‘BREOTON · IS GARSECGES · EALOND’

The first four words of the main text of the OEHE begin by translating Bede's famous line, ‘Brittania Oceani insula’, using the poetic and difficult word garsecg. The term appears about one hundred times in the Corpus of Old English, and while it clearly refers to the ocean, precisely how it came to bear that meaning has long been a subject of contention. The Dictionary of Old English Corpus indicates that ‘the etymology of the word has been much disputed … the compound is probably to be translated as either “spear-warrior” (where personification is presumed) or “spear-ocean”’. On one level, the term has been read as powerfully northern and Germanic. Possibly a kenning, it appears several times in British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv (the Beowulf manuscript), then most frequently in the Old English Orosius; Sievers and Sweet associated the term with the runic inscription on the Franks Casket to give it the meaning of ‘the Rager’. More recently, Roger Smith and Earl Anderson have connected it with Norse ship construction and folk etymologies for ‘the edge of the promontory’.

On another level, however, the term may be as closely associated with romanitas in Britain as Bede's Historia itself. As Michael Lapidge and others have recently and persuasively shown, despite earlier notions of the intensely Germanic and oral-formulaic character of Old English poetry, Latin learning and verse had a profound influence on Old English poetry, especially poetic compounds.