Voices of the past: Traces of orality in Ohthere’s and Wulfstan’s travel accounts

Identifying features of orality in written texts is one of the major concerns of historical linguists. This contribution argues that the travel accounts of Ohthere and Wulfstan preserved in the Old English Orosius can be stripped off various layers of ‘writtenness’, allowing some access to the spoken Old English words. The analysis is set within the framework of pragmaphilology, that interrogates texts in their contextual and historical embedding on the one hand (manuscript, authorship, settings of text production and reception, etc.), and on the other, allowing for a discourse-linguistic analysis on the level of language. In Ohthere and Wulfstan, we can not only discern the ‘voices’ of the two travellers, but also those of their audiences, and of the ‘reporters’. There are arguments indicative of dialogues underlying both texts. While they differ in the degrees of ‘spoken-’ and ‘writtenness’, both texts start out as indirect represented discourse, slipping quickly to non-dependent and direct discourse. On the cline between orality and literacy, Ohthere is situated closer to the orality end than Wulfstan, due to, e.g. its disjunctive narrative and slips from dependent to direct discourse. Wulfstan is closer to literacy, with syntactically more complex structures and a more streamlined narrative.