Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/272

 266 Klaeber in Beowulf from impersonal geweorfied 'convenit' fits the case perfectly. Moreover, it is a priori more likely that the ancient Anglo-Saxon phrase should throw light on the idiom as known in the later periods than vice versa. The almost complete absence of the expression from Old English literature is possibly owing to a slightly colloquial flavor attaching to it. The change of the old impersonal construction into a per- sonal one was practically unavoidable. There can, indeed, be little doubt that in all the following examples the noun or pronoun was felt to depend directly on l&tan, leten, laten, lassen. It is also easy to see that alterations of meaning were facilitated in case latan, suggesting both 'allow,' ' grant' 38 and 'leave,' 3 gained prominence at the expense of the verb geweorfian, which gradually fell into disuse (in English), became isolated (in Dutch), or was merged with another stem (in German). That an early obscuration of the phrase, both in form and meaning, actually took place, is indicated by a passage in the OE. Chron. (MS.E), A.D. 1090: ferde ongean to France and let heom swa weorfian, 'he let them manage it, ' 'left them to their fate.' At the same time, it should be insisted that we cannot start from this type in tracing the development of the idiom. Verdam assumes a basic meaning: 'begaan,' 'te werk gaan,' 'beschikken,' apparently considered a semantic variety of the plain 'worden' Cosijn postulates the connotation of 'ten einde toe,' but the central idea of (ge^weorfian (as illustrated in our first division), that of 'change,' is conspicuously absent from the notions we would naturally associate with the infinitive part of the phrase. At any rate, an examination of our lists of examples fails to reveal any connection between groups I and III. Now the examples of the idiom may be allowed to speak for themselves. Middle English examples a) The old construction theoretically continued, i.e., with the genitival object easily supplied (or understood) with reference to a preceding statement. 38 Cf., e.g., (WS.) Mat. 3.15: fat nu >us, ^Elfr. Horn. II 38.34: lat nu dus and gefiafa Vis (=sine modo), A.V.: 'suffer it to be so now.' 39 Cf. an (for)latan.