is in the library of Blickling
Hall, Norfolk); and he called attention to a passage (at p. 209) where
the homilist was obviously referring to the lonely mere of the
old poem, in which its overhanging groves were described as being
_hrimige_, which is nothing but the true old spelling of _rimy_. He
naturally concluded that the word _hrinde_ (in the MS. of Beowulf) was
miswritten, and that the scribe had inadvertently put down _hrinde_
instead of _hrimge_, which is a legitimate contraction of _hrimige_.
Many scholars accepted this solution; but a further light was yet to
come, viz. in 1904. In that year, Dr Joseph Wright printed the fifth
volume of the _English Dialect Dictionary_, showing that in the
dialects of Scotland, Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire, the word
for "hoarfrost" is not _rime_, but _rind_, with a derived adjective
_rindy_, which has the same sense as _rimy_. At the same time, he
called attention yet once more to the passage in _Beowulf_. It is
established, accordingly, that the suspected mistake in the MS. is no
mistake at all; that the form _hrinde_ is correct, being a contraction
of _hrindge_ or _hrindige_, plural of the adjective _hrindig_, which
is preserved in our dialects, in the form _rindy_, to this very day.
In direct contradiction of a common popular error that regards our
dialectal forms as being, for the most part, "corrupt," it will be
found by experience that they are remarkably conservative and antique.

CHAPTER II

DIALECTS IN EARLY TIMES

The history of our dialects in the earliest periods of which we have
any record is necessarily somewhat obscure, owing to the scarcity of
the documents that have come down to us. The earliest of these have
been carefully collected and printed in one volume by Dr Sweet,
entitled _The Oldest English Texts_, edited for the Early English
Text Society in 1885. Here we already find the existence of no
less than four dialects, which have been called by the names of
Northumbrian, Mercian, Wessex (or Anglo-Saxon), and Kentish. These
correspond, respectively, though not quite exactly, to what we may
roughly call Northern, Midland, Southern, and Kentish. Whether the
limits of these dialects were always the same from the earliest times,
we cannot tell; probably not, when the unsettled state of the country
is considered, in the days when repeated invasions of the Danes and
Norsemen necessitated constant efforts to repel them. It is therefore
suffici