Heading into December

     The Christian faith is such a curious blend of things taken from Judaism, original thought and borrowings from 'heathen' faiths. In the end, what is accepted or acceptable is not so much divinely ordained but is decided by those who come out alive from the brawl.
      Christmas is one of those celebrations that arose because heathen celebrations were fun and it was difficult to persuade people to abandon them as well as the church needed a date to celebrate the Son's birth as a human. His earthly name was Jesus, a Latinization of the Greekifying of a Hebrew name Joshua/Yesua. He is called 'Christ' from the Greek word 'Khristos' or 'the annointed one' which is a translation of the Hebrew Masiah or Messiah. The gospels were originally written in Greek, which seems odd to me. I am sure there is a reason why Greek was still such a common language in areas where the Romans had clearly taken over.
       The 'mas' in Christmas is from the Old English 'mæse', meaning a celebration or a feast. The Oxford Dictionary states that it came from the Latin verb 'mitto, mittere' perhaps from some concluding words like 'Ite, missa est' or "Go, he/she has been dismissed." So it is the feast of the anointed one but I think that we are all special in our own way and therefore every day is Christmas.
      Another Christmas related word that interests me is 'mistletoe'. As a plant, it was sacred to the Celts.  The Druids did not write their secret knowledge down, it is Pliny who discusses it in his Natural History. The word 'mistletoe' itself comes from the Old English 'misteltan' or Old Norse 'mistiltienn'.  'Mistel' for the name of the plant which seems to have been equated with basil in Alfred's translation of Gregory's 'Pastoral Care'. 'Tan' is for twig or branch, or even diving rod. The Romans called it 'vascum' which is its genus name today. It was obviously important to winter solstice celebrations in the north and therefore it had to be incorporated into the Christian feast but it appears that its use for a 'kissing ball' may be a later development. One is supposed to remove a berry each time someone is kissed under the mistletoe and, when all the berries are gone, the kissing must stop. Then the mistletoe must be burned on the Twelfth Night (the night before the Epiphany) in case the kissers had no intent to marry.
     Pliny stated that mistletoe found on the oak tree was especially valued. So, if it is associated with oak trees and especially trees that had been hit by lightening, it is associated with Thor, who as the protector of mankind, then protected houses that contained mistletoe from being struck by lightening. This is not its only reference in Norse myth.  Mistletoe was the wood of the arrow that killed the god, Baldr, who eventually is resurrected but only after the Norse apocalypse - Ragnorok.
     The name for December comes from the latin month December, which according to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, is derived from 'decemo-membris'. Decem is the word for ten and membris can mean 'a section or division'. It was the tenth month in the Roman calendar until the Romans decided to honour Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar as gods by adding two new months, which they named for these new deities. As we move into the month and edge closer to the big day, I will probably add a few more Christmasy words and their origins.

Cat Got Your Tongue?

