You Can't Always Trust the National Geographic

      It is true, you cannot always trust what you read in magazines, even a magazine like National Geographic. I was sitting at a tire place, getting a nail removed from one of my tires, and reading an old magazine because they featured an article on Greenland. In the article was a tidbit that caught my eye: the expression 'on the lam' comes from the Vikings because it is derived from their verb 'lemja'. Being the word-nerd that I am, I look it up as soon as I get home.
      Whoever authored this is wrong. The Oxford Dictionary states that it is of 20th century coinage and origins are unknown. It follows 'lam' in the dictionary which does mean 'thrash, hit with a stick ' from the ON lemja which means to 'beat so as to lame' but there is an asterisk in front of the colloquialism which makes it seem to follow the 'beating' word. A quick check at the Zoega Old Norse dictionary reveals that lemja means 'beating' and not 'fleeing' or 'running'. A good and knowledgeable proof reader would have caught that. I am offering my services. :-) (for a fee, of course)

Another quick look in the Brewer's Guide to Phrase and Fable for thoroughness adds nothing because the expression is not even listed, leading me to think 'on the lam' might be an Americanism.

The Other 'F' Word: Fart

     One thing that people often find more fascinating than where common phrases and words come is where the naughty words or 'not polite' words come from. After all, 'passing wind' can be referred to by its medical name (another 'f' word) flatulence, which comes from the Latin (as do many medical terms when they are not derived from Greek) flatulentus(a slow wind?) by way of the French or by its common name 'fart'.
      Flatus, the Roman word , is a masculine noun meaning blowing or wind and flatus emittere means sending out wind or farting (which appears in Suetonius as a synonym to crepitus ventris.). However the Romans also had another name for farting: the verb pedo, pedere, pepedi and the part participle, which also could be used as a noun for the thing, peditum. (which the French use commonly, peter)  Clearly the word 'fart' did not come from the Romans.
     As modern German has a similar sounding equivalent 'furz' which sounds like 'farts', our word must be derived from the Germanic Old English. Indeed, one glance at the Oxford English Dictionary shows the OE equivalent is 'feortan' and the earliest reference to it is as 'feorþing' in Aelfric's Glossary, which is very difficult to find in its entirety. I have been unable to find out why Aelfric included it in his glossary which he glossed as 'pedatio' but Bosworth Toller defined as 'crepitus ventris', due to Suetonius, which is idiomatic as 'fart' for the Romans, according to the Oxford Latin Dictionary (and Suetonius). My, they had a lot of words for this! Crepitus ventris is loosely 'a clattering, groaning or noise of the belly'. I would really love to see Aelfric's Glossary to see if he really wrote 'pedatio' because Lewis and Short does not contain this word and the Oxford Latin Dictionary does not either. So, it was not a Roman word, they used peditum, but it could have been a regional Medieval variant.
     The Cleasby-Vigfussun Old Icelandic Dictionary has a related word in it because you know the Vikings would have a word for fart and it is 'fretr' a masculine noun and a verb 'freta'. It also includes a nice compound for a vagabond: fret-karl, fart-man.
     I have wind on my mind since I am sitting here awaiting the arrival or effects of Hurricane Sandy.

Hooray for Hazel!

I am showing my age. The title of this post is an early sixties pop tune but it seems appropriate and catchy because my topic today is Hazel: the tree, 'corylus avellana'.

'Corylus' is the Roman name for the hazel and Linnaeus took 'avellana' from Leonhart Fuchs. Where he got the name 'avellana' from I am not sure. Somewhere (wikipedia, I think) it was stated that it was called that for the town of Avella, Italy but nowhere in Fuchs or Linnaeus does it state that. The Dictionary of English points to a town in Campagnia that may have been named for the apple, Abella. I wonder if 'corylus' (which is also spelt 'corulus') is related to the raven as a diminutive. This would make sense when one considers that Hugin and Munin (Thought and Memory) are two ravens, which sit on Odin's shoulders. There is nothing in the Oxford Latin Dictionary to support that connection. As well, 'æple' is one of the Old English forms for apple, Gaulish is 'avallo'(DOE) and so I was thinking that it was called 'the apple of the little raven'. The name 'hazel' comes from the Germanic; in Old English it is 'hæsel'.

I was reading Egil's Saga and the hazel was identified as an important sacred tree when it is used to stake out a formal battleground in Chapter 52. The battle staked out thus turns out to be the Battle of Brunaburh between King Aethelstan of the English and King Olaf with the Scots. As well, Egil laid a curse on the Norwegian king, Eirik Blood-ax, by placing a horse's head on a hazel pole and saying that the land-spirits shall have no rest until they drive Eirik out of Norway.

Donald Watts in his Dictionary of Plant Lore, states that the hazel is sacred to Thor, which I have to wonder about since he is already firmly identified with the oak and sometimes the mountain ash. How many sacred trees does Thor have? As well, its nuts are identified with wisdom, a quality that Thor is not usually credited with. He also says that it is a medieval symbol of fertility and perhaps this tree would be sacred to Frey then since he is a fertility god and as a Vanir, has suspected ties to witchcraft.

