Hwær cwōm commas, hwær cwōm question marks?

When as a student you first encounter an actual Old English manuscript, it may come as quite a shock. So far you’ve only taken one or two Old English classes and perhaps read things like the Story of Cædmon with modernized punctuation, yet before you in the manuscript there is just one vast wall of text strewn with a couple of dots here and there – “Where are the commas, where the question marks?”, you ask, lamenting your fate in a manner (not unduly) reminiscent of Théoden’s as he prepares for the Battle of Helm’s Deep.

But I think you should be grateful. Yes, I mean it! Because if you’re seeing nothing but letters and dots on the page, odds are you’re dealing with one of the many eleventh- or twelfth-century Old English manuscripts (Ker xxxiv) that use but a single mark to indicate, well, something resembling structure: the punctus (plural punctūs, if you want to know it). Isn’t that wonderfully simple? Pause (as you would at a punctus) for a moment in silent commemoration of all those Latinists who suffered in the face of literally point-less strings of letters running on forever (a.k.a. scriptura continua; see picture below) or texts so heavily punctuated that you’d want to throw in the towel right away. Good, now let’s get back to Old English.

Say you’re looking at British Library Cotton MS Julius E VII, an early eleventh-century manuscript containing a number of saints’ lives by Ælfric of Eynsham (and some not by Ælfric). In the part of the manuscript concerned with Saint Eustace, perhaps still familiar to readers of the Ang I Blog from Dr. Kehoe’s characterization of him as a saint given to frequent crying, the scribe employs a very simple two-level system of punctuation (alternatively: pointing).

On the first level, we have the punctus – see the many little dots surrounded by green rectangles in the first picture? These are used to mark the end of grammatical sentences, as far as I can tell from the 123 segments I analyzed, but also appear before almost all conjunctions (e.g. ond ‘and’), sometimes after (but not usually before) restrictive relative clauses, and occasionally after appositives and interjections. In at least one instance, a punctus was – in my opinion – employed for emphasis only, and whenever resulting segments would have become too short, the scribe tended to refrain from pointing. So the scribe was probably not following strict rules but still wanted their pointing to reflect some aspects of the syntactic structure – they tried to be helpful, really!

However, as you might have guessed from the presence of the larger yellow rectangles in the picture, punctūs are only one half of the story. There are also litterae notabiliores, notable letters (here capitals or enlarged minuscules), which serve the purpose of punctuation without being punctuation marks per se. For example, the first letter following a section of direct speech is always a littera notabilior, whereas the beginning of direct speech is similarly marked only some of the time. The reason? I assume the scribe could more readily afford inconsistency at the beginning because direct speech is invariably heralded by a form of cweðan or secgan (both meaning ‘to say’), so that special marking is not strictly necessary to tell the reader what’s going on. The end, by contrast, kind of demands marking, or else the reader would be under the impression that the speaker rambled on interminably. Helpful, no?

The other context in which litterae notabiliores appear is the beginning of what one might consider rhetorical periods. What constitutes a rhetorical period? Well, that’s “a matter of opinion” (Parkes 17), and I’ll leave the answer to someone more knowledgeable. By way of conclusion, I’d say it is not useful to think that we today are less weird than Anglo-Saxon scribes in our use of pointing. They, too, aimed to make their writing more easily digestible to the reader – we’re just not used to their customs.

References:

Ker, N. R. 1957. A Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Parkes, M. B. 1992. Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. Aldershot: Scolar Press.