The 10 most-cited articles in Notes and Queries, 2021

Frēawaru, the name of Hrothgar’s daughter in Beowulf, has long been recognized as an onomastic peculiarity. The name is unattested outside of the poem and it does not alliterate with any of the other Scylding names. Kemp Malone consequently posited that Frēawaru is ‘rather a title than a name’ and argued that the genuine name of this character is Hrūt, which corresponds to the name of Hrolf Kraki’s sister in later Scandinavian sources.1 Technically, though, Freawaru is Hrothulf’s cousin, and Malone, in any event, eventually recanted his position: onomastic parallels convince him that Frēawaru must be a name rather than an epithet, though he maintains that ‘the name was a creation of the Beowulf poet’.2 In his reassessment, Malone concludes that Frēawaru means ‘lord and protector’, analysing it as a dithematic name consisting of frēa (‘lord’) and waru (‘protection’).3 Malone acknowledges that frēa is...

As far as a large proportion of the history-reading public is concerned, Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 after King Henry II had euphemistically ordered his assassination with the words, ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ It is well known among scholars that the only contemporary record of the king’s words (Edward Grim’s monastic chronicle) reports them as follows: ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who allow their lord to be treated with such shameful contempt by a base-born clerk?’1 Early modern chroniclers stuck quite closely to this wording, with Raphael Holinshed recording the outburst in the hearty vernacular: ‘In what miserable state am I, that can not be in rest within mine owne realme, by reason of one onelie préest? Neither is there any of my folkes that will helpe to deliuer me out of...

In his agonized final hour Marlowe’s Faustus, anticipating eternal punishment, contemplates throwing himself upon God’s mercy—only to relinquish hope, in the conviction that God’s disposition towards him is wrathful. Indeed, his conviction seems (to say the least) plausible, given that a demon tears at his flesh as he speaks: It is the magnificent vision of Christ’s blood...

Born in Jamaica in 1702, Francis Williams (d. 1770) came from one of the only free black families of means in Jamaica. He was a free black man of learning and education. This note uncovers details about his often-misunderstood background and will focus upon the one poem that has been officially attributed to Williams, ‘Ode to George Haldane’—a Latin panegyric, (mis) translated by Edward Long. The second translation studied here is by William Gardner, a translation that, while not as flagrantly disrespectful of the original verse as Long’s, still takes various liberties with Williams’s original language. Long’s translation of Williams’s poem has stood unquestioned for over three hundred years, but this note argues that Long’s translation—and Gardner’s to a lesser extent—is misinformed, based upon systematic misinterpretation, and ultimately damaging to Williams’s legacy.1 As its title suggests, ‘Ode to George Haldane’ is addressed to Haldane who had been elected to...

In Beware the Cat (written 1553, first printed 1561), William Baldwin populates his playful fiction with real-world places and people. I am proposing new identifications of historical counterparts for two of these figures: John Young, to whom the prefatory letter is addressed, and Gregory Streamer, the primary narrator. Baldwin’s fictional persona, G. B., addresses the novel’s dedicatory letter to ‘the Right Worshipful Esquire Master John Young’.1 John Young has been variously identified as a court interluder under Henry VIII2; as the John Young (c. 1532–1605) who was Master of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, during Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey’s time there3; and as a courtier who was a member of the embassy to France in 1551.4 It is unlikely that a court interluder would be addressed as ‘right worshipful’.5 The John Young who would become Master of Pembroke Hall in 1567 was only twenty-one...

Tongue-twisters are one of the great international folk traditions. They are hard to pronounce because they disrupt the coordination of speech at the neural level.1 No history of tongue-twisters in English has ever been published, though according to the Oxford Companion of the English Language, they ‘became particularly popular in the 19c’ as elocutionary aids.2 The earliest printed usage of the word ‘tongue-twister’ I have found is from 1866, but the tradition of English tongue-twisters is much older than the word itself.3 Three vulgar Elizabethan tongue-twisters have recently been found among the records of the Exchequer at The National Archives, Kew. One of the many neglected gems in the series ‘Miscellanea of the Exchequer’ (E 163) is a notebook of two folios. It is a collection of sermon notes, legal drafts and jests; one particularly absurd passage reads: ‘A notable dronkerd fornisshed yt his neck...

We know from various sources, including Joyce’s own epiphanies he used in A Portraitof the Artist as a Young Man, which have been collected in The Workshop of Daedalus,1 just how much he treasured certain words and phrases he recorded, and furthermore, Ulysses is full of phrases and variations on them Joyce had used earlier in his fiction such as Dubliners and A Portrait. Late in the seventh episode of ‘Aeolus’ in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus and some other characters listen to the orator John F. Taylor declaim in the newspaper office, after hearing Taylor liken the then-growing Irish refusal to accept British rule to the Israelites’ refusal to accept Egyptian culture and religion under Pharaoh’s rule during Moses’s time. Stephen perceives Taylor’s speech through an allusion to the concluding speech of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, when the title character says, ‘Laud we the gods,/And let...

Following the critical and commercial failure of Men and Women, Robert Browning seems to have taken a lengthy break from the business of writing poetry, occupying himself by dabbling in drawing and clay-modelling. There is, however, evidence of a return to poetic activity during the winter of 1859–60, a winter the Brownings spent at Rome to help Elizabeth convalesce after she had been ‘dangerously ill’ the previous summer.1 In a letter of 18 May 1860, Elizabeth noted that Robert was working on a ‘long poem’ that she had not seen, and on a number of ‘shorter lyrics’, which she declared ‘worthy of him’.2 These poems were, no doubt, intended to form part of what Browning originally envisaged as a second series of Men and Women, the collection which eventually appeared under the name Dramatis Personae in 1864. It is, though, difficult to say with any certainty...

The Physician’s Tale, which retells a version of the story of Virginia, opens by announcing its source in the Roman history of Livy: Ther was, as telleth Titus Livius, A knyght that called was Virginius (VI.1-2)1 Few take this attribution for the origin it claims. Instead, like much of the rest of the Physician’s story, it comes from Chaucer’s more immediate source, Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose, which attributes matters to ‘Tytus Livius,/Qui bien se le cas raconter,’ within the first 7 lines.2 Most have found little evidence that Chaucer knew Livy’s work, Ab urbe condita, a text which does not seem to have been widely available.3 And yet, source remains a lively field of inquiry, perhaps because Chaucer’s retelling includes a number of descriptive passages (Nature’s fashioning of the heroine; admonitions to parents and guardians; and the famous dialogue between father and daughter before her death) that continue to perplex us. But the genre of the Physician’s Tale also gives us pause. A Roman example transferred to the medieval world with the borrowed…

ONE OF THE PIECES particularly admired by initial readers of Matthew Arnold’s first volumes of poetry was ‘The Sick King in Bokhara’ (1849). ‘[M]ost pleasing to the ordinary mind’, said The Times on 4 November 1853;1 ‘one of the wisest, most simple, and most genial of the poems’,2 added Fraser’s Magazine the following year. The story on which the poem—probably written in 1847 or 1848?3—is based is told in Alexander Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara (1834).4 It concerns the King of Bokhara who tries, generously, to overturn the death penalty handed down to a strict Muslim who had in some way violated the law. But the guilty man will have none of the King’s attempts at mercy and is slain at his own demand, even though the King instructs his executioners to allow him to escape if he makes the attempt. The King weeps over the dead man’s body and personally reads the funeral service for him.5