I don't think that searching for metaphors in translations would be a fruitful strategy. In the end, one would just have information about the use of metaphors in the translations studied, not in the original works. Metaphors are often inextricably bound to other aspects of culture. To study metaphors in any text, a researcher must master not only the grammar and vocabulary of the original language, but also possess a profound knowledge of the cultural context of the text, through reading other texts from the same geographic and chronological context, looking at material culture through archaeology and art history, and carefully examining whatever else is available for study. If the language of the text was in contact with other languages, learning something about these may also contribute to a deeper comprehension of the text; often metaphors pass from one language to another as calques, or semantic loans. A general understanding of metaphors in human language and thought would also be essential for interpreting the information thus gathered. If doing all this is beyond the scope of a study, then a reasonable strategy would be to do what Marina has done: seek out scholars who have worked in this area (or related areas) and ask them to share their views.

I am not a scholar of literature, but it seems to be that older non-English works contained metaphors.  

The Bible contains metaphors. For example, Jeremiah 51:7 says "Babylon was a gold cup in the Lord’s hand..."

I imagine that the early English writers would have been familiar with these non-English texts, which in turn would have served as role models for their English writing.

Thank you very much! I quite agree that Anglo-Saxons were familiar with Latin metaphors (or Greek for that matter), but they did not feel inclined to be using metaphors in poetry, it seems.

Julian of Norvich? "Truth sees God, and wisdom contemplates God, and from these two comes a third, a holy and wonderful delight in God, who is love". Дорогая Марина, ее "Откровения Божественной Любви" изданы в Москве в 2010 г. (англ. оригинал и рус. параллельный перевод). 

Огромное спасибо!!! Я не очень хорошо знакома с прозой - в основном изучала поэзию, поэтому особо благодаона Вам.

Old English poetry is full of metaphors. If you look up 'kennings' you will see that they were metaphorical words in poetry (things like 'whale road' meaning 'sea'). There are also extended metaphors (as in Dream of the Rood).

Metaphor is a human universal.

Dear Antea, you're right, but Dr Ivleva comments: "Kennings can also be considered as metaphors, but I am interested in metaphors like "he was a pillar of his order"". What do you think on the relevant texts of Percy Folio? 

Hi! Metaphors are pervasive both synchronically and diachronically. They do NOT appear in English first. If you want a Germanic example, walhakurna "corn of the foreigners = gold" is a kenning appearing in a runic inscription long before the Germanic settlement in Britain. But there are metaphors (in the modern sense) in Pre-Hispanic America, e.g. Nahuatl, in China, in Hebrew, Sumerian, Arabic, etc. English has many of its metaphors borrowed from other languages, mainly French, at the same time that it keeps numbers of Old Germanic metaphors, not only poetic ones (i.e. kennings). And of course, you can find many metaphors in Old Slavonic and Old Russian prose and poetry.

It seems, Dr Ivleva is interested in author or occasional metaphors in early English poetry (Chaucer was mentioned).., in this case my suggestion (Percy Folio or the Julian's prose as the research sources) can't be relevant, or they can be used in a comparative study: folk m. -author m., or poetic m. - prosaic m. Dr Bernárdez is right: the whole image paradigms as well as their fragments "migrate" from culture to culture, changing "aboriginal" image systems. 

Thank you, dear colleagues, for your interest in my research! With a group of my colleagues we are trying to find out the archetypes in the human cognition process. So far we came to the conclusion that at least in modern (and even more likely in ancient ) languages himan body serves very often as an archetype to express measures, geographical features etc. Modern writers often use parts of human body in metaphoric constructions. So, we wanted to dig deeper and try to find out whether such things happened before - they definitely did, othewise there wouldn't have been 'a mouth of a river' and the like. The point is when was it used to create some literary or stylistic effect? 

if you haven't already, you might want to try the Figurative Language Network in the UK .  If I remember correctly, they have both literary and linguistics scholars in their network.

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=FLN

Thank you, Dennis. It is a very helpful link!

Since Lakoff & Johnson showed in their book "Metaphors we lice by" that all our thinking is impregnated by conceptual metaphors, which express themselves in the language, I conclude that metaphors must have been around more less since proto language time.

Hi,

Its interesting that the example  you provide as the first use, that you can find of metaphor, is from Chaucer since the word origin of the word "metaphor" comes from the late 15th century. As was discussed by Goran, the concept of metaphor is more likely an inherent human communication device rather than a human construct. Logically, the awareness of its usage and usefulness became more apparent with the increase in available written material, and the invention of the printing press (which coincides loosely with Chauce's time period). So it would seem reasonable that the more literate people in general became, they needed words to describe the methods they were using to communicate abstract concepts - metaphor became one.

Bonne Chance

Thank you, Rebecca! This is a very insightful and helpful answer to my question!

Metaphors are certainly as old as language; so are metonyms and synecdoches, and probably a host of more specific devices, like personification and onomatopoeia. Their 'study' probably goes back as far as people have talked about talk, but the earliest explicit, written notice of them goes back to Plato, with indications of awareness in the scattered and fragmented pre-Socratic writings.  

