Tolkien's Problem with Beowulf Translations [11:41]

--> YouTube-Generated Transcript <--
· What was Tolkien's issue?
0:00 · In 2014, Christopher Tolken published
0:02 · his father's translation of Beayolf,
0:05 · accompanied by commentary on the poem
0:07 · that Professor Tolken presumably gave to
0:09 · his students while teaching. The
0:11 · translation being written in 1926, when
0:14 · Tolken was only 34 and still had the
0:17 · majority of his Beaywolf scholarship
0:18 · ahead of him, is pretty shaky. The
0:21 · commentary, however, was written much
0:23 · later during his two decades as
0:25 · Rollinsson and Bosworth Professor of
0:26 · Anglo-Saxon at Oxford at the height of
0:29 · his academic prowess.
0:31 · It's interesting to find then that one
0:33 · of his first comments is completely at
0:35 · odds with essentially every Beaywolf
0:37 · translation ever written. He is
0:40 · primarily concerned with the old English
0:42 · kenning
0:44 · in line 10A which usually gets
0:46 · translated to his sugarin as whale road.
0:49 · Why did Tolken disagree with this so
0:51 · much? Why has nobody followed his
0:54 · advice? And who at the end of the day is
0:56 · right? Stay tuned.
1:03 · This is the opening to Beayolf in Tom
1:05 · Shippy's recent translation, which is in
1:07 · my opinion the best. I'll have the link
1:09 · to that in the description if you're
1:11 · interested. Here is our word randrod
1:14 · right there in the 10th line of one of
1:16 · the most famous poems ever composed.
1:18 · Shippy's translation philosophy is
1:20 · usually to give general translations for
1:22 · these poetic compounds, which is
1:24 · probably most accurate for how the
1:26 · native listener and the poet would have
1:28 · understood them. For the literal
1:30 · meaning, we can consult two dictionaries
1:32 · from Tolken's time. The Bosworth Taller
1:34 · dictionary of Oxford and the Clark Hall
1:36 · dictionary of Cambridge. Both
1:38 · dictionaries give whale road from the
1:40 · two constituents Ron and Rod.
· Tolkien's comment on 'ofer hronrade'
1:44 · Now, in his commentary, Tolken has an
1:46 · extended note on this word, which begins
1:48 · simply by explaining the old English
1:50 · usage of the poetic compound, but
1:53 · devolves into something of a rant on
1:55 · common translations. Here's what he has
1:57 · to say. It is quite incorrect to
2:01 · translate it, as it is all too
2:03 · frequently translated whale. It is
2:06 · incorrect stylistically since compounds
2:08 · of this sort sound in themselves clumsy
2:11 · or bizarre in modern English even when
2:14 · their components are correctly selected.
2:16 · In this particular instance, the
2:18 · unfortunate sound association with
2:20 · railroad increases the ineptitude. It is
2:23 · incorrect. In fact, rod is the ancestor
2:27 · of our modern word road, but it does not
2:29 · mean road. Etmology is not a safe guide
2:33 · to sense. Rod is the noun of action to
2:36 · rean ride and means riding i.e. riding
2:40 · on horseback moving as a horse does or a
2:43 · chariot or as a ship does at anchor and
2:46 · hence a journey on horseback or more
2:49 · seldom by ship. A course however
2:51 · vagrant. It does not mean the actual
2:54 · track still less the hard paved
2:57 · permanent and more or less straight
2:59 · tracks that we associate with the road.
3:02 · Also, hon is a word peculiar to old
3:04 · English. It means some kind of a whale,
3:07 · that is of the family of fish-like
3:09 · mammals. What precisely is not known,
3:12 · but it was something of the porpus or
3:13 · dolphin kind, probably at any rate, less
3:16 · than a real hu. There is a statement in
3:19 · old English that a was about seven times
3:22 · the size of a seal and a hu about seven
3:25 · times the size of a hon. The word as
3:28 · kenning therefore means dolphins riding
3:31 · i.e. in full the watery fields where you
3:34 · can see dolphins and lesser members of
3:36 · the whale tribe playing or seeming to
3:38 · gallop like a line of riders on the
3:40 · plains. That is the picture in
3:42 · comparison the Kenning was meant to
