The evidence of the Old English lexicon
Even though the Christian authors of this period tell their readers very little about pre-Christian religion, the Old English lexicon itself provides access to religious ideas that were absorbed into the texture of speech.20 The English- speaking people of Britain did not import Latin vocabulary when native terms were already available that could be adapted to Christian purposes.
They obviously had terms for life and death (Old English Ilf and deaf, respectively), and they seem to have attributed the difference between the two to a life-spirit (Old English sawol). No evidence tells us how this life-spirit was conceptualized, for instance whether or not they thought of that spirit as something separable from the body or in some sense immortal. Below them was a dark nether region (Old English hel) and above them bright skies (Old English heofon, etymologically “what is raised up”). Presumably they did not conceive of those upper and nether realms as sites of eternal punishment and bliss, respectively, but rather as features of the physical world and, possibly, loci of numinous powers.Most important of all, they spoke of gods (Old English god, pl. godu), usually in the plural because they conceived of numinous power as having many forms. After the conversion, the word “God” remained in the English language with the innovation that its gender shifted from neuter to masculine, in accord with Christian idiom.
Study of Latin lexical borrowings into the Old English language opens up a window on religious change during this period. The Angles and Saxons needed a term to refer to the physical churches that were the primary sites of Christian worship, and so from an early date (before their migration to Britain) they adopted the word cirice, deriving ultimately from the Greek adjective kuriakon/Kvpiaicdv “pertaining to the house of God”.
They likewise borrowed minster “church, monastery” from Latin monasterium. They did not, however, need a word for the altar at which sacrifice was made. They used the native term weofod for this (cf. weofod-fregn “altar-servant, priest”).21 So the Angles and Saxons of pre-Christian times must have had altars that corresponded functionally to Christian ones, even if those items were free-standing rather than being confined within the walls of a building. Interestingly, the inhabitants of Roman Britain had previously imported the word eccles to denote “church” (from Latin/Greek ecclesia), but that word was not adopted in Old English. Still, certain British place-names (such as Ecclefechan, in south-west Scotland) embody that usage, thus pinpointing places that were centres of Christian worship before the English conquest.No new term was introduced to denote the Eucharist. The native word husel was used for that component of the mass.22 This suggests not only that the Angles and Saxons were in the habit of making sacral offerings, as virtually all the early peoples of Europe seem to have done, but also that they may have consumed consecrated food or drink in the course of such rites. The ceremony of baptism, too, had a pre-Christian antecedent. The Old English term for baptism is fulluht.2^ This word perhaps originally denoted a naming ceremony of some kind. In like manner, no verb meaning “to excommunicate” had to be imported, for English-speakers already had a verb to serve for that purpose, weargian. What that word literally means is “to make an outcast (wearh) out of one”, hence “to curse” in a religious sense.24
Other native English words were appropriated for different areas of Christian religious experience, and these too can point to practices that pre-dated the coming of the missionaries. An example is the verb betan. When used in an ecclesiastical context, this word has the Christian sense “to atone for, to do penance”.
The root sense of the word, however, is “to set things right, to make amends”. The wide semantic range of this word suggests that, before the Christian era, secular crimes were not sharply distinguished from religious ones. Another native word of religious significance that continued to be used, though only in contexts where non-Christian religion was discussed, is the verb bldtan, meaning “to sacrifice” (related to the noun blod “blood”).25 A plausible inference is that sacrificial offerings before the conversion routinely consisted of beasts killed at an altar in such a manner that blood ran down at that place (cf. Blotmonath).Interestingly, speakers of Old English did not immediately adopt the very common Latin word sanctus (“holy” or “saint”) to refer to saints, preferring to use their native word halig. Although Bede speaks of sanctus Alhanus, “Saint Alban”, in his seventh-century Latin history, we hear of se halig Albanus in the late ninth-century translation of Bede’s work into Old English. The adjective halig “holy” (cf. the adjective hdl “whole, intact”) is closely related to the verb “to heal” (hczlari), a word that in turn yielded one of the important Germanic names of Christ (Haelend “the Healer, the Saviour”). Based on the same root is the noun hael, which may originally have referred to good luck or well-being considered to be the result of divine favour.
It is of interest that the term deofol “devil” represents a Latin borrowing (from Lat. diabolus), for that fact suggests that native speakers of English were unfamiliar with the idea that a numinous creature could embody pure evil. While they had the word feond in their vocabulary, and while that word came regularly to be used of the Christian devil (or “fiend”), what feond originally meant was “enemy, adversary”. And just as the devil seems to have been brought to Britain with the missionaries, so too were angels. The word engel, which appears with some frequency in Old English religious texts, is a borrowing from Latin/Greek angelus.
Were there then no conceptions of angel-like beings in the ancient north? Apparently not, though it is possible that shape-changing female deities who could take on avian form were known (Davidson 1993: 109).As for the more specialized Christian vocabulary of the liturgy, of ecclesiastical organization, and of other aspects of religious life, it was regularly borrowed from Latin. Thus we have Old English preost “priest” from Latin presbyter, Old English bisceop “bishop” from Latin episcopus (literally “overseer”), and Old English diacon “deacon” from Latin diaconus. Words for ecclesiastical vestments, dishes and the like were also borrowed. The word cross was borrowed into English during the Anglo-Saxon period (from Old Norse kross and/or Celtic eras, rather than directly from Latin crux), but the native term rod “rood” was the more common word for the cross, whatever type or types of object that word originally denoted. Another term for the cross, especially in the poetry, is gealga “gallows”: a reminder that sacrifice by hanging is hard to distinguish from capital punishment, and that the early Germanic peoples seem to have cultivated both practices.
Other items in the Old English lexicon clearly reflect pre-Christian beliefs, though whether those beliefs are properly termed “religious” can be debated. The ylfe “elves” (singular aelfi seem to have been thought of as beautiful numinous beings associated with woods, fields, hills and bodies of water. A case has been made that elves were originally only male in gender, or else “male-like” (Hall 2007). As for dweorgas “dwarves” (singular dweorh), they were evidently associated with high fever and with the madness or dementia that fever can cause; they may originally have had nothing to do with mountains or underground regions (Liberman 2008: 46-62). Both elves and dwarves seem to have been thought of as powerful and potentially dangerous beings. Other names for dangerous half-seen creatures of the natural world were paca, scucca and scinn.
These creatures seem to have flirted with humankind from the borders of the illusory, and it is hard to tell just how they were imagined.Inhabiting the wilder and more remote regions of the earth were other dangerous creatures of the mythological imagination including the fryrs, or “marshland monster”. The seas were full of threatening nicras “sea-serpents” (singular nicor), and a person so unwise as to go poking into ancient barrows might stir up a wyrm “serpent, dragon” or two (pl. wyrmas). That was the native term for such creatures, while draca “dragon” was a loanword from Latin/Greek draco. If the Anglo-Saxons made a distinction between wyrmas and dragons, it seems, it was to the effect that the wyrm was serpent-like and poisonous, while the draca was the sort of horrid, winged, fire-breathing creature that liked to harry saints. Similarly, the word gigant was borrowed into English from Latin under the influence of the book of Genesis, with its antediluvian gigantas who offended God. There may have been giants on the earth in early Germanic days, no less dangerous than the giants of scripture, but what the Anglo-Saxons called them was entas or eotenas (cf. the Old Icelandic noun jdtunn, pl. jotnar) 26