Monath módaes lust

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Monath módaes lust mith meriflóda forth ti foeran, thaet ic feorr hionan obaer gaarseggaes grimmae holmas aelbuuina eard uut gisoecae. Nis me ti hearpun hygi ni ti hringthegi ni ti wíbae wyn ni ti weoruldi hyct ni ymb oowict ellaes nebnae ymb ýtha giwalc.

My soul's desire over the sea-torrents forth bids me fare, that I afar should seek over the ancient water's awful mountains Elf-friends' island in the Outer-world. For no harp have I heart, no hand for gold in no wife delight, in the world no hope: one wish only, for the waves' tumult.

J. R. R. Tolkien played with rewriting the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer throughout his unfinished novels The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers. This variant version is from The Notion Club Papers: it is supposed in the narrative to be an older and better tradition of the text.

It is accordingly given in a more archaic form of Old English; for instance one can notice the presence of final unstressed æ and i that both merged in e later, or the vowel spelt oe that later became e. There is also a difference of dialect: in The Road to Middle-earth, p. 264, T. A. Shippey says that the archaic version is in Old Mercian, not in Old West-Saxon like the other ones. The spelling is also imitated from the earliest record of Old English and not form the more familiar forms of the 9th and 10th centuries; instances of such archaisms are the use of th instead of þ and ð, of ct instead of ht, of b instead of f to denote the sound [v].

The text with its modern adaptation is found in Sauron Defeated, p. 243-244.

In the record a more archaic pronunciation of Old English has been attempted, based on Alistair Campbell's indications about the evolution of English sounds in his Old English Grammar. Notably:

·         b used for [v] is pronounced as a bilabial spirant

·         palatal c and gg are pronounced as stops, not yet affricates

·         initial velar g is given a spirant value.

References

Campbell, A[listair]. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. 423 p.

Shippey, T[homas] A[lan]. The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien created a new mythology. London: Grafton, 1992. 337 p. ISBN 0-261-10275-3