“The Garden of Death” (“Kuoleman Puutarha”), by Hugo Simberg, 1906
30 January 2023
We expect that basic vocabulary words trace back to Old English, and that is the case with the verb to die, except there is a twist with this one. The verb to die comes from the Proto-Germanic *dawjan, but this word only survived in the North Germanic languages. It does not seem to have made it directly into Old English or into the East Germanic Gothic, and it fell out of use in the Continental West Germanic languages in the early medieval period.
Old English had several other verbs meaning to die: sweltan, which survives in the Present-Day adjective sweltering; steorfan, the Present-Day form of which is to starve, although in Old English it could mean dying by any means, not just lack of food; and cwelan and acwelan, which give us the Present-Day to quell.
The verb was introduced in the north of England, via the Old Norse deyja, in the late Old English period, and we see uses of the variants deadian and *gedeþan, in the past participle form gedeþed, in Northumbrian glosses of Latin gospels and liturgical texts. From this we can surmise that it had currency as a dialectal term in the north during the late Old English period—Old Norse having had the strongest influence on English in the north.
We start seeing wider use of the verb in the twelfth century. It appears in the c.1135 poem bearing the modern title of History of the Holy Rood-Tree:
Eala þu leofæ freond ic halsiȝe ðe þurh god sylfne þ[æt] ðu underfo minne sunæ & þa ȝestreon þe ic him læfe forþan ðe ic nu deȝen sceal.
(Lo, you dear friend, I beseech you by God himself that you take charge of my son & the possessions that I leave him, because I shall now die.)
And it is found in the c.1175 manuscript known as the Ormulum. From one of the homilies in that manuscript:
& off þiss illke seᵹᵹde þuss
Daviþþ þe Sallmewrihhte
Till defless þewwess, þatt he sahh
Þe flæshess wille follᵹhenn;
ᵹe shulenn deᵹenn all se men;
Forr þiss iss tunderrstanndenn
Alls iff he seᵹᵹde þuss till hemm
Wiþþ all full open spæche;
ᵹe shulenn deᵹenn ifel dæþ
To dreᵹhen helle pine,
Forr þatt ᵹe follᵹhenn i þiss lif
All ᵹure flæshess wille.(& of this same thus said
David the Psalm-writer
To the devil’s servant that he saw
Following the flesh’s will;
Certainly all the men must die
For this is understood
And if he said thus to him
With full open speech
If he should die an evil death
To suffer torment in helle
Because you follow in this life
All your flesh’s will.)
It also appears in one of the later copies of one of Ælfric’s homilies. The version of his homily for the first Sunday after Pentecost that is found in the c. 1175 Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodley 343 reads:
Nú ne sceole ge healdan eowre child to plihte
to lange hæþene, for ðan þe heo nabbað
infær to heofonum, gif hi hæþene dægeð.(Now, should you not protect your child from the peril
of becoming heathen, because then he will not have
entrance to heaven if he dies a heathen.)
Earlier manuscripts containing this sermon use acwelan in this passage.
So, the English verb to die actually died and was reborn.
Sources:
Ælfric. “Dominica I post Pentecosten.” In John C. Pope, ed. Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society, 259. London: Oxford UP, 1967, 483, lines 106–08. Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodley 343.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018: s.v. degan, v., deadian, v., gedeþed, past. part.
Holt, Robert, ed. The Ormulum, vol. 2 of 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878, 182–83, lines 15,428–39. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, dien, v.
Napier, Arthur S., ed. History of the Holy Rood-Tree. Early English Text Society, OS 103. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894, 14. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. die, v.1.
Image credit: Hugo Simberg, 1906. Digital reproduction by Rafael Vargas, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.