EFNE TO SECGENNE.

As a followup to this post:

þys is efne to secgenne

Ic æt
þa pluman
þe wæron
þære iscieste

and þe
þu eallmæst cuþice
hordodest
for morgenmete

Forgief me
hie wæron smæcclice
swa swete
and swa cealde

This gem is from Hwæt!: a little Old English anthology of American modernist poetry, translated and edited by Peter Glassgold (which I will obviously have to find a copy of); it was quoted by a commenter in a wonderful thread at Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light. Don't read the comments until you've at least tried to identify the Old English texts in the post!

There are some wonderful things in the comments, too; for instance, John Emerson (whose erudite and fanciful comments frequently grace this site as well) provides some modern Icelandic equivalents for place names:

Scarborough (England) = Skörðuborg

Istanbul = Tyrkjagarður (Mikligarður -- old name)

Dardanelles = Hellusund

Bosporus = Sjávíðarsund

These come from a site that tries to provide (mostly invented) Icelandic equivalents for every place name! ("The hyperpurists of the ‘Nýyrðasmiðja’ regard the total icelandicization of all existing geographical names as an ultimate necessity. We are not ashamed to go this far...")

Oh, and all of this has led me to the online version of Bosworth and Toller's 1898 Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Splendid, hwæt?

Posted by languagehat at March 3, 2005 03:32 PM