When Old English maxims appear in poetic usage, as opposed to collections, they frequently take the form of an indisputably true observation about nature, followed by a statement about the current situation, from which we are to infer an analogy that will guide the character’s choice. That sounded familiar, but it took me days to figure out what I was remembering. It was a song by Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein from “Showboat“: 

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly,
I gotta love one man till I die.
Can’t help lovin’ that man of mine

Or, just maybe, it was Tom Lehrer. Either way, I love seeing thousand-year callbacks in popular culture.

As I mentioned the other day, I’m reading about Old English wisdom poetry. What with the all the references to winter in the examples there, I suddenly realized that Bilbo’s little quatrain in Rivendell is just such a seasonal wisdom poem:

When winter first begins to bite,
and stones crack in the frosty night,
When pools are black and trees are bare,
‘Tis evil in the wild to fare.   [LR 2.o3.o14]

As always when I think I’ve discovered something, I go check what Tom Shippey had to say about it. In Chapter 6 of The Road to Middle-earth³ Shippey makes the connection with the coda of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost and notes that both contain only words “… rooted in Old English. Both poems would require little change to make sense at any time between AD 600 and now.” So the idea of a wisdom poem is kind of there, but not explicitly stated. Scull and Hammond, in The Collected Poems⁴, bundle this poem in with “I Sit beside the Fire and Think”, but don’t make any further reference.

Bilbo’s quatrain supports my reading of the Exeter Maxim so well, I have to suspect that remembering it is what gave me that reading in the first place. 

I’m six pages into A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry by Carolyne Larrington⁵, and I’ve run into a swamp. Scholars from 50 years ago got themselves wrapped around the axle, trying to figure out the difference between maxims that have “bið” in them and those that have “sceal” in them. “Bið” is a fancy word for “is”. “Sceal” is our modern word “shall”, among other things. Those other things are making a mess as the scholars try to figure out when maxim-makers chose to use one or the other. 

“Winter bið cealdost” means “winter is [the] coldest [season]”. That’s fine. It’s in a list of seasons, the next of which is “lencten hrimigost (he byð lengest ceald)”, which is the punchline (spring is frostiest, it’s cold for the longest time). Everyone who’s planted a garden knows the temptation to plant as soon as it feels like spring, and then watch your plants die when the temperature drops below freezing two weeks later. Even scholars understand “bið” here. 

But then we come to “sceal”. Among its meanings are “oughta be”,  “has to be”, and so forth. A parallel maxim to the winter one from Maxims II is in the Exeter Maxims: “forst sceal freosan”. One of the snottors cited on page 7 translates that as “It is appropriate that frost should freeze.” I am unable to understand why. Nobody would ever say that! That sentence means, “Frost is gonna freeze you”! The whole point of Wise Sayings is to warn people about what’s going to happen, and Old English doesn’t have a future tense, so this is what’s available to the writer. 

What is it about scholaring that makes people miss things that are obvious?

OK; now I’m up to page 18. Prof. Larrington is no longer quoting distinguished greybeards, but speaking for herself: “I contend there was a body of folk-wisdom, not yet in metrical form, a body which can be sensed…” Exactly. When a writer puts a Wise Saying into the text, they’re not springing some new insight on the reader. The reader already knows it. If a character in a story says a contemporary maxim like, “Never sign anything by neon light,” the expected reaction is “damn right,” not “gee, I never thought of that before.”