A Sundial Slide Show
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The Aldbrough Sundial
The sundial is located on an interior wall (over a pillar on the exterior side
of the south nave aisle) of St. Bartholomew's church in Aldbrough, a small town
in East Yorkshire located 10 miles northeast of Hull, about a mile from the
North Sea coast. The church dates from the second half of the 14th century. The
sundial must have originated somewhere else and been moved to the church, and
by the state of its preservation we can conclude that the sundial has been
sheltered from the elements for most of its existence. The circle of the dial
divides the day into 8 parts, indicating that the dial was carved before the
Norman Conquest. Here is a description and analysis of the inscription on the
dial by R. I. Page, a prominent British scholar of ancient Anglo-Saxon and
The text is quite well preserved and reads: +VLF LET (?HET) AROERAN CYRICE FOR
HANVM 7 FOR GVWARA SAVLA, usually translated as, "+Ulf had this church built
for his own sake and for Gunnvor's soul." There is some trace of late
Anglo-Saxon work in Aldbrough church, and certainly the inscription contains
corresponding late linguistic forms, seen in the collapse of the classsical Old
English inflexional system. So, 'cyrice' for accusative singular 'cirican'
shows loss of final '-n' and has confusion of the unstressed vowel as does
'savla' for 'saule'. 'Gvnwara' is presumably genitive. The Old Norse form
should be 'Gunnwarar' but the Aldbrough name may be Anglicized, its second
element a borrowing of OE '-waru' which should have the genitive '-ware'. Loss
of definition in the vowel ending is common in late Anglian texts and shows a
breakdown of the Old English inflexional system which is not necessarily a
result of Old Norse admixture [but not necessarily not the result of such
admixture - A.K.]. Aldbrough has also the difficult form 'hanvm', which is
usually taken as the dative singular of the 3rd person pronoun, since attempts
to derive it from OE 'hean', "poor, desolate", seem semantically
misguided. 'hanum' is certainly the Old Norse dative singular of such a
pronoun, but of course Old Norse would use the reflexive 'ser' in this
context. The Old English equivalent is 'him', and Old English has no
reflexive. It looks as though the Aldbrough dialect has a pronominal system
influenced but not superseded by the Old Norse one. Both 'Vlf' and 'Gvnwara'
represent Scandinavian names, one with loss of inflexional '-r' (which suggests
English affection), the other with a second element probably Anglicized.
R. I. Page. 1971. "How long did the Scandinavian language survive in England?
The epigraphical evidence." In Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes, eds.
England before the Conquest: Studies in primary sources presented to
Dorothy Whitelock. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. pp. 165-181.
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Photos this page © A. Kroch 1998.