3:44 · evoke. It is not evoked by whale road
3:48 · which suggests a sort of semiubmarine
3:51 · steam engine running along submerged
3:53 · metal rails over the Atlantic.
· Line 10a in Beowulf translations
3:57 · So that's what Tolken thought. Who
4:00 · agrees with him? Well, the first ever
4:03 · translation of Beaywolf written in Latin
4:05 · in 1815 by Cremier Tolkin gives ctorum
4:09 · wh that is the roads of the whales. So
4:14 · not toolin. We can see from Tolken's
4:17 · frustrations and the two dictionaries
4:19 · that this was a normal translation in
4:21 · his time. So what about afterwards?
4:24 · 4 years after Tolken dies, Howell
4:27 · Chering publishes a translation and
4:29 · gives Whalero, so not Chering. In 2000,
4:34 · Sheamus Haney's famous translation gets
4:36 · published and again gives Whale Road, so
4:39 · not Haney. I actually realized as I was
4:41 · making this video that right next to me
4:43 · on my desk are two really important
4:45 · editions of Beaywolf that I can just
4:47 · show you. This is Clay's Baywolf fourth
4:50 · edition, otherwise known as the Clayber
4:51 · 4. um probably the most important thing
4:54 · ever written on Beaowolf. It is the
4:57 · current definitive scholarly edition.
4:59 · Even 15 years after its publication, it
5:01 · still holds up. Um and if we go to the
5:04 · glossery in the back on page 400 and
5:08 · find the word ronrod, we get whailroad.
5:12 · Now much of the work on the clay four
5:15 · was done by the scholar RD Fulk who this
5:18 · is no exaggeration might be one of the
5:20 · greatest scholars of all time really uh
5:23 · a titan of academia and he has his own
5:26 · translation written about 2 years later
5:29 · and if we go to the first page of that
5:31 · translation page 87 of this book we get
5:35 · whailroad
5:36 · now this is all before 2014 when
5:39 · Tolken's commentary is published surely
5:42 · Later translations reflect the new
5:44 · reading. Nope. In 2020, Maria Hedley
5:47 · actually quotes Tolken's commentary
5:49 · multiple times and gives whale road. And
5:53 · the regularly updated online Toronto
5:55 · dictionary of old English gives, you
5:57 · guessed it, whale road. So, who agrees
6:00 · with Tolken? Basically, no one. But is
6:03 · he wrong? Let's look at the evidence. At
· Who's right and who's wrong?
6:07 · least concerning the word rod, Tolken is
6:10 · factually correct. The word just doesn't
6:13 · mean road. And most dictionaries will
6:15 · actually agree with him on this until it
6:17 · gets put into a compound. And that's
6:20 · probably just because it's easier to say
6:22 · the swan road than the riding place of
6:24 · the swan, regardless of the fact that
6:27 · the latter is more accurate. Even Tom
6:29 · Shippy, arguably one of the greatest
6:31 · philologists and Tolken scholars of all
6:33 · time, uses the word road in his
6:36 · translation just for the sake of
6:37 · brevity. The trickier constituent is
6:40 · Hon. No one agrees with Tolken on Hon.
6:44 · The dictionaries all say whale. The
6:46 · translations all say whale. The
6:48 · additions all say whale. At first
6:50 · glance, Tolken seems to be a little
6:52 · crazy with this complaint. And you know
6:54 · what? I actually think he's right about
6:57 · this, too. One thing I want to point out
6:59 · before I get into the meaning of pur. If
7:01 · you'll actually check out the
7:02 · translation Tolken wrote himself, you'll
7:05 · find the word whale used in this
7:06 · position. That's because this
7:08 · translation was written in 1926. He was
7:10 · still only 34 years old. The commentary
7:12 · was written several decades later. So,
7:14 · it's not that he's like betraying
7:16 · himself. It's more so that he didn't
7:18 · realize yet what the word meant. Now, a
· Reading the gloss to Psalm 73
7:21 · huge problem pops out at us when we try
7:23 · to translate as whale in modern English.
7:27 · And that is the same thing that Tolken
7:29 · said. We have a sentence in old English
7:31 · that refers to Halas as being seven
7:33 · times Ronos. What does seven times mean?