He points out that, in the original Grimm brothers' fairy tales, Cinderella did not have a fairy godmother but asked her father for a branch of whatever tree brushed against him on a trip and he brought home a hazel. Cinderella planted the hazel branch on her mother's grave and it becomes the source for her wish-fulfilment and power for revenge.

The hazel was also responsible for Finn McCool's wisdom in Celtic myth as the Tuatha de Danaan planted their nine hazels of inspiration and the knowledge of poetry at a well when they came to Innisfail. There is considerable overlap between Norse and Celtic mythologies, not surprising since they shared space and frequently fought or married one another. Poetry is a powerful tool for cursing and magic in both cultures. Hazel is supposed to be the twig by which St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland and appears to be a powerful counter to fairy curses. This looks like an interesting book that I may want to order for myself.

Another really good resource on tree lore is Della Hooke's Trees in Anglo-Saxon England. It is expensive but I think, if you value accuracy, this is worth the price. Hooke adds that the hazel was used for divination and invisibility spells. Sacrificial victims like the Lindow bog-men were given crushed hazelnuts before they were killed. The hazel tree was frequently used as a boundary marker.

The holy family supposedly sheltered under a hazel tree when fleeing to Egypt. This puts the thought into my mind that, if the Tree of Life could be the Ash (Yggdrasil) then the Tree of Knowledge would be the hazel. Lucky me, I have one of these in my backyard. If only I could snatch the fruit before the squirrels get it. It is considered unlucky to pick the hazel; you are supposed to eat only the ones that fall to earth.

While I was researching this post, I discovered an online library, the Biodiversity Heritage Library which has Linnaeus's entire Species Plantarum online, see here.

What's In A Name: The Giant Edition

     In Beowulf, one comes across several words for 'giant': eoten, ent, gigant, and þyrs. After reading Tolkien's paper called "On Translating Beowulf", I have to wonder what are the differences between them.  Are they all synonyms or are there subtle shifts in meaning between all four? Gigant should be easy; it is a loan word from Latin giganteus, which would have been used in the Biblia Sacra Vulgata in describing the Biblical giants. However, one has to wonder how people originally understood the word because it was used in classical Latin to describe the titans, some of whom were gigantic but not necessarily all.  This is similar to the Old Norse jotunn, which is cognate with the Old English eoten, since jotunn were not always of extraordinary size. Some jotunn were very human looking and intermarried with the Aesir. 

     þyrs meant ogre or troll really, but also applied to giants and had a cognate in Old Norse þurs. And then there is ent.  We know what Tolkien made of the word but it has not cognate in any other Germanic language and it did not survive into Middle English, probably being of archaic usage when the Beowulf poet was composing his poem.  He did employ other archaic language to give his poem the look of antiquity. The etymology of the word is called 'uncertain' although there are a couple of brave scholars willing to speculate. I won't relate their arguments here because I didn't find them convincing.
     So what is the difference between the various words?  Near as I can tell, þyrs means ogre or troll. The gigant is the primitive giant destroyed in Noah's flood, the eoten are the descendants of Ham, like Nimrod who built the Tower of Babel.  Giant works in stone are called the work of eoten but also of the ent.  There might be no difference but dialect between eoten and ent but no one can say at this time. This is why they are slightly different than the gigant who is just a dumb brute and incapable of the skill and craft of the eoten.

Brisingamen

When I was a child, I read and loved a book called 'TheWeirdstone of Brisingamen' by Alan Garner. I read it to my kids.

Brisingamen was treated as a proper noun in the book title but only Brisinga is. The Brisingar are the dwarfs who made Freyja's famous necklace. 'Men' is Old Norse for 'necklace'. I wonder if Garner knew that when he picked it for a title. There is no necklace in the story but there is a stone. It has little or no connection with wyrd either, which was the Old English word for 'fate' or 'Fortuna' but then Garner chose the later spelling of 'weird'. So we are probably to take it as 'odd' or 'strange' but it looks odd and strange to me.

Swans and Valkyries

I just finished a paper. It is a huge, huge subject. To do it justice , one could probably write a book. Valkyries are a Northern concept; they belong to the Viking Age. No other culture has the armoured, beautiful battle maidens in their mythology. At least no conclusive evidence for them has been found. The three valkyries in Volundarkvida are also swan maidens. There is a lot of philological evidence that Latin for white 'albus', elf 'alp', and swan 'alpt' have a common Indo-European root.

The only named elf in Old Norse is Volund. In the few other stories, where he is mentioned, he is not called an elf but he is clearly and Otherworldy being even in the other stories. His extra-ordinary skill as a smith sets him apart and his ability to fly. The Wayland/Volund story is so old but scholars can't agree if he had a wife before he was taken captive by Nidud. I think he did. I think the swan maidens were valkyries because the daughters of elves could be valkyries and she was so very white as were all the other valkyries in Norse myth. You don't get that sense reading them in translation because hvitr is often translated as fair or radiant. It fires the imagination to think of what people made of swans so that they are related etymologically to elves.

