“Wintrum Frod”: Frod and the Aging Mind in Old English Poetry

Four seasons fill the measure of the year; Four seasons are there in the mind of man. Keats¹

Introduction

The Anglo-Saxons were not unique in associating wisdom with old age, for the association is common in classical, medieval, and modern literatures. The Old English reflex of this association, however, is particularly interesting insofar as it appears to be a strictly poetic convention expressed through the single word frod, “old, wise.” Analogues exist for age-based wisdom elsewhere in the corpus, but the notion, at least as embodied in a single word, was not something explored by writers of Old English prose, for frod never occurs in a prose text. Unlike other terms for “wisdom” in Old English, frod associates characteristically with age terms and is also an age term itself. What makes frod special, then, is that it covers two (at first glance) distinct semantic areas: “wisdom” and “old age.” It may mean either “wise” or “old” quite clearly in a given passage, but many occurrences collapse the two meanings, so that an individual described as frod is both “old and wise.”² Such individuals are wise because of their age and not in spite of it. But what is at issue is not simple chronology, how old an individual is reckoned in years, which is how critics unanimously understand frod, but rather the chronology, as it were, of an individual’s intellect, of the aging mind reckoned in terms of its abilities. I argue that writers of Old English poetry use the age-based wisdom of frod to express their conception of the aging mind. The ancient and medieval topos of the Ages of Man and the modern discipline of cognitive aging will serve as heuristics to help uncover the peculiar kind of wisdom that frod represents in Old English poetry: frod results from the aging mind properly seasoned.

Preliminaries: Etymology and Distribution

The “etymological fallacy” prevents us from assuming that the original or etymological meaning of a word is also its meaning in later use. The use of words changes over time, and changes in use bring changes in meaning. However, etymology can still serve as a useful point of reference, especially when discussing an older language like Old English, which was relatively close to its linguistic roots and had had less time for extreme semantic change to occur. It is also perhaps true that, being traditional or conservative in nature, poetry would be more likely to preserve older, established meanings.

The etymology of frod is quite clear, and the word has several known cognates in the Indo-European languages. The primary etymological sense, in addition to “wisdom,” which seems to have been present from very early on, comprises states and activities of the mind, most prominently “intelligence” and “understanding.”³ It was a wisdom, it seems, born of process not of state. Significantly, the oldest forms of frod do not appear to have functioned as age terms, and the subsequent association of wisdom and age by frod seems a peculiarly Germanic development. The etymological evidence, then, as a kind of preliminary evidence, suggests that the wisdom expressed by the etyma of frod was contingent upon the workings of the mind and had nothing inherently to do with chronological age.

In addition to establishing the original identity of frod as a wisdom term associated with mental activity, it is also important to establish its identity as an item of poetic vocabulary. This is easily done by examining its distribution in the Old English corpus. Simple data suffice for this purpose. The lexeme occurs a total of ninety-one times in the corpus, and eighty-five of these occurrences are in poetry, the remaining six being scattered throughout glosses.⁴ Poetry, then, was evidently more interested than prose in frod wisdom, for the corpus shows no use of this word by prose writers.⁵ The reason for this interest, as will be discussed below, is the connection of frod with the aging mind, a connection that prose writers in Old English apparently found uninteresting.

These data of...