An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

particular usage may have meant that even in Old English they were
becoming detached from their original paradigms.
A further instrumental usage which survives today, although not in
a transparent fashion, is the type of idiom exemplified by the more, the
merrier. Thus we find:
(15) Hig
.
e sc
.
eal
t
e heardra … 
t
e u¯re mæg
.
en lytla
e
Courage will be the greater … the more our strength lessens
Note that in this example from The Battle of Maldon,
†
e, which is usually
classed as a particle, and to which I shall return in Chapter 7, appears as
an alternative to 
†
y¯, but is otherwise to be distinguished in this usage.
A final use of the instrumental is one which is particular to Old English,
and which, without any later development, is seen in a number of
variations which together may be classed as partly manner and partly
accompaniment. The former is seen in examples such as:
(16) sc
.
olde here-byrne hondum g
.
ebroden
should be the war-corslet hand woven
and the latter in:
(17) Ond 
t
a¯ g
.
eascode he¯
t
one cyning lytle werode
And then he discovered the king with a small group
I have left aside until now one very significant use of the dative. In
present-day English we are accustomed to analysing all direct objects
identically, and therefore it might be assumed that in Old English this
would simply surface as all direct objects being in the accusative case.
That is indeed the norm. However there are many verbs which take a
direct object in the dative rather than the accusative case. The following
example shows this in practice:
(18) … 
e
a¯ kyningas … Gode [
] ond his æ¯rendwrecum []
hı
¯
ersumedon
the kings … God
and his messengers
obeyed
There are too many verbs which take a dative object to permit a sensible
listing of them here, although many of them will be found in the
glossary. It is, however, worthy of note that some verbs take either an
accusative object or a dative object, and that there may be a meaning
distinction available, as in these two sentences which show different
meanings of folgian:
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(19) ond 
e
a¯ folgode feorhg
.
eni
e
hlan [
]
then (he) pursued deadly foes
(20) him [
] folgia
t
fuglas [
]
him
followed birds ‘birds followed him’
Moving now to the genitive, perhaps the first point to make is that the
syntax of the genitive case is in most respects rather similar to that of
the possessive in present-day English. The second point to make, on the
other hand, marks a distinction between Old English and present-day
English, and to clarify this it is useful to distinguish between the Old
English genitive and the present-day possessive. For both the genitive
and the possessive we can characterise their prototypical function as
being to mark a relationship between two nouns. Thus in both (21) and
(22):
(21) … to¯
t
æs cyninges [
] untruman bearne []
(22) … to the king’s sickly child
the crucial feature is that there is a functional relationship between
cyninges/king’s and bearn/child, and that relationship is the same at both
stages of the language. But what are not found in Old English are phrases
such as the following present-day construction:
(23) The woman down the street’s cat
where the possessive marker is not found on the possessing noun
(woman), but rather on phrase-final noun (street). That is to say, it is the
woman who possesses the cat (if anyone can ever be said to possess a
cat!), not the street. The possessive marker, therefore, is attached, not to
the noun which enters the possessive relationship, but rather to the final
noun of the phrase. Therefore there is a significant difference here
between the two stages of the language.
Having dealt with that matter, it’s now possible to look in more detail
at the functions of the Old English genitive case. The principal uses of
the genitive, as I have indicated, are to show the functional relationships
between two nouns, thus we can talk of subjective genitives, where the
noun in the genitive acts as the subject of the second noun. Such uses are
very common, and can be exemplified by examples such as:
(24)
T
æs bisc
.
eopes bodung
where the bishop is doing the preaching, i.e. the bishop is the subject of
the preaching.
The obvious opposite of this is the objective genitive, as in folces weard
‘the guardian of the people’. However, as in present-day English it
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can be difficult to tell whether the genitive is being used subjectively or
objectively, to the point of complete ambiguity. Thus the phrase godes
lufu is, at least out of context, ambiguous, since it could mean either ‘the
love God has (for someone)’, or ‘the love someone has for God’. Of
course, exactly the same holds for present-day English. Other types of
genitive include the descriptive genitive found in, for example:
(25) Se wæs mæ¯res lı
¯
fes man
‘he was a man of famous life’
and the partitive genitive, as in a¯n heora ‘one of them’. It is possible,
although not necessarily fruitful, to further subdivide the categories
above, but that can make it difficult to see the general principles behind
the use of the genitive.
This is especially important here, because, in addition to the above
uses which closely resemble those in present-day English, there are a
few types of genitive which no longer exist or do so only in an altered
form. One such example is the genitive of measure, as in f ı¯f nihta first
‘a five nights’ period’, where present-day constructions usually prefer an