In The Rude Story of English, Tom Howell, an ex-lexicographer, takes on one of his favourite stories: how the English language came to be—and tells it through its rudest, most offensive, simplest parts. From 440 AD, when Hengest, a Germanic warrior, first stepped onto English shores and cursed as his boots filled with seawater, to the present day, curses, insults, and rude words have played as important a role in the story of English as polite ones. 

The Rude Story of English is part fact, part fiction and reveals that, no matter how uncomfortable or off-putting, there's much to be learned from some of a language's most colourful parts.

*****

I grew up knowing about the Astérix reality, the world of the books populated by cartoon Gauls and Romans engaged in unevenly plausible scenarios drawn from facts and other speculations. The asterisk reality is exactly the same thing. In a philologist’s handwriting, an asterisk mark signals where material has been concocted to plug a hole in real-world evidence. For example, when someone at Oxford’s dictionary department wanted to show that our modern word “arse” once had a job as an ancient Greek word, “orsoz,” the scholar needed to imagine a scene in which a German princess 2000 years ago was sitting on something locally known as her “ars-oz.” No documents exist to prove this occurred so the philologist added an asterisk in front of the word—*ars-oz– and stuck it in the dictionary under the “arse” entry in a paragraph recounting the word’s life story. Generally, depending on the number of nearby facts available, and on how clever/lazy the philologist was, an asterisk might stand for anything from “as good as true” to “probably-maybe” to “whatever, time for lunch.”

“The * is the sign of the reconstructed form,” explained Tom Shippey, who gave the asterisk reality its nickname. “It was proposed by August Schleicher in the 1860s and used widely ever since. In this entire process the thing which was perhaps eroded most of all was the philologists’ sense of a line between imagination and reality. In a sense, the non-existence of the most desired objects of study created a romance of its own.”

“Romance” is typically a divisive word. It’s a red stoplight to the hard-headed, but to a certain strain of artist or poet or sophomore or lover, it’s the other variety of red light, the type that means, “Come closer,” or perhaps, “Desired object of study—right this way.”

Soon after I discovered philology’s looking-glass world, I also learned that it contains an asterisk hero who is perfect for the story of English, a demigod-like figure with one foot in the real universe and the other foot lost in dark matter. The hero’s existence, stretching that word for the moment, owes much to one of the alt-reality’s minor contributors, J.R.R. Tolkien, the same person who helped write The Lord of the Rings movies. He worked at Oxford’s dictionary department for two years, 1919 and 1920, until he grew tired of trying to remain plausible and wandered off to write about hobbits instead. While in the office, J.R.R. mostly investigated English words that began with the letter w, such as “wolf” and “warg” and “wallop,” from which he invented the ancient French verb *waloper (to wallop someone, obviously). He also doodled fake Saxon riddles in the margins. Even after quitting the dictionary, J.R.R. carried on philologizing and asterisking, going past mere words to imagine the people who spoke them—and from these speculations emerged his stories of quests, elves, warriors, rings, and scary people on horses. Tolkien had read the old epics and knew that all good adventures need a single, socially isolated hero, so he collected several of these characters and kept them in reserve for later use in his fiction. Among the candidates was a man named Hengest.

Tolkien didn’t magic this man out of nothing. I remember Hengest from my high-school history classes in England. The ancient warrior had somehow gained a reputation for discovering Britain on behalf of the Angles, a tribe in northern Germany, thereby inventing the English language. (The word “English” may refer to the speech of Angles who crossed the water, but nobody uses it to name the German dialect spoken by those left behind on the mainland.) This historic coup makes Hengest highly desirable as an object of study, but he’s a horrendously tough fish to hook back up into the world of facts. J.R.R. certainly tried his darndest.

The professor based all of his asterisk-facts regarding Hengest on two poems, named Beowulf and The Fight at Finnesburg, ancient works from an oral tradition, set down on parchment a thousand years ago. The poems put Hengest in the company of Jutes, whose tribe supposedly lived next door to the Angles on what’s now labelled the Jutish peninsula of modern Denmark. But there’s a wrinkle. The Jutes’ name was once pronounced “yooten,” which also happened to be a Germanic word for magical giants. Strangely, the particular gang of Jutes that joined Hengest on his trip to Britain left no trash for modern archaeologists to dig up, raising the question of whether they were indeed magical giants or just very large humans with supernaturally tidy habits. Having visited the Danish province of Jutland myself, where I cultivated a rapport with the locals, I find the second interpretation easy enough to believe. However, if that’s wrong and Hengest’s original life story did feature giants, any sober-minded adult might suspect the whole crowd of characters belongs to a fairytale. It’s hard to tell from scraps of parchment. They almost never declare themselves as fiction or non-fiction.

J.R.R. chose to believe that Hengest lived in real history and that the “yooten” were real Jutes from Jutland. Working from the claims of anonymous poets, the author-philologist sketched out a figure who was “a masterless man, seeking warlike employment and any opportunity that luck might present to him.” * Hengest (or *Hengest, really) seemed to be an expert swordsman, and, even more excitingly, the true prince of the Angle tribe, although he suffered a falling-out with his own people and became a loner. In this regard he resembled Aragorn, the wandering king of The Lord of the Rings, who travels far from home under a fake name. Ostracized, Hengest sailed to Britain in 449 ad “primarily as a mercenary but soon changed his purpose,” as Tolkien put it. The warrior decided to settle down on the island, make babies, and invite his fellow thugs to do the same. Events were conspiring to give our language a great foundational hero. 

Sadly, before Hengest could assume his full asterisk-self, urgent duties distracted J.R.R. Tolkien. The famous scholar’s beautiful plans for Hengest gradually sank under piles of other asterisks, along with student papers, grocery lists, orcs, etc. I consider this to be a grim moment in the story of English because it seems to me that Tolkien, too, was on to something.

Excerpted from The Rude Story of English by Tom Howell. Copyright © 2013 by Tom Howell. Photo © 2013 Gabe Foreman. Excerpted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.