Old English Bird Names

St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 913: Vocabularius S. Galli (/en/list/one/csg/0913).

Introduction

During the Middle Ages, biblical glossaries were used to explain difficult vocabulary from the Latin Bible, such as vocabulary concerning animals, which readers from different parts of Europe might not know about. Usually, the bible already provided glosses in accordance with the structure of the original Bible text to facilitate word searches and those included a definition or explanation of the word. As those definitions mostly only provided synonyms or short explanations in Latin, these definitions were insufficient and were thus accompanied or replaced by translations into the vernacular language Old English.

Some of these glossaries originated at the School of Theodore and Hadrian in Canterbury (late 7th century). Theodore and Hadrian, as natives of Tarsus (modern Turkey) and Northern Africa, respectively, provided their students with the necessary information and translations for the Canterbury biblical commentaries. Some of the students’ notes – the glossaries – eventually reached the Continent through the Anglo-Saxon mission in the 8th century. A particularly important document originating from their classes is the Leiden Glossary (Leiden, University Library, VLQ 69), containing some 2500 entries, 260 of which include Old English and, occasionally, Old High German translations. The Leiden Glossary was originally produced in St. Gallen around the year 800 (Lapidge 2015).

Codex Sangallensis 913 is an especially famous manuscript because of the Vocabularius Sancti Galli (on pp. 181-206), a Latin and Old High German bilingual glossary written in the Anglo-Saxon half-uncial (an Insular script which combines rounded shape of majuscule letters mixed with miniscule letter forms; for more details see Schriftgeschichte). It was probably the notebook of an Anglo-Saxon from Mercia, travelling on the continent, as speculated due to the presence of some regional terms (Seiler 2025: 241-250). On pages 139–145 the manuscript contains a glossary written in Old English, which focuses on the animals and birds from Leviticus 11, a section of the Bible on the dietary laws of the Israelites. The list of clean or unclean animals was mostly obscure or confusing to people from colder climates and thus needed to be explained either by a Latin definition or an Old English translation.

The word spacing is tricky here, as orthographical conventions at the time were different to our current ones. Try to thus separate unsegmented text into single words and to combine spaced out morphemes to form a word. This manuscript is written in the Anglo Saxon or Insular Half-Uncial. This script combines the rounded shape of majuscule letters with miniscule letter forms. 

In the text the Tironian nota ⁊ is consistently used for the word 'and', which in this case is Latin et. Also, we find one example of an e-caudata letter (ę) in the text, which expands to an ash (æ). In addition to that, the flat-topped g (ᵹ) character has a long pointed tail and is written as a g. The d is round-backed (ꝺ). Moreover, the letters r (ꞃ) and long s (ꞅ) are sitting on the baseline, which sometimes makes r difficult to distinguish from s. Abbreviations should be written out in full. An example of such an abbreviation as found in this text is ÷, which is the short form of est. You can find more information on how to expand Latin abbreviations in the Cappelli Online. Furthermore, nasal suspension marks, consisting of horizontal strokes placed above a vowel, expand to n or m.