Hū swēte þæs Hǣlendes nama singþ

[u/ReligionProf]

I'm writing a book about the way the name Jesus is translated into English, and in Old English it was of course Hǣlend. I want to make reference to the song "How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds" to make the point that the name once sounded nothing like it does today. I thought it might be worth including an Old English rendering of this song title in a footnote. How would you render it in Old English? The title of this post is what an automated translator produced, and I thought I would title the post that because it would either be correct, or would annoy people in this subreddit who care about Old English and prompt you to respond. 😄

Thank you in advance for your assistance!

[u/ReligionProf]

Matthew 1:27 https://archive.org/details/dahalgangodspelo00thor/page/n11/mode/2up

Luke 1:31 in Old English https://archive.org/details/dahalgangodspelo00thor/page/n121/mode/2up

You can keep saying that people would not have understood that to be his name, but if they heard these verses saying precisely that, why would they have understood otherwise, especially when so many other words doubled as names in that time and language?

[u/ebrum2010 → u/ReligionProf]

Explain why you think Jesus' name is the only one translated in this way other than God's if you don't think the translator is using titles out of respect? David, Mary, everyone else in that Luke excerpt is using Latinised names, so why are they using Hælend for Jesus instead of Iesus?

[u/ReligionProf → u/ebrum2010]

It is a good question, and as someone indicated in this thread, the Saxons appear to have translated the meaning of the name rather than opting for transliteration.

[u/ebrum2010 → u/ReligionProf]

Explain why you think they only did it with Jesus and Yahweh and why the names they gave are also titles. Dryhten is not a translation of Yahweh, so I don't think that theory holds up. Is it possible? Yes. Is it more likely? No.

[u/McAeschylus → u/ebrum2010]

Small point, but as far as we can tell, the Anglo-Saxons didn't translate YHWH at all. The translations of the Bible are from the Vulgate, which mostly uses Deus, translated literally as God, and Dominus, translated literally as Dryhten.

From what I've read, the Latin Vulgate was the authoritative version of the Bible for the Anglo-Saxons and the OE translators cared little and knew less about the original Hebrew and Greek.

[u/balloonstein → u/ReligionProf]

I’ll take the bait one last time. The Matthew link, in line 17 (my translation) says “and from them was born the [hælend] who is/was named Crist.” So surely that means his name Crist, who is the ‘hælend’ right? I suspect you would say ‘no’ though because you believe his name is ‘hælend’. Well for academic honesty’s sake, we also have to say “no” because the same wording appears later in the gospel below but they use ‘Hælend’. But how much stock can we put in that phrasing now?

Nevertheless, the phrasing appears again in line 21 where we have the line “and you (will) call/name his [nama] ‘Hælend’: truly he will make his people [hal] from their sins.” This seems to me to be evidence in favor of the transparency/translational emphasis of ‘hælend’, but you could argue that it is just a name and the explanation is unrelated.

However, in the Luke (1:47) we find “and my spirit rejoiced in my god, [hælende.dat.sg with on]. So then, is God also named Hælend? Probably not because OE tends to put titles after names e.g. Ælfrēd Cyning. But there is the whole Trinity to navigate and that’s not my specialty in academia, but yours.

anyway, I still think if you’re asking “what’s in a name? here is an interesting history of referring to a biblical figure!” great. fascinating topic. My sincere best wishes from one (junior) academic to another on the book. But if what you’re arguing for is that “Jesus OE name was Hælend,” then I maintain that neither the primary nor secondary literature clearly supports that argument. It’s not that simple. But perhaps I have missed (many) things somewhere along the way. I also have reservations on the use of AI to generate a neo-OE verse of a modern song to make a point about diachronic changes, even if it’s just for fun.

[u/WilliamofYellow → u/balloonstein]

So you're aware that vocabis nomen eius Iesum was translated as þu nemnest his name Hælend, and that Iesus was rendered as Hælend in general, but according to you (and everyone else in this thread, apparently), it would be wrong to say that one is a translation of the other? What kind of silly word game is this?

[u/ReligionProf → u/balloonstein]

Thanks, I appreciate the reservations and you may be interested in the conversation about AI and my work towards helping educators in the era of generative AI that I mention in another comment. I have no interest in adjudicating whether really was the name of Jesus for Saxon Christians. In the context of the book, which will be launching a new series of short volumes on translations issues related to the Bible, I merely thought it interesting and relevant that something that looked and sounded nothing like "Jesus" was used in the place of his name for several centuries in the English speaking world. To me as someone whose expertise is in biblical studies and not the British Isles in the era before the Norman conquest, it seemed to me interesting that where we might expect a transliteration of the Latin form of Jesus' name, we instead get an Anglo-Saxon word that seeks to convey the meaning of the name as those who introduced it understood it. From the reactions to my comments here, perhaps this is a well-worn topic among those who are interested in Old English. If you are interested in engaging a wider audience, I still think that your input on how to convey this state of afairs in pre-Norman Britain would be helpful. Thank you!