Anglo-Saxon Styles

11Aldhelm’s Jewel Tones:Latin Colors through Anglo-Saxon Eyes

11 Aldhelm’s Jewel Tones: Latin Colors through Anglo-Saxon Eyes Carin Ruff Color terms are among the most frequently studied lexical fields in modern languages. The study of color is attractive to linguists and cognitive psychologists because the semantics of the description of objects goes to the heart of the relationship between thought and language. A lack of live witnesses to interview obviously inhibits the study of color systems in ancient languages. Despite this handicap , a great deal of progress has been made in understanding how color operates in the historical Germanic languages, but the same cannot be said of classical and medieval Latin. As a result of this situation, we can say in broad outline, at least, how the AngloSaxons used color terms in their own language, but we know virtually nothing about how they used color when they wrote in their second language. We know enough about the color system of Old English to be convinced that the Anglo-Saxons described the appearances of objects in ways that seem strange to native speakers of Modern English and seem also to differ from the descriptive system of classical Latin. What did the Anglo-Saxons make of the color vocabulary they learned when they adopted Roman culture? Did they find a system similar enough to their own that the description of objects in Anglo-Latin was unproblematic? Did AngloLatin authors so assimilate the Latin worldview that their mapping of the new color terms to the perceived spectrum became that of a native speaker of Latin? Anglo-Saxon authors’ use of Latin color terms is necessarily a matter of linguistics and of style, if style includes the literary traditions and personal habits that lead an author to choose from a set of linguistic possibilities.1 Color-term studies in the Germanic 223 224 Carin Ruff languages have largely been the province of linguistics and of linguistically oriented anthropology. The linguistic and anthropological data on color terms are complicated in the present case by a complex situation of language change and contact. We are interested in the use of color terms by authors working in a second language, Latin, a language that is acquired in most cases through textbooks and textual models, not through contact with native speakers . Moreover, the Latin used for instruction and as models by Anglo-Saxons was of various periods and origins: we have some data on the color-term system of classical Latin, but early medieval authors could and did refer to late antique models at least as often as to classical ones. We would expect some slippage between term and meaning in the internal development of the Latin semantics of color, and we would expect further slippage as non-Latin-speaking writers interpret Latin terms and begin to put them to their own use. It is in the interpretive space thus opened between Latin color terms and their referents that authorial style comes into play. Style as a nexus of rhetorical choice and personal habit filters the inventory of color terms available in the Latin known to the AngloSaxons , and leaves us a personal selection by each author, conditioned by culturally ingrained ways of seeing and by learned traditions of literary description. Because color terms are, in the first instance, descriptive of objects, their deployment also brings into play matters of personal and cultural taste in the objects described . In this paper I would like to explore, if not solve, some of the linguistic and stylistic problems involved in the literary use of color terms by second-language authors, using the first Anglo-Latin author, Aldhelm, as a test case. The questions raised above about Anglo-Saxon understanding of Latin color terms would be easier to answer if we knew more about the color terms of native Latin speakers. But arguments about Latin color terms are still going on in the tones of frustrated confusion that prevailed in the last century, and although classicists pay lip service to the idea that ancient color systems might not line up neatly with their own, the idea does not seem to have been fully assimilated. Thus, classicists are still arguing questions like “luteus: pink or yellow?” Such studies appeal particularly to botanists and are of some use in the interpretation of particular passages, but they contribute little to an understanding of color as a way of seeing or of the range of possible terms available in a culture from which an author potentially chooses. Most importantly, [18.224...