A panþer and wulf stand in for their tamer cousins, the catte and the hund
Previously on Ideas I’ve written about Old English, the vernacular language of what is now England from around 550 to 1150. The language was used centuries before the heyday of England’s bestiaries – the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – yet there is no shortage of Old English animal lore. In The Deorhord I have put together my own Old English ‘bestiary’ of sorts. The book’s title is a made-up compound of Old English deor (animal) and hord (hoard), a play upon the actual compound wordhord (a poet’s stockpile of words and phrases).
The words for ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ are virtually the same in Old English – hund (from which we get ‘hound’) and cat or catte (pronounced COT-tuh). There’s also the word docga (pronounced DODGE-ah), more similar to our ‘dog’, but it appears only once in the entire corpus, compared to hund’s 300 occurrences. Cat also appears far less frequently in Old English than hund – only eight times, most of which are in glosses (translations of Latin words for language learners).
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