The Word for Sea is Ford: Member-for-Member Metonymy in Old English

Result code in IS VaVaI

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Result on the web

<a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/34/article/962208" target="_blank" >https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/34/article/962208</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

The Word for Sea is Ford: Member-for-Member Metonymy in Old English

Original language description

Although it has not received as much attention as some other characteristics of Old English verse (kennings, alliteration, etc.), a number of scholars have investigated metonymy and the role it plays in Old English poetry. Metonymy, which ""consists in mentally accessing one conceptual entity via another entity""1 is most familiar to modern English speakers via common idiom. We might use metonymy to refer to paper tissue2 (a class of object) as Kleenex (a prototypical brand within that class of object), or to refer to a car (an entire entity) as a set of wheels (a part of that entity). Similar metonymic structures are visible in Old English poetics—just as a modern English speaker might refer to their car as their wheels, the Old English poet can refer to a ship as a hringed-stefna (ringed prow),3 or as wudu bundenne (bound wood, Beowulf, l. 226). Two of the more significant investigations of metonymy in Old English verse come from Gillian Overing's 1994 article ""Some Aspects of Metonymy in Old English Poetry,"" in which she argues that metonymy in kennings and compounds is what renders Old English poetry so ""immediate"" and ""evocative,""4 and John Foley's 1991 book Immanent Art, in which he argues that certain fixed [End Page 317] oral-formulaic phrases act as metonymic links to a vast, commonly constructed oral culture.5 To kennings, compounds, and formulaic phrases we can add another category in which metonymy appears to be particularly active in Old English verse—words used in reference to bodies of water. The Old English poet has access to a robust vocabulary in designating bodies of water. In her 1952 article on water words in Beowulf, Caroline Brady identifies no fewer than forty terms that designate the sea: sixteen simplex nouns, seventeen compounds, and seven genitive phrases.6 Similarly, Grendel's lake7 is designated by four genitive phrases and nine simplex nouns.8 Interestingly, there is extensive overlap in this vocabulary—eight different simplex nouns are used in reference both to the sea and to Grendel's lake. This overlap in vocabulary parallels an unusual metonymic process occurring in skaldic verse, that of ""member-formember metonymy."" First identified by Karen Sullivan in a 2008 article,9 member-for-member metonymy allows one word to metonymically stand in for another, provided they belong within the same semantic category. Using member-for-member metonymy, a skald could call a raven a gagl (gosling) or a már (gull), all words being within the semantic category of birds. A skald could also refer to the sea as a sund (sound) or fjörðr (fjord), all three being bodies of water.10 A very similar process appears to be at work in Beowulf, with words for certain bodies of water used in reference to others—just as an Old Norse sea may be called a sund or fjörðr, an Old English sea may go by ford (ford), flod (flood; river), or mere (lake).

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_ost - Miscellaneous article in a specialist periodical

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

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Continuities

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Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Journal of English and Germanic Philology

ISSN

1945-662X

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

124

Issue of the periodical within the volume

3

Country of publishing house

US - UNITED STATES

Number of pages

33

Pages from-to

317-349

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

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