7:37 · We'll get into that in a second. It took
7:38 · me a very long time to find what Tolken
7:41 · was talking about though. Eventually I
7:43 · did. Let's do some manuscript reading
7:45 · together. This is Vatican Palatinus
7:47 · Latinos 68. It is a commentary on Psalm
7:52 · 73 in the Vulgate counting. And here it
7:55 · says about the Leviathan at
7:59 · septum minoribus satures
8:04 · that is and they say that seven with
8:07 · seven of the smaller ones the greater
8:11 · ones are satiated or sort of filled. And
8:14 · then it explains that in old English
8:17 · here
8:19 · fiscu
8:22 · this is early North Umbrean. So uh some
8:25 · we get some strange forms like civu
8:27 · instead of seven
8:29 · but um here it says seven fish
8:34 · it sort of fill a seal is what I'll
8:38 · translate this as. Now fill here could
8:41 · mean fill as in food as in a seal eats
8:44 · seven fish. That's pretty plausible. It
8:47 · also could theoretically mean that the
8:49 · physical shape of a seal is filled with
8:52 · seven fish. That is a seal is seven
8:54 · times bigger than a fish. That's also
8:57 · plausible. I tend to lean towards the
8:59 · former interpretation, but really either
9:01 · of them for our purposes works.
9:05 · Here it continues
9:10 · filu that is seven seals fill a. Now,
9:15 · this tells us that a hon is at least
9:18 · larger than a seal, either in the sense
9:19 · that it could eat seven seals or that it
9:22 · could be filled physically by seven
9:24 · seals. So, sounds like something around
9:26 · the size of a large dolphin.
9:30 · Ceuas
9:32 · fu sevens
9:35 · fill a whale. Again, placing it
9:37 · somewhere around the size of a large
9:39 · dolphin. Either way, how could you say
9:42 · that aon is a whale if here we have a
9:45 · sentence saying, let's translate it as
9:48 · whale, that seven whales fill a whale.
9:50 · It just doesn't make sense. Translating
9:52 · hon is really difficult, at least in
9:55 · this context. If you look at every
· The case for "hron" as a large delphinid
9:58 · instance of the word hon, it clearly
10:00 · refers to an aquatic animal of some
10:02 · kind, but never a large one. Trust me, I
10:05 · actually did look at every single
10:07 · occurrence of this word hon. And if you
10:10 · want to as well, you can read this paper
10:12 · I wrote on it last year. Be warned, it's
10:14 · pretty boring. The main takeaway is,
10:17 · however, exactly as Tolken said, when
10:19 · speakers of old English wanted to talk
10:21 · about what we would call a whale in
10:23 · modern English, they used the word. When
10:26 · they wanted to talk about something more
10:27 · the size of a large dolphin, they used
10:30 · the word. And here we run into a problem
10:33 · with modern English. We call this animal
10:35 · a false killer whale, but the average
10:38 · person watching from the beach would
10:39 · probably see this animal and call it a
10:41 · large dolphin. They wouldn't be totally
10:44 · wrong either because the false killer
10:46 · whale is actually classified as a
10:48 · dolphin. But they probably wouldn't know
10:50 · that the vernacular name is whale unless
10:52 · they were educated in marine biology.
10:54 · Because when you say the word whale, the
10:56 · median English speaker thinks of
10:58 · something that looks like this, not
11:00 · this. But we can demonstrate pretty well
11:03 · that the old English word meant
11:06 · something like this, a big dolphin. Now,
11:09 · how should we translate it? If you had
11:11 · to pick one word to describe this
11:13 · animal, do you think whale or dolphin is
11:16 · more accurate? You can let me know in
11:18 · the comments if you disagree, but I
11:21 · personally side with Tolken on this one.
11:23 · I think the wordrod meant the riding of
11:26 · the dolphins and the playground of
11:28 · mysterious legendary creatures. Thanks a
11:31 · lot for watching. If you like this
11:33 · content, check out the rest of the
11:35 · channel. Kindly consider subscribing or
11:36 · becoming a supporter on Patreon. And
11:38 · until next time, you Sunday.