      Idioms are fascinating things. They are particularly challenging for people who are learning any new language and it seems like English has more than its fair share of them. One idiom that I use often is 'giving someone the hairy eyeball'. Did I ever hear that somewhere or make it up myself? I don't know but I did have someone ask me to explain it. Think of the face you make when you get a hair in your eye and combine that with some shocking or unpleasant news and there you have a hairy eyeball.
     I spent a few hours Thursday night trying to track down why we say 'cat got your tongue?' when someone is too silent. There is nothing in Brewer's Guide to Phrase and Fable on it. Unfortunately, as with many vernacular idioms, it was not written down until late, not until the mid 19th century, although there were several suggestions as to why a cat would want your tongue. The Oxford English Dictionary guesses that it may have something to do with cats being considered witches' familiars and having the sense that the cat has bewitched you into silence but I do not like this explanation.
    There is also a story on the net, told and retold, that in the Middle East, a liar's tongue was cut off and fed to the Caliph's cats. I was unable to find a the source for this assertion, whether it was reported by some medieval western chronicler or an Arab writer, so I am sceptical although it is a marvelous story.
     There is a nearly identical French version of this idiom "donner sa langue au chat" meaning one is giving one's tongue to the cat but it is used in a different sense. According to the Larousse dictionary, it means to give up (guessing). I found a French blogger who also wrote about other expressions that involve cats. One is "J'ai mangé la langue du chat"(I ate the cat's tongue) which means "I cannot keep a secret" and "mettre quelque chose dans l'oreille du chat"(put something in the ear of the cat) which means "to forget something".  I thought perhaps this means there was an early French origin for this expression but it does not appear in Thomas Heywood's books of English proverbs and sayings from the 16th century.
     If the expression is derived from the relationship of cats and Satan, then this is a late pairing, from the witch hunts of the late 15th and 16th centuries. Cats were not always seen as agents of evil, especially as many people, monks included kept cats as mousers. The cat was a symbol of liberty in Roman times since it appears on the statues of Libertas, the goddess of Freedom.
    The connection between cat and witch may have come from the custom of throwing a cat on the hilltop fires of the summer solstice, which came to be called the feast of St. John the Baptist when the church, unable to change pagan customs, incorporated them into Christian customs. One has to wonder what the cat has to do with the solstice. Cats draw Freyja's chariot, which reinforces the cat and witch connection since Freyja practices seidr, a type of magic performed by women. Though it seems to me that most of the important feasts or sacrifices to the Aesir take place in the winter not in the summer.  Isis and Batt are also connected to witchcraft and cats.
     Clearly there is something older going on with cats and language and the solstice. The domestic cat is not native to Northern Europe, it appears to have been introduced by the Romans who got them from the Egyptians. I don't like the theory that it comes from cats and witches but I have no alternative theory to propose.  

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.

More on Squirrel

The Germanic name for squirrel is annoying me. Is it a corruption of the Greek term? Everyone who says so is quoting Cleasby-Vigfusson but were they correct? I tried to look up the Old English term 'acwern'. The 'ac' in front looks like 'oak' and, since so many OE words are compounds and this is supposed to mean 'shade-tail', then wern or weorn should mean tail but I cannot find an entry in the Bosworth Toller dictionary or the Clark-Hall. I have not been able to access the Dictionary of Old English at the University of Toronto, although I should. They are definitely past the a's but the entry might not include an etymology of the word or break down the compound into its separate elements. Next week, I will try one more time and then I will give it a rest but in the meanwhile I found some other information.

In a book called Old Names - New Growth: Proceedings of the 2nd Aspens Conference (lovely title) there is this entry by Hans Sauer and Ulrike Krischke on quercus, oak, eiche : acweorna 'squirrel', 'eichhörnchen' should probably be placed here, too: according to Pokorny (p. 13F) its etymological root is not *aig- 'oak', 'Eiche' but *aig - 'swinging (violently)', '(sich heftig) bewegen, schwingen.' Still, secondary motivation in OE might have ben ac. Cf. Kluge s.v. 'Eichhörnchen' who connects the word to germ. *aik-'oak'".

Plus, Anatoly Liberman, who is a professor of Humanities at the University of Michigan, writes a word origin blog for the Oxford University Press and has a book out for laymen that is probably worth buying if you are interested in this sort of topic. Word Origins.... And How We Know Them. He wrote that the first German name for the squirrel was eihhurno and the first part of the word, the 'eih', meant 'oak' or was just 'eih'. In other words, it perhaps had two meanings and associating it with 'oak' does not "militate against good sense". The second part of the compound, he wrote was 'hurn' "coinciding with the word for 'horn' by chance." So the modern German word for squirrel would be 'little oak-horn'. He also pointed out that, although it sounds like an odd name for the wee beastie, the Russian name for squirrel is belka, which the first syllable 'bel' meaning white. I have not seen a lot of white squirrels.

