The benefits of reading a translated text with the original language beside it is hard to explain, but I suppose it can best be summed up here.

The Blickling Homilies, “Dominica Pasca (Easter Day),” includes the line: “Ond seo openung ∂aes dæges is swi∂e egesfull eallum gesceaftum.”

The translators, who always have a hard job and produced a solid edition, translated it as, “The manifestation of that Doomsday will be very terrible to all creation.”

Now, the idea of a doomsday is contextually correct to the context, since the rest of the passage mentions the end of the world, the heavens folding up like a book, and the earth being burned up in ashes. Pretty scary stuff, right?

But the term for “Doomsday” is not in the line. The word in question is *egesfull*, which means “fearful, terrible, wonderful, or full of fear.”

IF “egesfull” were only found in the context of apocalyptic religious works, then it would make sense that the term would be applied and even translated as “Doomsday.” However, it is not a scarce term. The Old English Corpus (OEC) has 52 matches for it, and it appears across a number of genres, such as homilies, glosses, and poetic epics. For example, Ohthere in Beowulf is described as “eald and egesfull” or “old and full of fear”; whereas, the Vercelli Homilies include “þæs egesfullican dæges tocyme” which means “the fearsome days to come” (or something along those lines). “Egesfull” is simply very flexible as a descriptive term.

Okay, but why is this question interesting? The term that the authors DO use to translate “egesfull” is “Doomsday.” Aside from very scary, end of the world associations, why does that matter?

Another word that would have been translated into “Doomsday” would have been the Old English word “domesday” (ahhh seeee, Old English…super makes sense). “Domesday” means… well, “judgement day” (dom [judgement] + dæg [day]). The Old English Corpus provides only 7 matches to “domesday,” all of which derive from a narrow set of genres, like charters and wills, at which point people generally their state before God after death. That is, the “domesday” appears to signify a death of some sort, or a reckoning up, while “egesfull” seems to indicate a fearful (or wonderful) period of time. This seems to be the case, when we look at the phrase “Ute gemunan þæne egesfullan domes dæg” from *Fourth Sunday after Epiphany* (OEC), in which both terms are used in one sentence. However, “egesfull” modifies “domesday,” so that we are meant to keep the end of that time as a potentially unhappy time.

So why did the translators use “Doomsday?” I don’t know. When I see that word, I think immediately of the Domesday Book in which the Normans took a census of the early British in the eleventh century. Perhaps the translators made this choice here as a reference to the proposed date for the Blickling Homilies, since they may have been composed or compiled in the tenth century. By using “Doomsday” in the text, the translators may be nodding to the “end of the early medieval British” era, since the culture effectively changed forever after 1066 with the invasion of William the Conqueror. In this way, the folding of heavens, the ash of earth, and the end of time may have been a pretty common feeling.

But I am not convinced. The Blickling Homilies don’t seem to emphasize fire brimstone that much. In fact, this might be one of the few places where “doom” or “fear” is discussed at great length, so I wonder if the use of “egesfull” as a state of being is in fact intentional rather than a reference to an end of things.

In any case, translating is just hard work somedays, and the best word does not always match the dictionary meaning. There is no exact translation, ever. So if you have stayed with me this far, I suppose we will have to wonder together.

Thank you for following me down this rabbit trail 🙂

Sources:

https://bosworthtoller.com/9110 https://bosworthtoller.com/7799 Old English Corpus