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The “Old Frisian” Tescklaow as Invented Tradition: Forging Friesland’s Rural Past in the Early Nineteenth Century
- Edited by Karl Fugelso
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 14 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 16 April 2024, pp 145-168
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Summary
In 1823, the historian Jacobus Scheltema (1767–1835) published the text of the Frisian Tescklaow, with his learned commentary on it. This document, bearing the date of 1557 but with many elements apparently reaching back to the later Middle Ages, regulated the annual threshing of rapeseed (L. brassica napus). According to Jacobus's remarks, the law and other documents related to it had been newly discovered by his brother Paulus (1752–1835), and many scholars took Jacobus at his word. Indeed, Paulus's find soon attracted the enthusiastic support of many esteemed scholars, including Jacob Grimm, who appreciated the Tescklaow for its folksy character. Moreover, though some experts raised questions about the text from almost the moment it was published, acceptance of the Tescklaow did not fully end until seventy years after its publication, when it was conclusively demonstrated to be a forgery.
This essay outlines the nature and reception of this fake text written in quasi-Old Frisian and discusses the background against which it appeared. In its apparent antiquity, the Tescklaow appealed to the Romantic desire to support national identity with a medieval narrative, and as a legal text it attracted particular support among many scholars who focused on laws as vehicles for national identity. It also attracted attention because it was written in Frisian, a little-known language that was presumed to be extremely old, older than many other Germanic languages. To be sure, the document's supposedly Frisian character is underscored in its title's use of the spurious word “laow,” which, in its apparent echo of the word “law,” pulls on the commonplace perception that Frisian and English were closely related languages. Moreover, the Tescklaow's frequent references to medieval Frisian legal traditions helped allay many historians’ initial doubts about its authenticity.
Setting the Stage for the Tescklaow
The second half of the eighteenth century saw the rise of the agricultural revolution and industrialization in western Europe. In its wake followed accelerated urbanization, and it is hardly coincidental that in the same period a desire grew among the bourgeoisie to look back to times when life seemed simpler and more heroic. James Macpherson, for example, began to collect manuscripts with Gaelic songs on the Hebrides and the Scottish Highlands, which he published in 1760 as Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language.
2 - The Reception of the Old English Version of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues between the Conquest and the Close of the Nineteenth Century
- Edited by Larissa Tracy, Longwood University, Virginia, Geert H. M. Claassens, KU Leuven, Belgium
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- Book:
- Medieval English and Dutch Literatures: the European Context
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 08 October 2022
- Print publication:
- 12 July 2022, pp 29-52
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Summary
BISHOP WÆRFERTH OF Worcester's late ninth century translation of Pope Gregory the Great's Latin Dialogi (late sixth century) into Old English as the Dialogues was an important text in pre-Conquest England: witness the three manuscripts and a bifolium of an otherwise lost manuscript that have survived. This number looks slightly less impressive when compared to the nine extant manuscripts or fragments from England of Gregory's original Latin text which date between the late seventh and late eleventh centuries. While the reception of the Old English Dialogues in both pre-Conquest England and in the past five decades has been adequately addressed, the tale of what people thought of it in the period between 1066 and its first edition in 1907 has largely remained untold. Now that plans have been announced to make a new edition, this essay charts the journey that the Old English Dialogues made from post-Conquest England into the world of the early-modern antiquaries and from there into the modern era. It appears that later medieval historiographers repeatedly mentioned its existence, thus probably drawing the attention of early modern antiquarians, notably Francis Junius and Edward Lye who quarried the text for its lexicographic potential. While Wærferth was frequently praised for his achievement, the contents of the Old English Dialogues, to the extent it was commented upon, met with a fair amount of (Protestant, Enlightened) contempt. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did a change in the scholarly paradigm emerge in Germany that spread to England and the rest of the Western academic world. The result was a renewed philological attention to the Dialogues, above all aimed at establishing a reliable text edition that would enable it to be analysed by both linguists and literary critics alike.
