Sax and dotty music but no words
![sax and dotty music but no words sax and dotty music but no words](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71sMxb488qL._SX522_.jpg)
After the warrior Beowulf has mortally wounded the monster Grendel, Grendel’s mother comes seeking vengeance. The saex played a significant role in Beowulf, the epic poem written in Old English in the eighth century or thereabouts. After all, the Old English spelling of Saxon was Seaxan (and Seaxe in the plural). There is even speculation that the Saxons, the Germanic invaders known once in England as Anglo-Saxons, got their name from the knives they carried. But before the Norman Conquest of 1066 reshaped the English language and gave us Middle English – a process that took about a century to filter down to ordinary folks – saex was all the rage. It survives today only in the narrowly defined word sax, a tool used to trim roofing slates. Saex comes from a Germanic root ( sah or sag) meaning to cut. The Dictionary of Old English offers a “word of the week,” and last week it was hand-saex, with which Warren Clements has some fun in his Globe and Mail column surprisingly (to me-I wasn’t familiar with him), he doesn’t linger on the cheap laughs but goes on to a useful examination of the history of the word: