Old English Wlītan and Wlātian : Poetic Verbs of Looking (And Seeing)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. A rich body of research exists in psychology and cognitive science exploring inattentional blindness and motivated perception: how failure to attend to specific aspects of a given scene may in fact allow someone to look at a specific thing and not see it (see, for example, O’Regan et al. and Ekroll et al.).2. A reason for wlātian’s absence from prose might have been its accidental homophony with words with the root -wlæt- that have to do with disgust or nausea.3. Citations and text excerpts are from the DOEC, using their abbreviated titles for works other than poems; translations are my own.4. Such models might lead to invented languages such as Tolkien’s Elvish languages, or to arguments about primitive languages (and primitive peoples) such as those formerly made for Australian Indigenous peoples.5. A writer such as Owen Barfield would disagree, arguing instead that “it is the nature of language to grow less figurative, less and less couched in terms of imagery, as it grows older … [T]hat figurative element, that presence of living imagery, that we find in earlier language … was simply there in the language as such; it was a ‘given’ kind of meaning, a ‘given’ kind of imagery” (n.p.).6. The shift in meaning of the nominal form look from an intentional “glance” to an impersonal “appearance” is interesting and probably telling.7. The OED (s.v. †anleth, n.) suggests the etymology and- “against, facing” and wlitan “to look.”8. Actually Ezechiel: see Ezechiel 44: 2.9. OED (s.v. behold): “To hold or keep in view, to watch; to regard or contemplate with the eyes; to look upon, look at (implying active voluntary exercise of the faculty of vision)… This has passed imperceptibly into the resulting passive sensation.”10. As noted at the beginning of the essay, the science of vision has long been interested in the effects of attention and visual orienting. Findlay and Gilchrist note, “Attentional selection of a region of visual space can be made in two distinct ways. We say that something ‘catches our eye’ when we orient and look at it. We can, however, also look at one thing and be attending to another, … often colloquially termed looking out of the corner of the eye” (3).Additional informationFundingWork on this article was made possible by a course release from the College of Arts and Letters at Idaho State University.