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OLD English vocabulary presents few words of Greek derivation. The few it does offer evoke the Greek of the New Testament: cristen, deacon, engel, homily, hymn, and martyr.1 Yet these Greek-derived words did not arrive in Old English directly from the New Testament. With lines of assimilation far more circuitous, their paths from Greek into English are haphazard and gradual rather than simple leaps from the Bible into English. Focusing on martyr, I will begin this article by showing that martyr arrived in Old English no longer meaning a “witness”2—its earliest Classical Greek meaning—but nearer to “A person who chooses to suffer death rather than renounce faith in Christ or obedience to his teachings, a Christian way of life, or adherence to a law or tenet of the Church,”3 its primary definition today. I will then chart the word’s initial appearances in Latin and then in Old English texts, after which I will examine martyr’s synonyms and conclude with a brief look at its emergence in Old Irish. What I will suggest is that martyr’s early assimilation and popularity in Old English highlights its conceptual importance to Anglo-Saxon Christianity, the Greek loanword conveniently expressing a concept that the Old English church was quick to adapt to common usage, as the colloquial strength of martyr served to strengthen the church.
Precisely how martyr came into Old English remains unclear: the word appears in other early Germanic languages such as Gothic, Old Saxon, and Old Frisian.4 It was also available in the Latin Vulgate’s book of Revelation. Whether the word was already part of their lexicon when the Angles and Saxons began settling Britain in the fifth century or whether martyr became fixed in written Old English through Latin learning is difficult to determine. On the one hand, if martyr did arrive very early in Old English, it could suggest the great prevalence of martyrdom and martyrs—or, at least, the importance of such concepts—as well as their appropriation by Christian communities speaking early Germanic languages. On the other hand, the word might have been initially confined to the vocabulary of the learned and literate elite. Possibly, martyr’s prevalence throughout Anglo-Saxon literature stems...