Wæstm: Installment Number One!

My first online publication!

The apple harvest, from the Tacuinum Sanitatis

Eala! I’m so excited to finally be sharing the first part of my free prose story Wæstm with you all! As I said in this post, creating this story, translating it from Modern English to Old English, editing and revising it, has been a long project. It’s taken about a year to get here, but I’m so glad to get to publish it at last!

This chapter, born as it was from a very basic vocabulary and grammar chart, is mostly about exhibiting and playing with some of my favorite words, as well as testing the waters as a new Old English student (this first chapter was written around the time I turned thirteen). The story includes some of my favorite words at the time, like neorxnawange (paradise) and gafol-fisc (tax-fish), the latter of which I found in Hana Videen’s insightful and thoroughly entertaining book The Word Hord.

A quick word about Wæstm itself: the title of my story was long deliberated upon, but in the end I felt like the one simple word, directly translating to fruit, was the most fitting way to start the story, especially as it was the fruit that I was inspired by in the first place. In this story, as you’ll see, I always translate the word wæstm as apple. Though this may not be the direct meaning or the one most accurate to the biblical source material (some historians think that the original fruit was intended to be a pomegranate or a quince), I have found that in the modern day most people have heard it referred to only as the apple, and so I’ve chosen to follow that translation here.

So, without further ado…

WÆSTM

By Beatrix Mackil

Chapter the First: The Tragic Story of The Little Apple, The Tax-Fish, And The King

In Canterbury is a little apple

Be-innan Cantwarabyrig is sum lytel wæstm 

The apple sits on the tree and does not move

Se waestm sitteð on þǣm trēowe ond ne onstyrað

But he wished to perform good deeds 

Ac hē woldeð fremman ellen

He dropped to the earth 

Hē gefēolð tō eorþan 

He did not know how to walk

Hē meahte ne gān

But he rolls in Canterbury

Ac hē gewælteð in Cantwarabyrig

He sees a tax-fish building with stones 

Hē seoð sumne gafol-fisc timbriende mid stānum 

He helps the fish

Hē hilpð þone fisc 

The king rides over the hill

Se cyning rīdeð ofer þām hlince

Hē sits on the apple

Hē sitteð on þone wæstm

And sends him to paradise

Ond sendeð hine tō neorxnawange