Post-Conquest references to Wærferth's translation of Gregory's Dialogues show the work did not really sink into oblivion, despite being in Old English. However, awareness of the text did not rest as much on familiarity with the vernacular version itself, as on the man who translated it, owing to Bishop Asser's reference to this feat in his Vita Ælfredi regis Angul Saxonum (Life of Alfred King of the Anglo-Saxons) [hereafter Vita Ælfredi] (893).
Isolation or Network: Arengas and Colophon Verse in Frisian Manuscripts around 1300
- Edited by Aidan Conti, Orietta Da Rold, University Lecturer, Faculty of English, St John's College, University of Cambridge,, Philip Shaw
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- Book:
- Writing Europe, 500-1450
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 October 2015, pp 83-100
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LITERACY CAME RATHER late to Frisia, a narrow stretch of land no deeper than some 25 kilometres and running along the coast of the North Sea between the estuaries of the Rhine and the Weser. Although the Frisians had been converted to Christianity from the late seventh century to the end of the ninth, very few centres of learning, if any at all, had come about in the centuries immediately following their conversion, due to various circumstances. First of all, the missionaries who evangelised amongst the Frisians had their bases far away from the coast: Willibrord's home abbey was in Echternach (Luxembourg), Boniface worked from Fulda (Hessen), Liudger resided in Werden (Ruhr area), while also from Corvey abbey on the lower Weser anonymous monks had worked in the Frisian lands. As a result, when newly converted pious Frisians wanted to donate land in honour of God and for the benefit of their souls, they did so to these monasteries rather than seeing to it that such pious communities were founded within the confines of Frisia itself to which they could relate.
A second factor frustrating the foundation of centres of Christian literacy was the arrival of the Vikings. Shortly after Charlemagne had completed the conquest of Frisia and its incorporation into his empire, the coastal districts started to become a target for increasingly frequent Scandinavian raids. These plundering activities were only temporarily brought to a halt when Charlemagne's grandson Hlothar appointed the Dane Rorik as count of Frisia in 850. For more than twenty-five years successive Danes ruled the Low Countries not unlike a kind of Normandy or Danelaw, but eventually they failed to settle permanently and establish a duchy or county there. Only around 950 did the coast see a nunnery in the dunes of Egmond (about 30 km north-west of Amsterdam), founded at the invitation of Count Dirk I, by Benedictines of the abbey of St Bavo in Ghent and hence oriented more to the south than to the north.
A third factor thwarting the rise of literacy was the ecclesiastical administration. Frisia never received its own bishopric, but the Frisian lands subsisted under the successors of whichever missionary had been responsible for their conversion. Hence, the Frisian lands became divided between four different bishoprics: Utrecht (Willibrord), Münster (Liudger), Paderborn (successor to Corvey abbey) and Bremen (Willehad), all of them situated outside Frisia.
5 - The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law
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- By Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, University of Leiden
- Edited by Larissa Tracy, Longwood University
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- Book:
- Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 July 2013
- Print publication:
- 18 July 2013, pp 108-130
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For most of the Middle Ages, the Frisians were a people who saw their lives dominated by violence. At least, this is the impression gained by studying their laws. Stretched out along the North Sea coast of present-day Netherlands and Germany, their homeland was threatened by land-hungry powers from without and by feuding from within. The first detailed view of the Frisians' legal traditions is the result of foreign occupation. In the second half of the eighth century, the Franks had gradually managed to expand their territory to the north at the expense of the Frisians, culminating in their complete subjection by Charlemagne, around ad 785. As he had done for other conquered peoples in his empire, Charlemagne required the Frisians to record their laws in writing. The result of this policy is the Lex Frisionum, which, in all likelihood, was presented at the Diet of Aachen in 802 where the laws of the recently subdued Saxons and Thuringians were also formulated and imposed. The Lex Frisionum is counted among the Leges barbarorum, the early medieval laws drafted in Latin by or for the various Germanic peoples. Yet, the name of this Frisian legal record is somewhat of a misnomer, coined as it was by the first editor of the text, the Basel scholar-printer Joannes Herold in 1557. Unfortunately, the manuscript on which he based his edition has since disappeared, so that we cannot confirm the correctness of Herold's title.
