Many scholars accepted this solution; but a further light was yet to
come, viz. in 1904. In that year, Dr Joseph Wright printed the fifth
volume of the _English Dialect Dictionary_, showing that in the
dialects of Scotland, Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire, the word
for "hoarfrost" is not _rime_, but _rind_, with a derived adjective
_rindy_, which has the same sense as _rimy_. At the same time, he
called attention yet once more to the passage in _Beowulf_. It is
established, accordingly, that the suspected mistake in the MS. is no
mistake at all; that the form _hrinde_ is correct, being a contraction
of _hrindge_ or _hrindige_, plural of the adjective _hrindig_, which
is preserved in our dialects, in the form _rindy_, to this very day.
In direct contradiction of a common popular error that regards our
dialectal forms as being, for the most part, "corrupt," it will be
found by experience that they are remarkably conservative and antique.
CHAPTER II
DIALECTS IN EARLY TIMES
The history of our dialects in the earliest periods of which we have
any record is necessarily somewhat obscure, owing to the scarcity of
the documents that have come down to us.
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