Global InformationProverbs of Hendyng information
The Proverbs of Hendyng is a poem from around the second half of the thirteenth century in which one Hendyng, son of Marcolf, utters a series of proverbial stanzas. It stands in a tradition of Middle-English proverbial poetry also attested by The Proverbs of Alfred; the two texts include some proverbs in common.[1] The rhyme scheme is AABCCB.
Marcolf appears as an interlocutor with Solomon in some German poems in the Solomon and Saturn tradition,[2] while “ "Hendyng" seems to be a personification generated from the word hende ["skilled, clever"], and seems to mean something like "the clever one" ”.[3] In The Proverbs of Hendyng, “Hending[equated with Hendyng]... is represented as the author of a collection of traditional proverbial wisdom in South-West Midland Middle English, each proverb ending with 'quoth Hending' ”,[4] a construction like that of a Wellerism.
The Proverbs of Hendyng is also noted for containing the earliest attestation of the word cunt in English outside placenames and personal names.[5]
- ^ Specimens of Early English, ed. by Richard Morris and Walter W. Skeat, 4th edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1872), II 35-42 (p. 295).
- ^ Specimens of Early English, ed. by Richard Morris and Walter W. Skeat, 4th edn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1872), II 35-42 (p. 294).
- ^ Christopher Cannon, Middle English Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
- ^ 234. Anderson, D. A. (2005). JRR Tolkien and W. Rhys Roberts's "Gerald of Wales on the Survival of Welsh". Tolkien Studies 2(1), 230-234.
- ^ "cunt, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 5 March 2015.