Surprises in Old Scottish Poems by Orlando Bartro
Gavin Douglas was a Middle English Scottish poet who is today remembered mostly for his Palis of Honoure.
The Palace of Honor is a dream vision of about eighty pages, modeled on Chaucer’s House of Fame.
It was written in 1501, and it contains many surprises for the modern reader.
Here is one:
Thair is nane ayr inoth watters nor seis,
But quhilk na thing may heir, as wyse men leiris
Lyik as but lycht thair is na thyng that seis.
There is no air within waters nor seas,
Without which no thing may hear, as wise men teach,
Just as without light there is no thing that sees.
Is it not surprising that only five hundred years ago, it was believed that sound traveled only through air? And that, therefore, no one submerged in a lake can hear anything?
This implies that there weren’t too many swimmers in Scotland.
It also implies that the highly educated were sometimes miseducated in those times, too.
And there is a second surprise in the above excerpt.
Look at leiris. It means teach, but is a predecessor of our word, learn.
And yet, still today, we will sometimes hear people say, “She learned me it in school.”
We now call this nonstandard usage, but it descends from a standard word with a long tradition.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, available at Amazon, usually for $ 4.91.