An Alternate MLT...

It's Thursday, and the MLT is finally being put up--still an MLT, but sort of an alternate take. I've been researching the devil in Old English literature a bit, so the focus of this MLT will be a philological exploration of the words used to represent the devil in OE.

An obvious starting point for any exploration of the devil in OE is Peter Dendle's book, Satan Unbound, followed by several other studies of various functions, images, and uses of the devil throughout the corpus--foremost of which is probably the article by R. E. Woolf, "The Devil in Old English Poetry." As this post is primarily philological rather than an examination of thematic or narrative issues, however, much of the following is independent of these works. Dendle does offer an excellent appendix portraying the close syntactic and semantic connections between use of the word deofles (the genetive form of "devil") and other nouns in closely linked idiomatic phrases (such as deofles lare ["devil's teaching"], deofles cræft ["devil's craft"], etc.), which is worth mentioning in any philological exploration of uses of the devil in OE (123-24).

Much of my work so far has been groundwork for my larger project: that is, searching the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus and the online Thesaurus of Old English for terms signifying the devil, where they appear, how many times in the corpus they are used, and especially where and how many times they are used in the Vercelli Book (with most regard for the homilies)--which is the basis of my project. As Dendle (among many other scholars) observes in the first line of his work, "The devil is the most frequently appearing character in Old nglish poetry, and possibly in all Old English literature" (3). The following numbers only serve as evidence for such a statement:

deof-*: 2689 total in the entire OE corpus, 2383 in prose, 79 in poetry, 227 in gloss, 56 in Vercelli Homilies
satan-: 92 total (both OE and Latin) in the entire OE corpus, 48 in OE, 44 in Latin, 40 in prose (37/3), 11 in poetry (all OE), 41 in gloss (all Latin), 2 in Vercelli Homilies
lucifer-: 25 total (both OE and Latin) in entire OE corpus, 6 in OE, 19 in Latin, 6 in prose (5/1),** 1 in poetry, 18 in gloss, 1 in Vercelli Homilies
leohtberend-: 8 total in the entire OE corpus, 6 in prose, 1 in poetry, 1 in gloss, 1 in Vercelli Homilies (the same instance as that of lucifer)

For the word lucifer, the 1 instance of Latin in prose poses a curiosity for philological study, as it is found in Æfric's Grammar, glossed with the OE word leohtberend ("light-bearer"). This instance, then, is indeed a Latin usage, but allows for yet further inquiry into the OE words for the devil through the avenue of leohtberend as a specific compound (leoht-berend) created to serve just this purpose as a religious word for the devil--which is ultimately derived from a Hebrew biblical concept carried through the Latin Vulgate and into an OE cultural appropriation. Concerning the word leohtberend, 4 of the instances are found in close proximity with the word Lucifer--that is, all of these connections are found in the same phrases, in relative clauses joining them, or as parallels in a gloss text; only in one instance (besides the gloss instance) are the two words separated by more than three words between them, in which case the word is used in a relative clause.

In addition to the above words used for the devil in OE, there are myriad other names used for both Satan and other demons--which a search of the online Thesaurus of Old English aptly presents in several categories. These words, however, pose a much larger problem of searching the OE corpus, parsing their uses, and analyzing findings in scrutiny, as many of the words may be used not only for the devil and demons but also in other contexts as well. It is true that the first category above (deof-) becomes a bit more fluid, as it includes not only derivations and declensions of the nominative form of the main noun deofol but also compounds that use this word as a root. For the time being, however, I have chosen to focus only on the most prominent forms (as in the above) and their derivations.

As a contrast to all of this, and as a way of emphasizing the prevalence of the devil in OE, I will also provide the following statistics about the occurrences of the word Adam--another prominent theological and figural image in the Christian worldview--in the OE Corpus:

adam-: 495 total in the entire OE corpus, 380 in prose, 51 in poetry, 64 in gloss
[Edit: One instance of Adomes also occurs, in The Dream of the Rood; this is the only spelling of the name in this manner, with an "o" rather than "a."]

What becomes apparent from juxtaposing the words for the devil and Adam, then, is a clear sense of the views the Anglo-Saxons had for the biblical and Christian narrative. While Adam is indeed important in religious understandings (495 instances is significant), the images and popular imagination surrounding such a character pale in comparison with those of the devil--a much more present figure in the minds of the people, and (as Dendle explores) one who potentially poses a much more active role in the spiritual world of the Anglo-Saxons and not merely in mythological narratives.

* All occurrences of the word in its various forms and declensions, including compounds beginning with this word.


Sources:
Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, ed. Antonette diPaolo Healey (Toronto: U of Toronto, 2005).
Dendle, Peter, Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001).
Thesaurus of Old English [online], ed. Flora Edmonds, Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, and Irené Wotherspoon (Glasgow: U of Glasgow, 2005).
Woolf, R. E., "The Devil in Old English Poetry," Review of English Studies, n.s. 4 (1953): 1-12.