Alfred Bammesberger (b. 1938 in Munich) was Professor of English & Comparative Linguistics at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, with wide-ranging interests and publications in historical and comparative linguistics, especially Indo-European, early Germanic, as well as Baltic and Celtic linguistics, with special interest also in runic studies. He was editor of Historische Sprachforschung [one of the, if not the, oldest linguistics journal still in existence, dating from 1852] from 1985-2015. He died on 7 January 2025.
https://www.ku.de/die-ku/kontakt/presse/presseinformationen-detail/sprachwissenschaftler-prof-dr-alfred-bammesberger-verstorben
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(One of my early publications was in Historische Sprachforschung — during Bammesberger's tenure there as editor –: an article on reconstructing details of an Indo-European myth/story about a battle with a dragon:
Slade, Benjamin. 2008[2010]. How (exactly) to slay a dragon in Indo-European? PIE
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Bammesberger himself published extensively on Beowulf [see https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=bammesberger+beowulf ], including an article touching on one of the passages that I discussed in my "How (exactly) to slay a dragon in Indo-European":
Bammesberger, Alfred. 2012. Beowulf's Last Fight (Beowulf, 2702B–2705). Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 165-167. [ https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/43344563 ]
Bammesberger 2012 argues that in the passage:
geweold his gewitte, wællseaxe gebræd
biter ond beaduscearp þaet he on byrnan wæg,
forwrat Wedra helm wyrm on middan
['Then again the king himself (= Beowulf) gathered his wits, drew a slaughter-seax biting and battle-sharp that he wore on his byrnie. The Helm of the Wederas (= Beowulf) cut asunder the dragon in the middle.']
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(I would note that the word forwrat which appears here is actually a prefixed form of the verb writan, which is the direct root of Modern English write.
Forwritan itself is a hapax legomenon in Old English, with this being the only extant occurrence.
Writan in Old English too usually means ‘to write, to form letters’, though it can also mean ‘to draw’, but its earlier meaning ‘scratch, cut’ is also found occassionally, in the sense of inscribing an image or letters into wood, stone &c.
But, outside of this single line in Beowulf, Old English writan means ‘to cut’ only in the sense of ‘cutting into, incising’, never ‘cutting’ in the sense of ‘chopping’ or ‘hewing’. However, elsewhere in Germanic we find Old Saxon uurītan denoting not only ‘to write’, but also ‘to cut, to wound’; cf. modern German reißen ‘to tear, to rip’. These cognates suggest that Gmc. *wreitan had a sense like ‘to scratch, to tear, (to cut?)’. The sense ‘cut asunder’ (‘tore asunder’?) of Beowulf 2705 forwrāt seems to preserve an earlier sense of the verb, otherwise unattested in Old English.)
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(Writan occurs only once elsewhere in Beowulf at l.1688, where it refers to something on a sword-hilt, either a runic inscription or an engraved image, it is unclear which.
þurh rūnstafas rihte gemearcod
geseted ond gesǣd hwām þæt sweord geworht
"So/Also on the sword-hilt of shining gold, it was in rune-staves rightly marked –
it was set down and said – for whom the sword was wrought."
)
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text/gemini