Middle English is the name commonly given to the forms of English
current from about 1100 to roughly 1500, between pre-Conquest Old
English, which is hardly intelligible today without special study,
and the early modern English of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Of course it changed considerably during that period, and different
dialects existed in various geographical areas. The form of Middle
English used in this translation is for the most part the East
Midland and London dialect of writers like Chaucer in the
fourteenth century, which is the direct ancestor of our modern
standard form of English. It is not hard to read with a little
practice, but an extensive glossary has been provided to assist the
reader where necessary. Imagining what Londoners of the fourteenth
or fifteenth centuries might have made of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland" provides a historical perspective not
only on Chaucer's fourteenth century and Carroll's nineteenth, but
on our own time as well. The self-opinionated Victorian child whose
delightfully illogical adventures down the rabbit-hole are so
contrary to the order and regularity of her life in the waking
world receives an education in "otherness" that is both a critique
of contemporary society and an enjoyable children's fairytale.
Adapting this to a medieval milieu has required changes not only of
language but of costume and customs as well. While we have sought
to keep both text and illustrations as close as possible to
Carroll's and Tenniel's originals, it is probably the differences
that will be of most interest. Following Chaucer's practice in his
fiction, Carroll's prose has been translated into Middle English
verse. In the illustrations Alice wears the sort of clothes a child
of roughly equivalent social standing might have worn. Dodos and
flamingoes were unknown in medieval England, but Phoenix and swans
will do instead. Judges did not wear wigs, but Serjeants at law
were distinguished by the coif. Parodies of medieval poetry replace
some of Carroll's parodies of poems Alice gets wrong, poems
Victorian children may have been taught. Puns on tail and tale are
possible in Middle English, but those on tea and on tortoise are
not; suitable substitutes have however been found. Carroll's
"Laughing and Grief," for "Latin and Greek," have become the
"Wlaffyng and Gristbitunge" which seemed to a fourteenth-century
author to describe the uncouth dialects of the North which he could
not appreciate. The Caterpillar's hookah has become an alembic, for
the medieval Catirpel has been turned into an alchemist searching
for the philosopher's stone that will change base metals into gold.
Notions of physics, geography, and astronomy altered radically
between Chaucer's time and Carroll's, to say nothing of our own. A
medieval Alice's education would have been rather different from
her Victorian counterpart's. She can teach the Duchess something of
the Ptolemaic, but not the Copernican, system of astronomy. She has
learnt some Latin from her brother's "donat," or elementary
textbook written by Aelius Donatus as long ago as the fourth
century AD. She may not have lived as much under the sea as the
Mokke Se-Tortus has, where the school he went to unnecessarily
offered "wasschyng" as an extra, but she can be surprised by his
strange versions of the medieval course of education the Trivium
and Quadrivium. The so-called "Middle" Ages seemed entirely modern
to those who lived in them, but at this distance it may not be easy
to appreciate what life and mental attitudes were like so long ago.
So how should one read a translation into Middle English of Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland? As the King advised the White Rabbit,
about to read out, aloud, from a paper picked up on the court room
floor, "Begin at the beginning, ... go on till you come to the end:
then stop." And if at first sight there does not appear to be "an
atom of meaning in it," closer inspection may reveal so
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