Another line from Puck of Pook’s Hill that has no relevance to literary influence so it gets its own post:

“He sent for my second son, whom being unmarried he had ever looked upon as his own child…”

The speaker is Sir Richard Dalyngridge, a Norman knight who came over with William the Conqueror. He had become fond of the English and adopted their ways. I love that sentence for the way the reader grinds to a crawl on the eighth word. Word order won’t help us now; time for the Great English Verb Hunt we learned as the way to decipher what those old guys meant.

Kipling has done a beautiful job of recreating the feel of a modern English speaker trying to read Old English. There aren’t many inflections left these days, but the one we’ve got is effective.  That sentence might easily have come from someone who’s thinking in Old English, and therefore doesn’t think of word order as an important part of grammar.

And yes, it’s intentional. Later in the book, we’re told a character is educated because he knows “the Leech-Book of Bald”.