7 - Across borders: Anglo-Saxon England and the Germanic world
- from II - EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE
- Edited by Clare A. Lees, King's College London
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature
- Published online:
- 05 February 2013
- Print publication:
- 29 November 2012, pp 185-208
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Anglo-Saxons were tied to the continent in many ways. Above all, Germania was their cradle: Bede tells a detailed story about their Germanic roots; to Boniface, these roots were an incentive for his missionary zeal; for the narrator of the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, a fact to be mentioned with awe. Artefacts betray the Germanic origin of the settlers who arrived in Britain from 400 onwards. By 600, the culture of the ruling elite shows a much wider horizon: the gifts that accompanied the ship burial at Sutton Hoo hail from as distant places as Byzantium and Egypt. The conversion drew the Anglo-Saxons into a cultural world in which the Mediterranean and Judaeo-Christian element was dominant but which afforded a legitimate place for the Germanic world from which the Anglo-Saxons originated and to which they remained tied not only linguistically. The seventh-century Franks Casket emits this identity in both image and word (see Chapter 3 above): visually, Weland the Smith flanks the adoration of the Magi, and Old English text in runic characters accompanies Latin text in roman script. The Anglo-Saxons so much belonged to the ‘old world’ that Beowulf, though written in England and in English, is set completely in the (north) Germanic world. This chapter, then, charts relations between continental Germanic cultures in and beyond the British Isles from Tacitus and Bede to such poems as Waldere, Widsith, Finnsburh, the Leiden Riddle, the Hildebrandslied, Heliand and Genesis, and examines the cultural and aesthetic work of texts such as these. The chapter also invites a meditation on the powerful cultural traffic between the Germanic world (Francia, Frisia, Saxony) and the English.
Borders and identities
Borders presuppose the presence of spaces, territories and domains which have elements in common that differ from what lies outside. Such spaces can be physical and virtual. Hadrian’s Wall, for example, was erected to demarcate visibly, solidly and menacingly the northern limit of the Romans’ sway over Britain from around 125. However, in Anglo-Saxon England this monument of Roman imperialism had lost its original delimiting (and controlling) function – borders are clearly by no means permanently fixed but prove to be prone to change over time.
The Old Frisian component in Holthausen's Altenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
- Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr
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- Journal:
- Anglo-Saxon England / Volume 17 / December 1988
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 26 September 2008, pp. 5-13
- Print publication:
- December 1988
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The publication of the first fascicule of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English bears witness to the fulfilment of many vows made at symposia in the past. One of these was to abandon the practice of Bosworth—Toller of providing entries with etymological information. To meet trie objections raised against this policy at the second DOE conference in 1970, Christopher Ball assured the audience that entries would contain etymological information only if it would be impossible to establish the meaning of a word otherwise. ‘Frivolous’ etymology, as Ball termed it, such as linking OE fōt to Latin pedem, would be omitted. The editors of DOE will have been confirmed in their attitude by the fact that in those years Dr Alfred Bammesberger announced a plan for a new etymological dictionary for Old English. Since then, besides numerous articles, he has published a volume of Beiträge Zu einem etymologischen Wörterbuch des Altenglischen. In the preface to this book, Bammesberger stresses that the preparation of such a new dictionary is a project which will not be completed in the immediate future. So, for the time being, the comparist will have to make do with BT and Ferdinand Holthausen's etymological dictionary of Old English. This seems an appropriate time, therefore, to focus our attention on that component of Holthausen's dictionary which concerns the closest relative of English, (Old) Frisian: not least because Holthausen himself devoted so much attention to it.