[singing] Whale meat again, don't know how, don't know when...

Interesting. Thanks for posting.

I remember reading Beowolf in college. I waited until the night before the test to read it, because I figured how long could a poem be? It took me until 4 in the morning, but I passed the test...

Good thing you didn’t try that with “The Iliad”.

Tolkien could speak two dozen different languages. He had also invented several additional languages he used in his books. I don’t think his translations should be dismissed too easily.

Next study will be translating poet Jim Morison into 700 AD Old English…

Let’s see what happens.

College... y’know, I’d picked up a paperback of Beowulf in my early teens (being very interested in Tolkien, sword and sorcery books, Eddison, etc) and have never read it. I think I spent a weekend with Grendel’s mother though...

My pleasure.

>>Good thing you didn’t try that with “The Iliad”.<<

Yeah, I grew up with Iliad, so I was familiar with it, I'd never heard of Beowolf before though. LOL

I think I spent a weekend with Grendel’s mother though...

😂😂😂😂😂😂

I definitely got a crash course on Beowolf. It wasn’t Tolkien’s translation. I’d like to read his version though.

and of course...

https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/1001719/posts
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3683406/posts

and...

https://freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/1434606/posts

I’m not sure I’d join a picket line in favor of this, but I agree with you and JRRT.

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son

https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Homecoming-of-Beorhtnoth-Beorhthelms-Son.pdf

Better a crash course in Beowulf than a crash course in Evel Knievel...

https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/beowulf-a-translation-and-commentary-together-with-sellic-spell-j-r-r-tolkien?variant=40041675784270

Ok so its about a monster which is half bee and half wolf right?

Whatever else one (this one anyway) can say about The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, the three or more authors *really* knew how to compose opening lines. Whew!

Reason my HS senior English teacher said that poetry cannot be translated into another language, but can be made into a different poem in another language with different meanings.

*Translate a song into another language, and you get something different with the same music.

