I saw a screening of Beowulf last week but have been holding off commenting on it until it opened. I am not planning to post a review (since I worked on the film, I wouldn't exactly be objective) but I did want to make a few remarks on the use of language.

A few weeks back, I was interviewed for an article on Beowulf in the L.A. Times that has just appeared.

I do want to point out that my remarks were paraphrased (as is fairly common with journalists), and so there are a few places where what I intended may not have been rendered quite accurately.

A ghost word is a word that was created by the error of lexicographers, one that has no independent existence. A classic example is Dord, which appeared in the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary. The entry was meant to be an abbreviation (D or d) for density. Snopes.com does their usual fine job of explaining the confusion.

So one of the first requests I received in my capacity as expert on all things Old English was for a list of swear words. This is one of tasks that seems simple on the surface: hit the dictionary and find the equivalents, but there are all sorts of problems that come up in trying to produce anything adequate. In a project like this, of course, scholarly uncertainty is simply not an option. We might not know, but we still need to have something for the characters to say.

Today I was forcefully reminded of how our inconsequential decisions can snowball--the proverbial butterfly wing that unleashes a hurricane. I received an e-mail out of the blue from a production assisstant for Robert Zemeckis. They are doing a major Hollywood film of Beowulf and want an Old English consultant who can translate into OE and coach the actors on pronunciation. They're filming in Culver City, and so they want someone local.

It sounds like a blast, but I can't help thinking about the chain of decisions that led them to me. Apparently they called the English department at UCLA and asked a medievalist there (Andy Kelly) for someone who had the necessary skills. He gave them my name.