Abstract
As a culturally constructed concept, illness may be conceptualised through various metaphors across different times and cultures. This paper presents evidence based on readings from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus in Electronic Form (Healey et al. 1998) and the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) that in Old English illness is conceptualised as a heavy burden. The significance of the illness is a burden metaphor in Old English is greater than in Present Day English, in which, as pointed out by Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014) it would not be usual to speak of a heavy illness. The paper also investigates whether there is evidence for a nascent form of the military metaphor for illness and medicine, as identified by Sontag (1978/1991) and exemplified in Middle English by Díaz-Vera (2009). The military metaphor suggests a different approach to illness, in which one ‘fights’ the affliction. This is not well-evidenced in Old English, and it is argued in this paper that these two conceptual metaphors are based on distinct cultural schemas (Quinn 1987). While illness is a burden is to an extent grounded in embodied experience (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), the conceptualisation in Old English cannot fully be understood without also taking into account cultural schemas influenced by the humoral theory of disease aetiology, and by the religious context.
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Notes
Translations from the Old English are the author's own except where otherwise specified.
The burden metaphor also exists in Latin, and endures into English (albeit opaquely for most speakers) in words such as grief. I have included the corresponding Latin in the above examples to show that while Latin influence cannot be ruled out, the burden metaphor in Old English does not result entirely from translation. Examples (7) and (8) show molestia ‘annoyance’ where OE has hefigness and hefigre aðle.
The aim of the present study is not specifically to investigate conceptions of illness in the Northern European tradition, but to present an account of the multi-faceted Anglo-Saxon conceptualisations. Latin influence is therefore taken into account but is not considered to be problematic in terms of its effect on the evidence here.
As Sontag (1978/1991) demonstrates, the metaphor comes to be used for a range of diseases without this kind of cause.
The glosses for (17) and (18) are the author's own.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
The words hal, halig, and hælð, broadly corresponding to PDE 'whole', 'holy', and 'health' were arguably more cognitively related in the Anglo-Saxon period. hal and hælð are both highly polysemous, referring to spiritual and physical health. According to the OED, the derivation of halig from hal probably came from the sense "inviolate, inviolable, that must be preserved whole or intact, that cannot be injured with impunity" (OED, s.v. holy). The Anglo-Saxons may not have been aware of the 'wholeness' in halig, since does not display any senses that are outside of the domain of religion. However, the linkage between the health and spiritual domains does appear to be real for the Anglo-Saxons, which is not only evidenced on the basis of the polysemy of hælð and hal, but also in the overt metaphorical use of health for spiritual salubrity, as in examples (26–28).
Proposition schemas presented as such can only be taken to be, as Sharifian (2011, p. 15) emphasizes, ‘partial linguistic representations’ of cultural schemas.
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Rob Getz at the Dictionary of Old English for kindly providing the entries for hefig, hælð, and their related forms prior to their online release.
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Scott, P.J. Illness as a Burden in Anglo-Saxon England. Neophilologus 101, 603–620 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-017-9527-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-017-9527-7