Mountain Grill

[Jon Jarrett]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005, Eric Siegerman wrote:

> What makes me ask is that the Anglo-Saxon King Aelfred the Great
> had a ring, whose inscription said something like "Aelfred mec
> haet gewyrcan", "Aelfred had me made".  Well, "wyrc" must be
> "work", but the rest -- word order, affixes, the "ae"s, the "c"
> in "mec" -- is all far more Deutch than English.  That ring gave
> me quite a shock when I saw it (on my one trip to England when I
> *didn't* get to see HW, and so settled for the British Museum
> instead :-)

        It's called the Alfred Jewel, and no-one's quite sure what it
is. You can see it here:
        http://www.mirror.org/ken.roberts/alfred.jewel.html

        You can see from that it has a socket at the lower end; it may as
that page says have been the head of a stick used as a bookmark, possibly
the head of a (quite narrow!) staff, and so on.

        Carl's covered the phonology far better than I would have so that
only leaves me the archaeology. Imagine if we used our powers for good! Or
something... Yours,
                    Jon


--
                Jonathan Jarrett, Birkbeck College, London
    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk/ejarr01 at students.bbk.ac.uk
  "As much as the vision of the blind man improves with the rising sun,
       So too does the intelligence of the fool after good advice."
       (Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, late-eight/early-ninth century)