--> YouTube-Generated Transcript <--
	·	What was Tolkien's issue?
0:00	·	In 2014, Christopher Tolken published
0:02	·	his father's translation of Beayolf,
0:05	·	accompanied by commentary on the poem
0:07	·	that Professor Tolken presumably gave to
0:09	·	his students while teaching. The
0:11	·	translation being written in 1926, when
0:14	·	Tolken was only 34 and still had the
0:17	·	majority of his Beaywolf scholarship
0:18	·	ahead of him, is pretty shaky. The
0:21	·	commentary, however, was written much
0:23	·	later during his two decades as
0:25	·	Rollinsson and Bosworth Professor of
0:26	·	Anglo-Saxon at Oxford at the height of
0:29	·	his academic prowess.
0:31	·	It's interesting to find then that one
0:33	·	of his first comments is completely at
0:35	·	odds with essentially every Beaywolf
0:37	·	translation ever written. He is
0:40	·	primarily concerned with the old English
0:42	·	kenning
0:44	·	in line 10A which usually gets
0:46	·	translated to his sugarin as whale road.
0:49	·	Why did Tolken disagree with this so
0:51	·	much? Why has nobody followed his
0:54	·	advice? And who at the end of the day is
0:56	·	right? Stay tuned.
1:03	·	This is the opening to Beayolf in Tom
1:05	·	Shippy's recent translation, which is in
1:07	·	my opinion the best. I'll have the link
1:09	·	to that in the description if you're
1:11	·	interested. Here is our word randrod
1:14	·	right there in the 10th line of one of
1:16	·	the most famous poems ever composed.
1:18	·	Shippy's translation philosophy is
1:20	·	usually to give general translations for
1:22	·	these poetic compounds, which is
1:24	·	probably most accurate for how the
1:26	·	native listener and the poet would have
1:28	·	understood them. For the literal
1:30	·	meaning, we can consult two dictionaries
1:32	·	from Tolken's time. The Bosworth Taller
1:34	·	dictionary of Oxford and the Clark Hall
1:36	·	dictionary of Cambridge. Both
1:38	·	dictionaries give whale road from the
1:40	·	two constituents Ron and Rod.
	·	Tolkien's comment on 'ofer hronrade'
1:44	·	Now, in his commentary, Tolken has an
1:46	·	extended note on this word, which begins
1:48	·	simply by explaining the old English
1:50	·	usage of the poetic compound, but
1:53	·	devolves into something of a rant on
1:55	·	common translations. Here's what he has
1:57	·	to say. It is quite incorrect to
2:01	·	translate it, as it is all too
2:03	·	frequently translated whale. It is
2:06	·	incorrect stylistically since compounds
2:08	·	of this sort sound in themselves clumsy
2:11	·	or bizarre in modern English even when
2:14	·	their components are correctly selected.
2:16	·	In this particular instance, the
2:18	·	unfortunate sound association with
2:20	·	railroad increases the ineptitude. It is
2:23	·	incorrect. In fact, rod is the ancestor
2:27	·	of our modern word road, but it does not
2:29	·	mean road. Etmology is not a safe guide
2:33	·	to sense. Rod is the noun of action to
2:36	·	rean ride and means riding i.e. riding
2:40	·	on horseback moving as a horse does or a
2:43	·	chariot or as a ship does at anchor and
2:46	·	hence a journey on horseback or more
2:49	·	seldom by ship. A course however
2:51	·	vagrant. It does not mean the actual
2:54	·	track still less the hard paved
2:57	·	permanent and more or less straight
2:59	·	tracks that we associate with the road.
3:02	·	Also, hon is a word peculiar to old
3:04	·	English. It means some kind of a whale,
3:07	·	that is of the family of fish-like
3:09	·	mammals. What precisely is not known,
3:12	·	but it was something of the porpus or
3:13	·	dolphin kind, probably at any rate, less
3:16	·	than a real hu. There is a statement in
3:19	·	old English that a was about seven times
3:22	·	the size of a seal and a hu about seven
3:25	·	times the size of a hon. The word as
3:28	·	kenning therefore means dolphins riding
3:31	·	i.e. in full the watery fields where you
3:34	·	can see dolphins and lesser members of
3:36	·	the whale tribe playing or seeming to
3:38	·	gallop like a line of riders on the
3:40	·	plains. That is the picture in
3:42	·	comparison the Kenning was meant to