If Liberman is correct, then the comment by Cleasby and Vigfusson is questionable. We shall have to wait until I get a chance to see what the entry in the DOE is. Meanwhile, here is a link to Liberman's blog. There are some choice words discussed in the recent past.

Chipmunks

How sad for anyone living in Europe. As amusing as the antics of squirrels can be, the chipmunk is far, far cuter than he. I looked up the etymology of the word 'chipmunk' in the OED and they do not know. There is a suggestion from someone or thing called Bartlett that it is a aborigine word but the OED writers thought it was an English compound.

So I went to Wikipedia because, as a resource, it is far better than it is given credit for. They state that the chipmunk is a type of North American squirrel. They quote a Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe by John D. Nichols and Earl Nyholm. (How interesting that such a thing exists and I don't have one!) Their etymology is that it came from the Ottawa word jidmoonh, meaning 'red squirrel. (Ojibwe, ajidamoo) Chalk one up for Wikipedia!

Because they are so adorable, I am going to post a picture of one taken from Wikipedia.

Add: After logging off I decided to check this dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe. It exists but it lists agongos as the word for 'chipmunk'. Looks like they called Scandinavian people 'chipmunks' too. There is an Eastern Ojibwa-Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary by Richard A. Rhodes that gives gwiingsenh as the word for chipmunk. Well, whoever wrote the Wiki entry did not properly cite that reference and searching google books as well as a general search does not reveal any book where that may have come from; everyone just quotes the Wikipedia article. That does not mean it is wrong but cannot be viewed as gospel without more information.

One more time: It started to annoy me. Why did they say that? So I did a bit more searching. Whatever I could do from home. I found an article on "The Significations of Certain Algonquian Animal Names" in American Anthropologist from 1901 by Alexander F. Chamberlain which give the Algonquin name for chipmunk as lênâpé pochwapiith or "he who sits upright on something". Appropriate and in the Cambridge History of the English Language, John Algeo ed., 1991, I found an article on Canadian English (did not know there was such a thing) by Laurel J. Brinton and Margery Fee and they wrote that the word chipmunk came from the Ojibwe. From here the trail runs cold, unless I want to go to the university library and I am not feeling that energetic.

Who Invented the Middle Ages?

I thought that it was the Victorians who invented the Middle Ages. They invented much of the romance that surrounds our impressions of this period. I was wrong. It was the Italians in the 15th and 16th centuries.

A quick check of the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that the earliest mention of the term 'Middle Ages' or 'Middle Age' as it was in this text was in 1570's J. Foxe Actes & Monumentes (rev. ed.) I.III 204/1 "The primitive tyme of the church....the middle age, and ..these our latter dayes of the church"

William Camden, who wrote the great Britannia, used the term in 1605 writing, "I will onely giue you a taste of some midle age, which was so ouercast with darke clouds, or rather thicke fogges of ignorance."

H. Wotton wrote in 1624 "after the reuiuing and repolishing of good Literature, (which the combustions and tumults of the middle Age had vnciuillized)"

Edward Gibbon also used the term, "During the middle ages, (from the ninth to the twelfth century) whilst Christianity was advancing with a slow progress into the North." 1776

Henry Hallam considered the Middle Ages to run from the invasion of France by Clovis in 490 A.D. to the invasion of Naples by Charles VIII in 1494.

I consider it to start with the fall of Rome in 410 A.D. and end with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It seems neater that way. Begins with the fall of the western half of the Roman empire and ends with the fall of the eastern half.

The OED goes on to say that the term comes from the Latin media aetas, medium aevum, medium tempus and was especially used in Basle. ( at the university I assume) 1469 in Rome was the first use of media tempestas but they didn't list who the author/ authors were. Perhaps it evolved from Petrach since the concept of the "Dark Ages" is credited to him as well. Historians in the Middle Ages went with the 'Six Ages of the World' of Augustine and considered themselves in the last age before the Apocalypse. People have been predicting the Rapture forever.