Randy,

That's true, and it is a good point for speech devices over world literature and writings, and while English writers and readers may have been aware of Plato, Mariana is researching "English" usage. Can we find any link between Plato's use of metaphor and English. 

Michael's reference to sacred writings would at least have the link of the clergy and the scriptatoriums that were present, and how this awareness of metaphor would eventually spread to the literate via the reformation. 

Well, that depends on how you define "English," Rebecca (and Marina). The earliest extant poem (Caedmon's hymn, 7th C), in Anglo-Saxon, has metaphors. The earliest scholarship about rhetoric and literature on English soil (by the Venerable Bede, 8th C) discusses metaphor, but it is written in Latin. In fact, all of the work that English scholars would have read--Cicero's de Inventione and the Rhetoric Ad Herennium, for instance, both from the 1st century BCE--through the Middle Ages, (.e.g., Matthew of Vendome, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, both 12th C)--was all written in Latin. It's not until the Early Modern period (e.g., Richard Sherry and Thomas Wilson, both in the 16th C) that you get scholarship about tropes like metaphor in the English language. (All of these authors, by the way, were more or less 'secular.') There's really no point in trying to find the 'earliest metaphor' in a language, or to find the earliest scholarship about metaphor in the West, since it all comes out of the classical period, with Plato as the earliest (and Aristotle as the most systematic). 

I would see Old English verse as steeped in metaphor. Apart from the kennings which are formulaic metaphors there is continuous metaphoric expression, hu seo ƥrag gewat/ genap under nihthelm, swa heo no wǣre (how that time has passed away darkened under the helmet of night as if it had never been).   

Thank you very much, Barbara! The piece from Wanderer is what I was really looking for!

Like Goran and Rebecca, I suspect that conceptual metaphors, like visual communication (including abstract and figurative representation) and language, are innate to our species. These cognitive capacities seem to have emerged gradually, becoming increasingly more complex over the last several million years.

Looking to contemporary primate species for clues, there is evidence that monkeys think less metaphorically (at least in certain semantic domains), and that chimpanzees, our close relatives, are capable of metaphorical thinking.

Here is an article about testing rhesus monkeys and humans for metaphorical thinking involving space and time:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952654/

Here is a study showing evidence for metaphorical thinking by chimpanzees:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3798977/

Goran initiated a question over a year ago, concerning metaphorical thinking in chimpanzees and bonobos:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Are_there_any_conceptual_metaphors_used_among_chimps_or_bonobos

There is another question here on ResearchGate concerning acts of aesthetic creation among nonhuman and early human primates, with over 300 answers, some of which discuss the emergence of language in human evolution:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Have_primate_species_other_than_Homo_sapiens_engaged_in_acts_of_aesthetic_creation

Metaphors are present in visual thinking as well as verbal thinking. See: George Lakoff, Women, fire, and dangerous things: what categories reveal about the mind, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Thus one might predict that metaphors should be present in any language spoken by Homo sapiens. The previous answers on this thread tend to support this hypothesis.

Accepting that metaphor has been around since ever, but that you want to look specifically at Old or Middle English use of metaphor. Noting that Anglo-Saxon is Old English, there are a limited number of extant works, you may be able to read (the translations) and analyse them for yourself. Nice bit of original research, no? Obviously, it is difficult to know whether the translator has carried the metaphors over or not, so ideally you should learn Anglo-Saxon :D - but otherwise, choose a translation that is hailed as being literal as well as poetic. Bound to be one out there.

I don't think that searching for metaphors in translations would be a fruitful strategy. In the end, one would just have information about the use of metaphors in the translations studied, not in the original works. Metaphors are often inextricably bound to other aspects of culture. To study metaphors in any text, a researcher must master not only the grammar and vocabulary of the original language, but also possess a profound knowledge of the cultural context of the text, through reading other texts from the same geographic and chronological context, looking at material culture through archaeology and art history, and carefully examining whatever else is available for study. If the language of the text was in contact with other languages, learning something about these may also contribute to a deeper comprehension of the text; often metaphors pass from one language to another as calques, or semantic loans. A general understanding of metaphors in human language and thought would also be essential for interpreting the information thus gathered. If doing all this is beyond the scope of a study, then a reasonable strategy would be to do what Marina has done: seek out scholars who have worked in this area (or related areas) and ask them to share their views.

And for personal research, there are scholarly, highly literal and extremely reliable transcriptions and translations of early works available, sometimes now in digitised versions such as that of Beowulf on the British Library web site (the transcript of the original may display more or less well, depending whether your browser can handle the character set).

I'd like to reinforce Sian Cooper's message: metaphor is an integral part of  language, of every language. It is the major mechanism for the transition from concrete to abstract concepts or concepts dealing with states of mind or thought processes.

The first metaphors in what we call "English" already existed, and were merely part of the transition from whatever a person thinks isn't quite "English" to whatever a person thinks is just barely "English".

If you are looking for written attestations of metaphor, then you have your limited set of written works for the roughly 1000 years between the Roman exit from the British Isles and the entrance of the printing press. It's up to you to decide when "English" starts to appear from the variety of Germanic languages imported from the lands we now call Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Look at the Old English riddles, particularly the Exeter Book.