3:44	·	evoke. It is not evoked by whale road
3:48	·	which suggests a sort of semiubmarine
3:51	·	steam engine running along submerged
3:53	·	metal rails over the Atlantic.
	·	Line 10a in Beowulf translations
3:57	·	So that's what Tolken thought. Who
4:00	·	agrees with him? Well, the first ever
4:03	·	translation of Beaywolf written in Latin
4:05	·	in 1815 by Cremier Tolkin gives ctorum
4:09	·	wh that is the roads of the whales. So
4:14	·	not toolin. We can see from Tolken's
4:17	·	frustrations and the two dictionaries
4:19	·	that this was a normal translation in
4:21	·	his time. So what about afterwards?
4:24	·	4 years after Tolken dies, Howell
4:27	·	Chering publishes a translation and
4:29	·	gives Whalero, so not Chering. In 2000,
4:34	·	Sheamus Haney's famous translation gets
4:36	·	published and again gives Whale Road, so
4:39	·	not Haney. I actually realized as I was
4:41	·	making this video that right next to me
4:43	·	on my desk are two really important
4:45	·	editions of Beaywolf that I can just
4:47	·	show you. This is Clay's Baywolf fourth
4:50	·	edition, otherwise known as the Clayber
4:51	·	4. um probably the most important thing
4:54	·	ever written on Beaowolf. It is the
4:57	·	current definitive scholarly edition.
4:59	·	Even 15 years after its publication, it
5:01	·	still holds up. Um and if we go to the
5:04	·	glossery in the back on page 400 and
5:08	·	find the word ronrod, we get whailroad.
5:12	·	Now much of the work on the clay four
5:15	·	was done by the scholar RD Fulk who this
5:18	·	is no exaggeration might be one of the
5:20	·	greatest scholars of all time really uh
5:23	·	a titan of academia and he has his own
5:26	·	translation written about 2 years later
5:29	·	and if we go to the first page of that
5:31	·	translation page 87 of this book we get
5:35	·	whailroad
5:36	·	now this is all before 2014 when
5:39	·	Tolken's commentary is published surely
5:42	·	Later translations reflect the new
5:44	·	reading. Nope. In 2020, Maria Hedley
5:47	·	actually quotes Tolken's commentary
5:49	·	multiple times and gives whale road. And
5:53	·	the regularly updated online Toronto
5:55	·	dictionary of old English gives, you
5:57	·	guessed it, whale road. So, who agrees
6:00	·	with Tolken? Basically, no one. But is
6:03	·	he wrong? Let's look at the evidence. At
	·	Who's right and who's wrong?
6:07	·	least concerning the word rod, Tolken is
6:10	·	factually correct. The word just doesn't
6:13	·	mean road. And most dictionaries will
6:15	·	actually agree with him on this until it
6:17	·	gets put into a compound. And that's
6:20	·	probably just because it's easier to say
6:22	·	the swan road than the riding place of
6:24	·	the swan, regardless of the fact that
6:27	·	the latter is more accurate. Even Tom
6:29	·	Shippy, arguably one of the greatest
6:31	·	philologists and Tolken scholars of all
6:33	·	time, uses the word road in his
6:36	·	translation just for the sake of
6:37	·	brevity. The trickier constituent is
6:40	·	Hon. No one agrees with Tolken on Hon.
6:44	·	The dictionaries all say whale. The
6:46	·	translations all say whale. The
6:48	·	additions all say whale. At first
6:50	·	glance, Tolken seems to be a little
6:52	·	crazy with this complaint. And you know
6:54	·	what? I actually think he's right about
6:57	·	this, too. One thing I want to point out
6:59	·	before I get into the meaning of pur. If
7:01	·	you'll actually check out the
7:02	·	translation Tolken wrote himself, you'll
7:05	·	find the word whale used in this
7:06	·	position. That's because this
7:08	·	translation was written in 1926. He was
7:10	·	still only 34 years old. The commentary
7:12	·	was written several decades later. So,
7:14	·	it's not that he's like betraying
7:16	·	himself. It's more so that he didn't
7:18	·	realize yet what the word meant. Now, a
	·	Reading the gloss to Psalm 73
7:21	·	huge problem pops out at us when we try
7:23	·	to translate as whale in modern English.
7:27	·	And that is the same thing that Tolken
7:29	·	said. We have a sentence in old English
7:31	·	that refers to Halas as being seven
