Some Thoughts about 'The Seafarer'

NOTES ON PRONUNCIATION

In the first passage read, the fact that the word 'man' is spelled 'mon' represents a common feature of Old English involving the rounding (and possibly nasalisation) of short /ɑ/ before nasal consonants. For a lot of speakers/writers, this was probably allophonic (shown by alternations in spelling between 'mon' and 'man,' 'lond' and 'land' within a single text). If I were to re-record this, I would probably make more of an effort to differentiate this rounded vowel (something like [ɒ]) from phonological /o/, although you could argue that some speakers might have had an advanced version of this where that allophonic [ɒ] actually became /o/. I don't know if there's any evidence for that, I'm mostly just writing it for the sake of peoples' immersion if they noticed that idiosyncracy.

The word 'cold' (with inflection) is variously spelled 'cealdne' and 'caldne'. Plenty of OE writers alternated their spelling, apparently sometimes just for the sake of variety - I doubt the writer intended for these two spellings to be pronounced differently, but I forgot about the first one while reading the second.

The word 'medodrince' is one of several examples in this poem where we find 'o' where an OE textbook might suggest 'u'. I have interpreted this as a reflection of the writer's own regional accent. I pronounce the 'c' as [k] because the last substantial bit of OE reading I did was in a Northumbrian-influenced dialect where [k] had not palatalised.

The alternation between 'feþera' and 'feþra' might not reflect a difference in speech, even though I've mistakenly differentiated them here; I think the syncopated form 'feþra' is more likely to be the way the author intended this word to be said.

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The John Pope paper retracting his arguments: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa...