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In:Germanic Interrelations: Studies in memory of Hans Frede Nielsen
Edited by Stephen Laker, Carla Falluomini, Steffen Krogh, Robert Nedoma and Michael Schulte
[NOWELE Supplement Series 34] 2025
► pp. 103–125

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Of Angles and angels

Philology, history and the representation of identity

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Published online: 6 May 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/nss.34.06hin
Abstract
From a period of a thousand years from the first century AD to the eleventh, diverse sources in multiple languages collectively testify to the source and development of the group-name (‘ethnonym’) from which the familiar Angeln, Angles, England and English of modern usage derive. The complex range of early attested forms proves consistent with well-attested principles of language-use and language-change. Like any natural phenomenon, a group with an expressed and named identity will be a state of constant adaptation to circumstances, be those opportunities or stresses, and the adoption and replacement of the variants in textual history likewise conforms with historical circumstances in readily explicable ways. A comprehensive and empirically precise approach is especially important in case of the evolution from the Anglii to the English, which is of clear historical salience, and has attracted much inaccuracy and even misrepresentation.
Article outline
  • 1.Sensitive matters
  • 2.The earliest Latin and Greek sources for the Angles
  • 3.The etymology of the name in Germanic
  • 4.Pope Gregory the Great, Angles and angels
  • 5.Onwards: angelcynn and England
  • 6.The English
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (79)
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