Saxish homework

One of the groups I belong to is called the Saxish Ring… the idea is to find out about the language the Saxons spoke, not to learn it, but to understand how it worked, where it came from and its influence on modern English. We meet for two hours every forth=night, and our discussions range far and wide, not just about England a thousand years ago. We talk about the origins of language itself, the spread of different languages and the development of accents, dialects and patois. The time flies by!

Quite often we are given a couple of words to think about and try and research their origin, often they are names of places, and it’s quite astonishing how  names you think have a perfectly obvious origin come from a completely different source.

We were given a lovely Christmas card by our teacher, and within it were a couple of Anglo-Saxon riddles… which I tried to make sense of, but in the end gave up! Here is one of them:

wiht cwom gongan ƥær weras sæton
monige on mædle, mode snottre;
hæfde an eage ond earan twa
ond twegen fet, twelf hund heafda,
hryc ond wombe ond honda twa,
eamas ond easle, anne aweoran
ond sidan twa. sage hwæt ic hatte.

It’s one of those riddles where you have to guess what something is… this i think has an eye and two ears,two hands… but that’s as far as I got… answer tomorrow!