How to Read Middle English: Pronunciation, Dialects, and Verse from Beowulf to Chaucer

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MEDIEVAL ENGLISH

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he texts of medieval English literature were written in two different stages of the language, separated by a historical break. The first is Old English, which developed among the Germanic settlers and stayed whole until the Norman Conquest of 1066. The second is Middle English, which first appears in records in the early 12th century and gave way to Modern English at the end of the 15th century, when printing spread.

Old English is a heavily inflected language. Words constantly change their form to show their role in the sentence (person, number, tense, case, and mood), and its vocabulary is almost entirely Germanic. It is so distant from the modern reader that, apart from examples with line-by-line translation such as Caedmon’s Hymn, all Old English works can be read only with special training, or in translation.

In Middle English, this strict system of endings became weaker, and thousands of new French words replaced older native words. For a modern reader, the real difficulty of Middle English is not the endings. It is the non-standard spelling, which was a “rough phonetic system”, and the differences between regional dialects:

Midland dialect: the language of London and of Geoffrey Chaucer, and the direct ancestor of standard English today.

Western and North-Western dialects: the dialects of Piers Plowman by William Langland (West) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (North-West). Both are quite different from the language of London.

Northern dialect: the dialect of works such as The Second Shepherds’ Play, with its own sounds and spelling rules.

The Sound System: How to Pronounce Middle English

Three main rules separate Middle English from Modern English when you read it aloud: long vowels sound like those in continental European languages, the final -e is pronounced, and all consonants that are silent today are pronounced.

A vowel is long when it is doubled (aa, ee, oo), when it is at the end of a word (he, to, holy), or when it comes before a single consonant followed by a vowel (name, mete, note). It is short before two consonants (except th and ch).

2. The Final “-e”

In poems with a fixed number of syllables, the final -e is pronounced like the light “a” (schwa) at the end of sofa. It gives the unstressed syllable that the verse needs (“Another Nonné with hire haddé she”). But it is dropped, meaning not pronounced, when the verse does not need it, or before a word that begins with a vowel or h.

3. Consonants

All the consonant groups that are silent in Modern English are pronounced one by one in Middle English:

Letters that are not silent: the first and last consonants in gnat (g-nat), knave (k-nave), knight (k-night), write (w-rite), and folk (fol-k) are all pronounced. The exception is gn in the middle or end of a word, as in sign, where the g is silent.

H and GH sounds: an h at the beginning of short English words and French-origin words is silent. The gh in night or thought sounds like the throaty ch in German ich or nach.

Verse in Old and Middle English

The rhythm of English poetry was shaped by two different ideas of beauty, one before the Norman Conquest and one after it.

1. Old English and the Alliterative Line

Old English poetry does not use rhyme. Its basic unit is a single line, and alliteration, meaning words that begin with the same sound, links the line together. A line has four main stresses and is divided by a strong pause, a caesura, into two half-lines with two stresses each. At least one of the two stressed words in the first half-line (usually both) begins with the same sound as the first stressed word of the second half-line. The fourth stressed word does not alliterate. A Beowulf example is “Oft Scyld Scefing // sceaþena þreatum..” Any vowel can alliterate with any other vowel. When these lines were performed with a harp, they created a solemn atmosphere that matched the serious, epic spirit of the age.

2. The Return of Alliteration and French Influence

Middle English poetry follows two paths: the regular stressed and rhymed verse adapted from French, and the alliterative verse inherited from Old English.

Flexible alliteration: in 14th-century works such as Piers Plowman, the caesura is kept, but the rules become looser. All four stressed words can begin with the same sound (“In a summer season // when soft was the sun”), or a line can have five or six stressed words (“A fair field full of folk // found I therebetween”). Because h became silent, words that begin with h can alliterate with vowels.

Rhymed and stressed verse: this is the French-style line, with unstressed (x) and stressed (X) syllables in a regular pattern (x X x X x X or x x X x x X x x X). In some poems, and in texts like Everyman or the ballads, only the number of stresses is fixed, and the number of unstressed syllables is free. Sometimes this irregularity came from the carelessness of the scribes who copied the texts.

3. Chaucer and the Iambic Pentameter Revolution

In poems before Chaucer, a line usually has four stresses, sometimes three and sometimes seven. In the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer used iambic pentameter: rhymed couplets with five regular stresses in every line. In this way, he set the standard line of English poetry.

To catch the rhythm when reading Chaucer, remember two things. First, the -e at the end of words is pronounced, and when it comes at the end of a line it makes an 11-syllable line. Second, the poet sometimes shortens words to keep the rhythm, as in Canterb’ry and ev’r, or by cutting the plural -es to -s. This technique is called slurring.

Now that we know how Middle English sounds and how its verse works, we are ready to hear it in the voice of its greatest poet. In our next post, we are going to look into Caedmon’s Hymn