Hwæt se h*med

First: Oh, right, I have this blog. I should use it.

Now over to something completely different:

As I was working on two essays this weekend for my history classes I suddenly found time to do other things (as one does). Unfortunately I didn’t use this time to clean my room, which is the usual thing to do in such a situation. While looking through my bookshelf I came across Peter S. Baker’s Introduction to Old English. It still has page 311 of the glossary earmarked. This is from back when I was doing a course in Old English as part of my MA in English. There are two phrases I remember from those days. One is (tellingly):

Iċ wȳsce þæt iċ wīsra wǣre.
I wish that I were wiser.

(For the geeks: The dotted cs mean that they are pronounced like the ch in chin rather than k. The macrons (bars) signal a long vowel. If you know IPA, the whole phrase reads something like [iʧ wyːʃə θæt iʧ wiːzrɑ wæːrə].)

This post is about the other phrase.

And that particular phrase was a result of me and my friend Harald’s need for something relevant to utter as we tried to wrap our minds around OE’s various grammatical cases, the ancient pronunciation (aka the fun bit), the varied syntax etc. Even though the Old Saxons never swore (no, they probably did) and no evidence in written sources of swearwords exists (there probably is) I looked very hard stumbled across for this in the book’s glossary:

Hǣmed. neut. sexual intercourse. dat. sg.

And so the 9th-century equivalent of WTF:

Hwæt se hǣmed!?
[hwæt sə hæːmɛd] (IPA)
What the sexual intercourse!?

was born. I later left for the University of York for a semester but the next year it was still very much in use as we struggled through writing our MA theses (as in: "Hwæt se hǣmed? Have you finished that chapter already?", or: "I'm out of coffee, hwæt se hǣmed?"). I wish I had a picture of all the Hwæt-se-hǣmed-Post-Its covering our desks, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. Or ask Harald.