It's just being accurate. There were two different written forms of the letter 's' back then.

You seem to be making the same error as many make about natural evolution: Assuming it does anything "to" anything, that it has a purpose. That's not how it works; it just happens.

Maybe called the "teleological fallacy" or something.

@huflungdung:

Good for thee, ackcherly.

I think you can make it make sense if you think of it as "writing in a speech popular at the time". Nowadays we (sometimes, often?) write the slang we speak; in the 1800s, people wrote (and perhaps spoke?) in more flowery sentences. Romance novels might seem written in stilted language to us now, but in their day they were kind of like writing in slang is now.

Is that true though? I don't think the median population member spoke in this way in the 1800s. Obviously in 2026 we have a massive written record of the popular speech patterns of the entire spectrum of society, but that's down to the internet more than anything.

Maybe the median literate population member talked like this. :-)

> strong and perhaps stiff or some similar word

Steady or stout (which used to mean more "steady" than "thickset" as now), perhaps.

> Heo sloȝ þe heþene men ... sloȝ hem and fælde hem to þe grunde

> She slayed the heathen man ... slayed him and felled him to the ground.

Them, not him, I thought? The Master had several henchmen.

> ...from alle mine ifoan!”

> ...from all my (?)"

Foes, fiends? (Ger. "Feind" and Swe. "fiende" both mean "enemy", so I've always thought that's the original meaning of Eng. "fiend" too.)

> Aelfgifu, which I incidentally know is an old English female name meaning Elf Gift

Spouse -- almost wrote "wife" there, but that could have been confusing in this context -- of some old king of Wessex or something, innit?

>Them, not him, I thought? The Master had several henchmen.

I'll admit part of the difficulty there was that I'd skipped the ends of earlier chapters because they were too easy, so I was missing some context like this

>Foes, fiends? (Ger. "Feind" and Swe. "fiende" both mean "enemy", so I've always thought that's the original meaning of Eng. "fiend" too.)

Foes sounds right yeah. I think there was another word at some point where a prefixed "I" seemed to indicate that the thing was "to me", and -an feels right to be an old plural form. I can't think of any straight away but instinctively I feel like there are words in modern English that pluralise similarly, perhaps in the names of some old organisations?

>Spouse -- almost wrote "wife" there, but that could have been confusing in this context -- of some old king of Wessex or something, innit?

That's the one. I don't remember exactly who they were but my memory is that she managed to be the spouse of two Anglo-Saxon kings, sometime not too long before William arrived

Yeah, I think[*] that's common for most languages: With much more material in writing, vocabulary and spelling stabilize.

___

[*]: I guess, from what I've understood -- absolutely no expert, just interested.

> it looks more Germanic to me, which I don't have the knowledge to read.

Of course you do, not only to read but write: English still is a Germanic language.

Replace "that thing that looks like a 3" with, eh, "gh" I think.

(Sorry, can't recall for sure, returning to this thread a couple days after reading TFA.)

Paradoxically, that might help us speakers of Continental Germanic languages, since it could bring both pronounciation och word-roots closer to traits that have survived in Dutch, German, or the Nordic languages.

> al þar sor and al þat sorȝe.

> all there sour and all that sorryness.

"all those sores and all that sorrow"?