Abbot Ceolfrid's youth, sc. from 642 to 660. Ceol- frid died in 716, many years after Csedmon, it would be reasonable to assume. There- fore I regard Csedmon' s and Hilda's genera- tion as the last which retained final n in Northumbrian words of more than one syllable. As final n is retained in " Wistlan- wudu " in ' Widsith,' we must, in view of the Northumbrian peculiarities exhibited by that text in the Exeter Book, assign the poem, as we know it, to Csedmon' s generation. Consequently, I would ascribe the " accom- modation to the idiom of his own day and time " of which I spoke in ' N. & Q.,' 11 S. vi. 7, to a Northumbrian of circa 660.
There is another palseographical peculiarity which throws us back to the time when Bede was learning to write, i.e., to the year 685. Bede completed his ' Liber de Tem- poribus ' in 703. Winithari, Abbot of St. Gall, post 820, copied this work and made two curious scribal mistakes. He twice wrote hebrecicam for hebraicam ; cp. Momm- sen, ' Bedse Chronica Maiora,' in ' Chron. Minor.,' iii. 237. Now in ' Widsith,' among the monastic interpolations, we find the un- accountable form exsyringum. This points to the same kind of a as that which puzzled Winithari : the latter made a into ec, and one of the copyists of ' Widsith ' turned as-syr- into *ecs-syr-, with the result that exsyringum found its way into the text (Cp. "Dorcic " for *Dorca, above.)
The date of 'Widsith 3 falls after the death of Casere (448), cf Gufthere (451), and of the unhistorical Theodric who " weold Froncum." The last was Prince of the Mseringas, and It have reasons for da- ting his obit in 457.^ ? Hence I assign the
- " Siquidem in habitu sseculari usque ad tern-
pora prouectioris aetatisc onsti tutus, nil carmiimm (Csedmon) aliquando didicerat" ( 4 H. E.,' ed. Plummer, IV. xxii.).
