unparalleled degree by the abundance of Scandinavian words, while the French element in its vocabulary is extraordinarily small. The precise determination of the locality is not free from difficulty, as it is now recognized that the criteria formerly relied on for distinguishing between the eastern and the western varieties of the midland dialect are not valid, at least for this early period. The Ormulum certainly contains a surprisingly large number of words that are otherwise nearly peculiar to western texts; but the inference that might be drawn from this fact appears to be untenable in face of the remarkable lexical affinities between this work and Havelok, which is certainly of north-east midland origin. On the whole, the language of the Ormulum seems to point to north Lincolnshire as the author's native district.
The work is dedicated to a certain Walter, at whose request it was composed, and whom Orm addresses as his brother in a threefold sense—“according to the flesh,” as his fellow-Christian, and as being a member of the same religious fraternity, that of the Augustinian Canons. The present writer has suggested (Athenaeum, 19th May 1906) that Orm and Walter may have been inmates of the Augustinian priory of Elsham, near the Humber, which was established about the middle of the 12th century by Walter de Amundeville. In his foundation charter (Dugdale's Monasticon, ed. Caley and Bandinel, vi. 560) Walter endows the priory with lands, and also grants to it the services of certain villeins, among whom are his steward (praepositus) William, son of Leofwine, and his wife and family. As this William is said to have had an uncle named Orm, and probably owed his Norman name to a godfather belonging to the Amundeville family, it seems not unlikely that the author of the Ormulum and his brother Walter were his sons, named respectively after their father's uncle and his lord, and that they entered the religious house of which they had been made subjects.
The name Orm is Scandinavian (Old Norse Ormr, literally “serpent,” corresponding to the Old Eng. wyrm, “worm”), and was not uncommon in the Danish parts of England. It occurs once in the book. The Gallicized form Ormin is found only in one passage, where the author gives it as the name by which he was christened. If this statement be meant literally (i.e. if the writer was not merely treating the two names as equivalent), it shows that he must, like his brother, have had a Norman godfather. The ending -in was frequently appended to names in Old French, e.g. in Johannin for Johan, John. The title Ormulum for the book which Orm made was probably an imitation of Speculum, a common medieval name for books of devotion or religious edification.
The Ormulum is written in lines alternately of eight and seven syllables, without either rhyme or alliteration. The rhythm may be seen from the opening couplet:
Nu, broþerr Wallter, broþerr min
Affterr þe flæshess kinde.
The extant portion of the work, not including the dedication and introduction, consists of about 20,000 lines. But the table of contents refers to 242 homilies, of which only 31 are preserved; and as the dedication implies that the book had been completed, and that it included homilies on the gospels for nearly all the year, it would seem that the huge fragment which we possess is not much more than one-eighth of this extraordinary monument of pious industry.
The Ormulum is entirely destitute of poetic merit, though the author's visible enjoyment of his task renders it not uninteresting reading. To the history of biblical interpretation and of theological ideas it probably contributes little or nothing that is not well-known from other sources. For the philologist, however, the work is of immense value, partly as a unique specimen of the north-midland dialect of the period, and partly because the author had invented an original system of phonetic spelling, which throws great light on the contemporary pronunciation of English. In closed syllables the shortness of a vowel is indicated by the doubling of the following consonant. In open syllables this method would have been misleading, as it would have suggested a phonetic doubling of the consonant. In such cases Orm had recourse to the device of placing the mark ̆ over the vowel. Frequently, but apparently not according to any discoverable rule, he distinguishes long vowels by one, two or three accents over the letter. Like some earlier writers, he retained the Old English form of the letter g (Ʒ) where it expressed a spirant sound (not, however, distinguishing between the guttural and the palatal spirant), and used the continental g for the guttural stop and the sound dzh. He was, however, original in distinguishing the two latter sounds by using slightly different forms of the letter. This fact was unfortunately not perceived by the editors, so that the printed text confounds the two symbols throughout. The discovery was made by Professor A. S. Napier in 1890. It must be confessed that Orm often forgets his own rules of spelling, and although hundreds of oversights are corrected by interlineation, many inconsistencies still remain. Nevertheless, the orthography of the Ormulum is the most valuable existing source of information on the development of sounds in Middle English.
The Ormulum was edited for the first time by R. M. White in 1854. A revised edition, by R. Holt, was published in 1878. Many important corrections of the text were given by E. Kölbing in the first volume of Englische Studien. With reference to the three forms of the letter g, see A. S. Napier, Notes on the Orthography of the Ormulum, printed with A History of the Holy Rood Tree (Early English Text Society, 1894). (H. Br.)
ORMAZD, or Ormuzd (O. Persian Auramazda or Ahuramazda), the supreme deity of Zoroastrianism. He is represented as the god and creator of good, light, intelligence, in perpetual opposition to Ahriman the lord of evil, darkness and ignorance. The dualism of the earlier Zoroastrians, which may be compared with the Christian doctrine of God and Satan, gradually tended in later times towards monotheism. At all times it was believed that Ormazd would ultimately vanquish Ahriman. See further Zoroaster.
ORME, ROBERT (1728–1801), English historian of India, was born at Anjengo on the Malabar coast on the 25th of December 1728, the son of a surgeon in the Company's service. Educated at Harrow, he was appointed to a writer ship in Bengal in 1743. He returned to England in 1753 in the same ship with Clive, with whom he formed a close friendship. From 1754 to 1758 he was a member of council at Madras, in which capacity he largely influenced the sending of Clive to Calcutta to avenge the catastrophe of the Black Hole. His great work—A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan from 1745—was published in three volumes in 1763 and 1778 (Madras reprint, 1861–1862). This was followed by a volume of Historical Fragments (1781), dealing with an earlier period. In 1769 he was appointed historiographer to the East India Company. He died at Ealing on the 13th of January 1801. His valuable collections of MSS. are in the India Office library. The characteristics of his work, of which the influence is admirably shown in Thackeray's The Newcomes, are thus described by Macaulay: “Orme, inferior to no English historian in style and power of painting, is minute even to tediousness. In one volume he allots, on an average, a closely printed quarto page to the events of every forty-eight hours. The consequence is that his narrative, though one of the most authentic and one of the most finely written in our language, has never been very popular, and is now scarcely ever read.” Not a few of the most picturesque passages in Macaulay's own Essay on Clive are borrowed from Orme. (J. S. Co.)
ORMEROD, ELEANOR A. (1828–1901), English entomologist, was the daughter of George Ormerod, F.R.S., author of The History of Cheshire, and was born at Sedbury Park, Gloucestershire, on the 11th of May 1828. From her earliest childhood insects were her delight, and the opportunity afforded for entomological study by the large estate upon which she grew up and the interest she took in agriculture generally soon made her a local authority upon this subject. When, in 1868, the Royal Horticultural Society began forming a collection of insect pests of the farm for practical purposes, Miss Ormerod largely contributed to it, and was awarded the Flora medal of the society. In 1877 she issued a pamphlet, Notes for Observations