No Yolking

I know, it is a sad play on words but I could not help myself. I did not have a great title ready for today's blog which is about the phrase 'egging on'.

This week's reading in Old Norse was sections of The Volsung Saga and, in keeping with Signy's rather determined efforts to avenge her father's death, she was egging her brother on. The verb in the Old Norse was eggja, that is "to incite, to urge one on" so the phrase is an old one. I don't know which came first the noun egg or the verb but there are two egg's in Old Norse. One is "egg" of course and the other is "edge". It is the edge that is the relative to the verb because you can whet a knife and that creates an edge. If that does not make sense, think about whetting your appetite. So now you know, egging some one on has nothing to do with eggs and everything to do with sharpening your knife to avenge your father. No yolking.

fylgjur - Norse Protective Beings

In Njal's Saga, Thord sees a goat covered in blood lying in a hollow that Njal cannot see. Njal tells him that he must have seen his fylgja and he should be careful. Thord says being careful will not help, he is about to die. He does die in an ambush by Sigmund and Skiolld, while Thrain stands by.

In Hallfreder Saga, as he lay dying, Hallfred saw a woman in armour approaching him. He called her his fylgjukona.

The fylgjur is rather like the banshee, a protective spirit that is rarely seen by the people whom it protects except when someone is about to die. The banshee wails in mourning as a harbinger of death, not as a bringer of death. Banshee simply means 'woman of the Sidhe' or fairy woman.

Fylgjur may be related to fylgja or afterbirth. The belief was that when a person was born, the afterbirth followed and that was the person's fylgja. You had to be careful in disposing of the afterbirth least an animal consume it and the person's soul with it. It is interesting that Icelandic peoples thought the afterbirth was an Otherworldy being. Also interesting that Celts and Norse thought this spirit was a woman.

(from Cassell's Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend by Andy Orchard)

The Death of a Norseman

It is always interesting how differently people expressed ideas at various times and places. I am practicing my Old Norse by reading Hrolfs Saga Kraka. I became interested in the poor fellow hiding in a bone-pile in a hall. Clearly Bodvarr hauled him out of the pile to help him. The other men in the hall notice Bodvarr and Hottr (the guy from the bone-pile) sitting at a table and start flinging bones at them. One of them throws a large knucklebone at them which Bodvarr catches and flings back at him. "Hann fekk bana" "He fetches death." In the Zoega, 'fa' means to 'grasp with both hands'. That he does. It almost looks like a middle voice verb. i.e. 'fetches death for himself'. It sounds good but it is just a plain old past indicative which started out with a 'ng' and it turned into a 'kk'.

I have to wonder - why is there a pile of bones in the mead-hall. Doesn't anyone clean it out?

A Word of Old Norse

I was reading the Penguin Classic The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking-Lore translated and edited by Andy Orchard. Orchard more than W.H. Auden or Henry Adams Bellow tries to keep the language as literal as possible so I was a little curious about a phrase in Lokasenna (Loki's Home Truths) that I won't repeat here because I am trying to avoid cuss words. I have to wonder if the Penguin people had a few restless nights over this.

I had a chance to ask the translator 'why this word and not that?' 'Is that one more accurate?' since Bellows translated it as "Unmanly thy soul must seem" and Auden translated it as 'played a woman's part". The word in question is an adjective 'argr' and is defined in the Zoega as 'unmanly, effeminate'. The phrase that was Orchard's preference was again something I won't reprint here but does seem appropriate in a Norse trash-talking contest at a drinking party. Loki seems to have not been invited since he tends to be a bit of a buzz-kill. He succeeds well at ruining the party.

So then, what does it mean? It is uncontrollable lust basically. Usually applied to men, only once to a woman, and it is not heterosexual. So that ought to be enough to be getting on with, eh?

Ecce Viri Septentrionis!

Behold the men of the north! I suppose I could have tried to write that in Old Norse but I had only one class in it and it will be a while before I attempt any such thing. I shall be delving into Icelandic sagas and Norse mythology this year. Be prepared. The Vikings are coming.

I used the word 'septentrionis' for 'of the north' because the Romans referred to the north in this way. The septentriones were the seven stars near the North Pole belonging to the Great Bear. Or the Little Bear. Whichever. You could also use 'boreas'. It is all good.

Some people might object to calling Northmen vikings but it seems to have been a common word for sea-farers from Scandinavia especially those with tendencies to piracy and pillaging. The Anglo Saxon version 'wicinga' appears in the chronicle early on. The etymology is uncertain and the word 'viking' itself might not be derived from Old Norse but Old German since people along the northern coasts would be most at risk from their predations especially after the decline of the Frisian navy following Charlemagne's campaigns against them. It should be fun. I just thought I would warn my many followers why my posts will be seeming rather bloodthirsty this fall.