412 Old English Hwæt
2.1 Introduction
The well- known opening lines of the Old English poem Beowulf begin with a
word which has caused notorious diffi culties for translators:^1
Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.It seems clear that hwæt is not functioning here as an interrogative form.
Modernizers of OE have rendered it as “what ho,” “lo,” “yes,” “indeed,”
“list(en),” “listen to me,” “attend,” and “hear (me),” translations which “[n] o
translator of the poem has ever been satisfi ed with” (Cassidy 1996 : 45). As
Clemoes ( 1985 : 27) remarks of the adverb her ‘here’ in OE prose, the language
“is not uncommonly at its most serious when using ordinary, everyday words
with special meaning derived from context – the sort of denotation no diction-
ary can ever do justice to.” This is also the case with OE hwæt. Dictionary
defi nitions are not very precise about its meaning. Hwæt is traditionally seen
as an interjection or adverb of indeterminate function; for example, An Anglo-
Saxon dictionary (BT) defi nes hwæt as an adverb or interjection meaning Why,
what! ah! , with the supplement (BTS) adding that hwæt serves “as an intro-
ductory particle of vague meaning, why , well , so , indeed , certainly ,” while the
OED (s.v. what , pron., adj.^1 and adv., int., conj., and n., def. B 1) describes it
as an interjection “used to introduce or call attention to a statement: Lo; now;
well ” and the Middle English dictionary (MED) (s.v. what , int., def. 1a) says
that it may be used “[a]s an exclamation emphasizing the speaker’s emotional
response to a situation; also, as an exclamation calling for the hearer’s atten-
tion or demanding the hearer’s response or action: why, here now; now listen
to this.”
This chapter argues that what I will call “exclamatory hwæt ” belongs to the
set of OE pragmatic markers, as suggested by the dictionary defi nitions just
1 Interpreting the syntax of these lines is also not without diffi culty (see Spamer 1981 ;
Bammesberger 2006 ).