Could Beowulf see blue?
The history of English colour words
Imagine looking up at a cloudless sky on a summer’s day. Or go outside and look if you’re in the northern hemisphere.
The colour you see covering that open expanse is probably the best example of blue that you’ll see in nature. Nothing else comes close: you may catch shades of blue in birds, flowers, or the surface of the sea, but the open sky is the prototype: true blue. If the sky isn’t blue, then nothing is.
Blue seems so natural to us — both word and colour — that it may surprise you to learn that English only got the word blue in the 13th or 14th century. Stranger still, even the category ‘blue’ isn’t much older than that.
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It’s not that people in the past couldn’t see blue. Indeed, there were several words which could refer to things we would call blue today, but these words could also describe things we’d assign to other colours too, especially grey and green.1
William Gladstone, who would later become British prime minister, remarked on something similar in his reading of Homer, namely that there were no unambiguous references to the colour blue in the Iliad or the Odyssey. Instead, as Gladstone proposed, the colour words used in Homer seemed to refer not to hue, as ours do, but to lightness or darkness.
In Gladstone’s words: “Homer seems to have had… principally, a system in lieu of colour, founded upon light and upon darkness”2
This, for Gladstone, explained the strange usages of colour words in the Iliad and the Odyssey. It explained why the sea was so frequently described as ‘wine-dark’.3 For Homer, the colour of the sea and the colour of wine shared something: their dark richness, perhaps, rather than their hue.4
Many people have misinterpreted Gladstone as believing that the Greeks of Homer’s day were colourblind.5 But that’s not what Gladstone believed at all. For him, it’s not that Homeric Greeks couldn’t see colour, it’s that what they thought of as colour was different from how we conceive of it today. They saw all the colours that we see, but they divided them up differently.
And the same (with apologies for the title of this article) was likely true of the speakers of Old English: they would certainly have been able to see blue, but they may not have grouped all the things we call blue into a single colour.
Indeed, the way we English speakers divide the colour space into discrete colours, such as blue, green, red, yellow, etc., is somewhat arbitrary and not as fixed as we might think. As Gladstone’s Greeks show us, the way we understand colour isn’t just given by nature. It’s a product of historical circumstance and cultural evolution.
Look at this colour slider: as you inch right, what starts out as blue becomes gradually greener and greener. There’s no sharp division between blue and green.
And yet, when you present people with paint swatches drawn from this spectrum, they can reliably say whether it’s a shade of blue or a shade of green. It’s like there’s an invisible boundary in our minds that divides up this gradient into two discrete categories. Even more interesting, speakers of a given language tend to agree about where the boundary is!
But scholars who study how colour works in different cultures and languages have found that there are big differences in how the colour space is divided up from one language to another.
For example, where English speakers see different varieties of blue, Russian speakers distinguish between two different basic colours: голубой goluboy ‘light blue’ and синий siniy ‘dark blue.’ Other languages distinguish fewer colours than English does: for example, the Dugum Dani language of Papua New Guinea classifies all colours as variants of two basic colour terms, mili ‘cool/dark’ and mola ‘warm/light’.6
It’s unsettling to imagine that our perception of something as fundamental as colour is so flexible. It forces us to look at our own language not as a perfect mirror of reality, but as a cultural artifact with its own strange history. And the story of English colour is full of mysteries, the biggest being the gap in Old English where blue should be.
Why did blue, of all colours, arrive so late? Where did it finally come from? And if the early English rainbow was missing blue, what other colours were they living without? To answer that, we first need to understand how they saw the world.