7:33	·	times Ronos. What does seven times mean?
7:37	·	We'll get into that in a second. It took
7:38	·	me a very long time to find what Tolken
7:41	·	was talking about though. Eventually I
7:43	·	did. Let's do some manuscript reading
7:45	·	together. This is Vatican Palatinus
7:47	·	Latinos 68. It is a commentary on Psalm
7:52	·	73 in the Vulgate counting. And here it
7:55	·	says about the Leviathan at
7:59	·	septum minoribus satures
8:04	·	that is and they say that seven with
8:07	·	seven of the smaller ones the greater
8:11	·	ones are satiated or sort of filled. And
8:14	·	then it explains that in old English
8:17	·	here
8:19	·	fiscu
8:22	·	this is early North Umbrean. So uh some
8:25	·	we get some strange forms like civu
8:27	·	instead of seven
8:29	·	but um here it says seven fish
8:34	·	it sort of fill a seal is what I'll
8:38	·	translate this as. Now fill here could
8:41	·	mean fill as in food as in a seal eats
8:44	·	seven fish. That's pretty plausible. It
8:47	·	also could theoretically mean that the
8:49	·	physical shape of a seal is filled with
8:52	·	seven fish. That is a seal is seven
8:54	·	times bigger than a fish. That's also
8:57	·	plausible. I tend to lean towards the
8:59	·	former interpretation, but really either
9:01	·	of them for our purposes works.
9:05	·	Here it continues
9:10	·	filu that is seven seals fill a. Now,
9:15	·	this tells us that a hon is at least
9:18	·	larger than a seal, either in the sense
9:19	·	that it could eat seven seals or that it
9:22	·	could be filled physically by seven
9:24	·	seals. So, sounds like something around
9:26	·	the size of a large dolphin.
9:30	·	Ceuas
9:32	·	fu sevens
9:35	·	fill a whale. Again, placing it
9:37	·	somewhere around the size of a large
9:39	·	dolphin. Either way, how could you say
9:42	·	that aon is a whale if here we have a
9:45	·	sentence saying, let's translate it as
9:48	·	whale, that seven whales fill a whale.
9:50	·	It just doesn't make sense. Translating
9:52	·	hon is really difficult, at least in
9:55	·	this context. If you look at every
	·	The case for "hron" as a large delphinid
9:58	·	instance of the word hon, it clearly
10:00	·	refers to an aquatic animal of some
10:02	·	kind, but never a large one. Trust me, I
10:05	·	actually did look at every single
10:07	·	occurrence of this word hon. And if you
10:10	·	want to as well, you can read this paper
10:12	·	I wrote on it last year. Be warned, it's
10:14	·	pretty boring. The main takeaway is,
10:17	·	however, exactly as Tolken said, when
10:19	·	speakers of old English wanted to talk
10:21	·	about what we would call a whale in
10:23	·	modern English, they used the word. When
10:26	·	they wanted to talk about something more
10:27	·	the size of a large dolphin, they used
10:30	·	the word. And here we run into a problem
10:33	·	with modern English. We call this animal
10:35	·	a false killer whale, but the average
10:38	·	person watching from the beach would
10:39	·	probably see this animal and call it a
10:41	·	large dolphin. They wouldn't be totally
10:44	·	wrong either because the false killer
10:46	·	whale is actually classified as a
10:48	·	dolphin. But they probably wouldn't know
10:50	·	that the vernacular name is whale unless
10:52	·	they were educated in marine biology.
10:54	·	Because when you say the word whale, the
10:56	·	median English speaker thinks of
10:58	·	something that looks like this, not
11:00	·	this. But we can demonstrate pretty well
11:03	·	that the old English word meant
11:06	·	something like this, a big dolphin. Now,
11:09	·	how should we translate it? If you had
11:11	·	to pick one word to describe this
11:13	·	animal, do you think whale or dolphin is
11:16	·	more accurate? You can let me know in
11:18	·	the comments if you disagree, but I
11:21	·	personally side with Tolken on this one.
11:23	·	I think the wordrod meant the riding of
11:26	·	the dolphins and the playground of
11:28	·	mysterious legendary creatures. Thanks a
11:31	·	lot for watching. If you like this
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11:38	·	until next time, you Sunday.