wæs þu hāl!

Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green;
here we come a-wand’ring
so fair to be seen.

The classic Christmas carol begins with the word wassail, prefixed by the archaic intensifier a-. Now it means to carouse and revel by going from house to house singing carols, but this sense seems to have derived from and displaced an earlier one: “Wassail,” one would proclaim with a toast, especially in Twelfth night and Christmas eve celebration. In Layamon’s Brut, the knight Keredic explains to Vortigern, king of Britons: ¹

It is the custom in Saxon lands
whenever a company is glad of drink,
that friend says to friend, with courteous gesture,
“Dear friend, wassail.” The other says, “Drink-hail.”

“Wæs hail”, one says, that is, “Be well!” Before it was enshrined in drinking formulas it was an ordinary salutation from Old English times. Here wæs is the singular imperative of wesan (“to be”), and hail comes from Old Norse heil, synonymous with Old English hāl (“hale, whole”). Thus, Éomer, overjoyed at the return of Théoden his king into his own, cries, “Westu Théoden hál!.”² It is one of Tolkien’s many linguistic jokes: Rohirric is only the Anglo-Saxon of the West Midlands, where Tolkien himself grew up.³ Westu is a dialectical variant of wæs þu: “Be thou, Théoden, well!” Later, as the Riders prepare to marshal forth against Isengard, Éowyn brings wine to the king, saying, “Ferthu Théoden hál!” Here ferthu is surely fer þu, again a singular imperative, for feran, “to go” or “set out.”

The chapter is filled with many a delightful homage to ancient England, and the Rohirrim are, as many have noted before, a calque on the Anglo-Saxons. Naturally, Tolkien’s feeling for those older days can be gleaned in part from that which Legolas says about their language. “‘That, I guess, is the language of the Rohirrim,’ said Legolas; ‘for it is like to this land itself; rich and rolling in part, and else hard and stern as the mountains. But I cannot guess what it means, save that it is laden with the sadness of Mortal Men.’” In that “slow tongue unknown” to the others no doubt Aragorn had chanted, hwær cwom mearg; hwær cwom mago?, those words from The Wanderer taken for Eorl: “Where now the horse and the rider?”

If the Rohirrim are the Old English, then hobbits are the English. In this way they are closer to one another than to others. And in characteristic Tolkien fashion, this connection is made fast by linguistic tie. Upon meeting Merry and Pippin at Isengard, the king remarks:

‘Are not these the Halflings, that some among us call the Holbytlan?’

‘Hobbits, if you please, lord,’ said Pippin.

‘Hobbits’? said Théoden. ‘Your tongue is strangely changed.’⁴

Strangely changed indeed! The exchange harkens back to the very first line of The Hobbit, written nearly twenty years prior: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”⁵ For holbytlan would be the plural of a weakly declined *holbytla, that is, “hole-builder.”