Could Beowulf see blue?

The history of English colour words

Mountain Landscape with Rainbow (circa 1809-1810), Caspar David Friedrich

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.

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.

At what point does blue become 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.

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You're reading The Dead Language Society. I'm Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.

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How many colours are in the rainbow?

To answer this question, let’s get a bit more sophisticated with how we’re thinking about colour as it shows up in language. To do this, let’s take a phrase we’ve been using loosely and make a capitalized technical term out of it: Basic Colour Term.

A Basic Colour Term is a colour word that serves as a building block of how languages categorize colour.

The idea of a Basic Colour Term was developed by the researchers Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in their cross-cultural work on colour perception and categorization.

Basic Colour Terms must meet several criteria: they should be simple words rather than compounds (like blue, not blue-green), commonly used and agreed upon by speakers (so taupe is out), and broad in meaning rather than restricted to describing specific objects (so red qualifies, but blonde doesn't, since it only applies to hair, fur, and maybe beer).

What makes Basic Colour Terms important is that they can be used to compare the colour systems of different languages. Berlin and Kay did a big cross-cultural survey of Basic Colour Terms in 1969, and found that, if they knew how many basic colour terms a language had, they could also predict which colour terms they were.⁷

For example, if a language only had two Basic Colour Terms, Berlin and Kay found that they would divide the colour space between light and dark, much like Dugum Dani mili vs mola.

If a language had three Basic Colour Terms, they would separate out red from light vs dark. And as the number of Basic Colour Terms in a language got higher, the colours would appear in a predictable order:

• 2 Basic Colour Terms: light (white/red/yellow), dark (black/green/blue)

• 3 Basic Colour Terms: white, dark (black/green/blue), red/yellow

• 4 Basic Colour Terms: white, dark, red, green OR yellow

• 5 Basic Colour Terms: white, black, red, green, yellow

• 6 Basic Colour Terms: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue

• 7 Basic Colour Terms: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown

For languages with more than seven Basic Colour Terms, they would also have terms for purple, pink, orange, and/or grey — but there didn’t seem to be any order of preference among these colours.

This was a revolutionary finding: it showed that, despite all the diversity in the world’s colour systems, there was a logic to it that seemed rooted in human perception and cognition.

The human eye and the human mind are set up in such a way that these patterns recur in the organization of colour systems. Although Berlin and Kay’s theory has been refined over the years, the basic findings are still valuable in helping us understand how colour works in language.

So let’s turn now to English. According to Berlin and Kay, Modern English distinguishes 11 Basic Colour Terms: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey. Old English, on the other hand, did not.

So what was the Old English colour system like?

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Old English had no ‘blue’?

Old English seems to have had the following six Basic Colour Terms:⁸

• hwīt ‘white’

• sweart/blæc⁹ ‘black’

• rēad ‘red’

• ġeolu ‘yellow’

• grēne ‘green’

• grǣġ ‘grey’

In addition, Old English also had two words which seem to be borderline cases of Basic Colour Terms:

• hǣwen ‘blue, grey, green’

• brūn ‘brown (and other things — more on this later)’

According to the researcher Carole Biggam, these two words, hǣwen and brūn, meet almost all the criteria for Basic Colour Terms except for the one where speakers have to agree on the meaning of the word.¹⁰

For hǣwen, it seems to have meant ‘blue’ primarily among the educated crowd, probably in an attempt to have an Old English word on hand to translate Latin words like caeruleus ‘sky-blue’.

What hǣwen meant for everyday people isn’t entirely clear, since Old English writing was mostly the province of the educated, but we can glean something about how ordinary people used the word from plant names and works about traditional medicine.¹¹ It appears to mean something like ‘cool-coloured’ in popular literature rather than specifically ‘blue.’ This inconsistency of use across social strata, therefore, disqualifies hǣwen from consideration as a Basic Colour Term.

We’ll explore hǣwen (and other Old English words which could mean ‘blue’) in greater detail below. But before we do, we need to talk about brūn.

Brūn is the ancestor of Modern English brown, but it covers a much wider range of hues than our Modern English brown does. The Latin words translated into Old English as brūn suggest that it could cover things we’d call not only brown, but also black, purple, or red. Beyond that, in poetry, brūn is used to refer to metallic objects, such as swords:

Þa Byrhtnoð bræd bill of sceðe, brad and bruneccg
‘Byrhtnoþ drew sword from sheath, broad and brown-edged’
(Battle of Maldon, 163)

Many scholars have found it strange that the same word should be applied to dark things and to metallic things, which are more usually thought of as being shiny. Out of this have grown many theories about what brūn really meant. Did they “brown” swords in the Germanic Iron Age?¹² Did brūn refer to rust? To dried blood?

I’ll return to the issue of what exactly brūn meant later on. But, for now, we can content ourselves with this: whatever it really meant, the fact that brūn apparently had a special poetic usage disqualifies it from the status of a Basic Colour Term for the same reason we excluded hǣwen. It was not used consistently among all strata of society.

This means that Old English had a six-term system of colours, with two colour terms (hǣwen and brūn) waiting in the wings.

Interestingly, this doesn’t line up exactly with Berlin and Kay’s original theory, which said that, if a language had six Basic Colour Terms, one of them would be ‘blue’.

Instead of a term for ‘blue,’ Old English had grǣġ ‘grey’, which Berlin and Kay’s 1969 theory suggested would only emerge in a system with between eight and eleven terms. But, of course, the 1969 theory was only the first draft: the theory has been refined since then.

This stripped-down six-term system presents us with a world that feels both familiar and alien. It’s a world where an orange that somehow made its way to England would simply have been seen as rēad ‘red’. It was a world where the same word could describe both a shadowy forest and the gleaming edge of a sword.

To truly understand this world, we need to go beyond the list of Basic Colour Terms and see how they were used. What follows is a journey into an older, stranger way of seeing, and the story of the revolution that gave us blue, orange, and all the other colours that paint our modern world.