II.—Boda, Bod, Forebodings.

In Saxon, bod is a command, boda is a messenger. These words no longer exist in the English language as nouns, and as they are not to be found in the Vision of Piers Plowman or in the writings of Chaucer, it may be concluded that they had dropped out of the language before the end of the fourteenth century. But we retain traces of them in other shapes. Lord page 19 Lytton, in his historical novel of "Harold" has attempted to regenerate the word bode in its original sense. He constantly speaks of Harold's messenger as the bode. It is quite admissible to employ the word as he has done, when describing Saxon times and events, and a Saxon state of society; but when he came to write another historical novel—"The Last of the Barons"—in the time of Henry VI. and Edward IV., he very properly abstained from using a word which had been long obsolete, and which no one who figured in the Battle of Barnet would have used or understood. Words half forgotten may occasionally be brought back into our language by a popular writer; but to succeed in reanimating half-dead words, they must be such as supply a want, and must seem better calculated to express the meaning which they bear than the word in previous use, which they are designed to supplant.

We have the word embedded as it were in the word foreboding. These words are now used only where disaster or misfortune is anticipated. "Forebodings of evil," "it bodes no good," "I had melancholy forebodings."

As bod is a command, and also a message, so the verb bodian is to deliver a message, as well as to command. When Christianity was introduced among the Saxons, by far the most important messages of that day was the message of the Gospel. It would have been contrary to the genius of the Saxon language, as I have shown in the Introduction, to adopt a word from the Greek or Latin, though it was sometimes done in the case of ecclesiastical words; accordingly bodian came to mean to preach. It is so used in the Saxon Gospels.

In Mr. Laing's "Travels in Norway," he describes how the people of the country were called together in case of any sudden alarm. A stick, or baton, was placed in the hands of a runner, who ran at speed for a few miles and then handed the stick to another, who at once took up the running. This stick was called the bud-stik, which is no doubt another form of the same word, for the languages spoken in the Scandinavian Peninsula are allied to the Teutonic dialects. The vowels u and o are not radical. The bud-stick is therefore the message-stick, or the command-stick, for it conveyed a message from authority, which includes a command.

A few words in explanation of this vowel change may not be deemed out of place here, as we shall find many instances of it as we proceeed. Not only do the vowels freely change from one Teutonic language to another, but there are certain normal vowel changes in the same language, especially from a hard to a soft vowel, or diphthong, in forming plurals and diminutives. This is what the Germans call umlaut. Generally speaking, in modern English we form the plural of nouns by the addition of the letter s—horse, horses; cow, cows; brother, brothers; tree, trees; and so on. In Saxon, there are various plural endings, but besides this, the principal vowel is sometimes changed. This is also common in modern German. We retain a few instances in modern English. Thus, the plural of man is not mans, but men, and the plural of woman in sound changes both vowels, for women is pronounced wimmen, and Chaucer writes wymmen. In the translation of the Bible we have some examples of letter-change no longer in common use, except among those who affect a Scriptural language. We have kyne as the plural of cow, brethren instead of brothers—this last, perhaps, in rather a collective sense, i.e., brotherhood. Other instances may be given—foot, feet; mouse, mice; tooth, teeth; goose, geese. In the irregular conjugations of verbs, now generally called the strong conjugations, we have the perfect tense and the past-participle produced, not by adding -ed, as in the regular, or weak verbs, but by changing the vowel. Thus we have sink, sank, sunk; drink, drank, drunk; swim, swam, swum; sing, sang, sung. Formerly, holpen and molten were common, but we now use helped and melted, though molten is not quite out of use. We still see in books the Saxon delxe—dig, but I do not remember to have met with its proper past-participle, dolfen. Other in-stances of strong preterites will occur to the reader, and I need not push the subject further.