Black and White

My BA dissertation, which was a few years ago now, has become something of a party piece for me. It can be easily summarised into a few simple sentences which, even if they don't prompt people into amazed conversation, do at least make them raise their eyebrows in interest. Of course, at the time it was an amazing conversation-killer. Some poor soul would ask what I was studying, and I'd reply, "the word black", only to be met with a stumped silence. Not the best way of answering, I fear.

My dissertation was titled A Semantic Study of Blāc and Blæc in Old and Middle English, and briefly, what I found was this:

In Old English there were two seemingly interchangeable colour terms on the black-white continuum, blāc and blæc, generally taken to mean 'shining white' and 'black' respectively. In Old English. blæc was used as a standard colour term, much like the other hue-based colour terms. In contrast, blāc was a brightness term and was used less as a colour term and more as an adjective expressing brightness (not necessarily white). When used to mean 'bright', it was used in descriptions of light or fire, concepts which defy any one colour. Blāc also had an alternative application as a more hue-based term to mean 'pale', a use most commonly seen in descriptions of flesh. Despite the similarities in spelling, there seems to have been very little confusion between the two. This is probably largely to do with context though.

While Old English used a brightness-based colour system, with colour terms focused on shades of black and white, Middle English had a colour system whose primary focus was hue. This made no difference to the semantic range of blæc, but it meant that blāc was used to just be a hue-term, where it meant 'pale'. As a result of this shift, the two terms could both be applied in the same contexts, which can be seen in the great number of cases in which could potentially mean both 'black' and 'pale'. This resulted in an ambiguity between the two terms in some cases in Middle English.1

Of course, now older and wiser, I know that this wasn't news to anyone in the business, but the fact that I'd found it out myself by sifting through the data still gives me the warm and fuzzies.

I mention this now because today I was reading a paper which reminded me of it. Loredana Teresi, in her study of Be Heofonwarum discusses several themes occurring in the text that she believes are drawn from a variety of other textual traditions. The theme I want to look at here is 'two bands of angels, one good and bright and one evil and black, fighting for the possession of a soul whose fate has not yet been determined'2 (there has to be a better way of making footnotes!). The juxtaposition of bright with black here is notable because 'brightness' is not the opposite of 'black'; their opposites would be 'dark' or 'white'. I would imagine would these descriptions were chosen because of their strikingness in Old English; blæc v. blāc. Unfortunately I can't get hold of the text at the time of writing this (I'm in my pyjamas and there are limits to my curiosity), but even if those weren't the terms used, it shows an awareness of the juxtaposition they create. Indeed, the use of different vocabulary and structures to express themes that are seen elsewhere would support Teresi's hypothesis that this text was constructed using themes from a 'common mnemonic repertoire',3 adapted to suit this particular text.

Unfortunately this means I can go no further until I've tracked down a copy of the text. Until then, wild speculation will have to do.

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1. My BA dissertation abstract. No-one's going to see any more of it than that, so I'm not referencing it fully.
2. Loredana Teresi, ‘Mnemonic Transmission of Old English Texts in the Post-Conquest Period’, in Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, ed. by Mary Swan and Elaine Treharne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 98-116, (p. 105).
3. Teresi, p. 116