William Sayers

Early Irish Attitudes toward Hair and Beards, Baldness and Tonsure

In the opening scene of the old Irish epic Tain bo Cuailnge, a great army is mustered by the rulers of Connacht, Ailill and Medb. The first to arrive are the Ulster exiles, the forces of Cormac Conn Longas, who advance in three troops. The first has shorn hair (fortii berrtha foraib); the second has long hair hanging down behind (monga tara cenna siar)\ the third has hair trimmed to shoulder length (berrtha slechtai co guaille). The reference to hair styles is but one element in this scene, but inclusion of this detail is a strikingly constant component in the descriptive topoi of early Irish epic literature. This may initially be viewed as yet another expression of the well documented Celtic cult of the head. Others are the taking of heads in battle, the preservation of tongues, and cranial matter mixed with lime in the form of balls, talking severed heads, vengeance through poisoned teeth, the association of heads with votive wells and altars, and so on.fc

Cei, Unferth, and Access to the Throne

ion. Even in the community of the gods, a sentinel is required, such as Heimdall among the Norse gods of Valhalla. The warrior Conall Cernach performs a similar role in the borderlands of Ulster in the Irish cycle of that name, not least in his challenge to the interloper who will later be awarded the name Cú Chulainn. We may then consider coastlines, rivers, and chains of hills the likely first line of defence and also the first boundary that a stranger must cross. Well to the interior of the often vaguely defined or contested borderlands in most cases is the king’s residence. Idealized visions of the Celtic hall display a eastwest axis for the building, with the king, his senior officers, and the serving functions at the west end, and doorkeepers at the distant east end, the principal entry. Royal doorkeepers keep company with the king’s fools and mercenaries (captured foreign warriors). As homologues of territorial boundaries, the arch of the doorway and its threshold were significant liminal points in the kingdom. Crossing these limits led to access to the king, to request a boon or throw down a challenge. In addition to the doorkeepers, Irish halls were managed by a senior officer, the rechtaire or steward (5Old Irish recht ‘‘law, authority’’). This twopart capsule portrait of a steward is found in Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel): ‘‘Mael garb for suidiu. . . . Cach n-imresain bı́s isin tig im sudi ligi is inna réir tı́agait uili. Dı́a faetsath snáthat isin tig ro-cechlastai a toitim in tan labras beóus. Dubchrand már húasae. Cosmail fri mol muilind cona scı́athaib 7 a chendraig 7 a irmtiud.’’ . . . ‘‘Taidhle Ulad in sin, rechtaire teghlaig Conaire. Is éigen aurthúasacht a brethi ind fir sin.’’ ‘‘His hair was rough and bristling. . . . Every quarrel that arose over seat or couch was submitted to his judgment; and when he spoke, a needle falling in the house could be heard. A great, dark staff overhead, like a mill wheel with its paddles and its fastener and spike.’’ . . . ‘‘Taidle Ulad [splendour of the Ulstermen] that, the steward of Conare’s household. It is necessary to listen to his judgments, for he has power over seat and couch and food. It is his household staff that is overhead.’’ On Cú Chulainn’s progression through marked space to a place by Conchobar’s throne, see Sayers, ‘‘Cú Chulainn.’’ See the bibliography of fundamental texts and the discussion in Sayers, ‘‘A Cut Above,’’ 96–7, where greater attention than here is paid to the steward’s serving duties. The role of Irish doorkeepers is illustrated in Cath Maige Tuired (The Second Battle of Mag Tured). The divine Lug approaches the hall of the king and requests entrance. But first he must give evidence of possessing a talent or skill then lacking in the royal retinue. Lug proposes his skill in a variety of trades but all are represented. Only when he claims competence in them all is he admitted (Cath Maige Tuired, 38–9). Cognate with Irish recht is the second element of the Welsh compound cyfraith ‘‘law’’ but we have no name for a court officer derived from this root. Togail Bruidne Da Derga, par. 85–6, ll. 787–804; Togail Bruidne Da Derga. The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, 83. Cei, Unferth, and Access to the Throne 129

Breaking the Deer and Breaking the Rules in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan

The medieval European hunt had an important social dimension. Although hunting game was a valued supplement to food raised on manorial estates, most large animals became the reserve of the aristocracy and their pursuit a source of sport and entertainment. Just as some of the hierarchy of the larger society carried over into the hunting party, a hierarchy was assigned to the animals hunted, one apparently not directly reflective of the danger involved in confronting the animal at bay. With social values in place and with an element of contingency in the hunt that could affect performance in the field and allow the socially lesser man to outperform his superior (as in battle), the process could be further ritualized by establishing qualitative conditions and sequentiality: doing things in the right way, at the right time. This imposition of human order on the pursuit and slaughtering of game, some of its constraints reflecting the logic of perceived economy (e.g. distinguishing cuts of meat of varying value), other aspects expressing ideology (who deserved what of the kill and why), was one general means of mediating between the wilderness and the settlement in the Middle Ages, but it was also subject to refinement and professionalism, a trend that increasingly valorized the court and courtliness, although not at the expense of the testing ground that was the forest. 1

Cant, Rant, Gibberish, and Jargon

In a recent note in these pages, etymologies were offered for a cluster of terms, many now dated but earlier often seen in close association, that designated witty turns of phrase: pun, quibble, ca...

An Unnoticed Early Attestation of gringo ‘Foreigner’: Implications for Its Origin

While there is a plethora of largely unfounded popular etymologies for the term gringo, including several variants on the theme ‘green (coats) go (home)!’ in reference to the presence of American military in Latin-American countries, all lexicographical works that seriously address the epithet accept a derivation from griego ‘Greek’, citing the expression hablar en griego ‘to talk gibberish’, that is, a foreign and thus unintelligible language (cf. English ‘it’s all Greek to me’). The idea and phrase have distant roots in Spanish. Cervantes writes of Don Quijote meeting a group of students and workmen:

Anglo-Norman and Middle English Terminology for Spindle Whorls

The Middle English Dictionary entry for fern (variant vern) identifies it as a term for a windlass (s.v. “fern” n.3).1 No etymology is proposed, although readers are invited to compare the Old French word vironner ‘to turn, go around.’2 The earliest attestations are from the late thirteenth century in utilitarian texts in Latin, Middle English, Anglo-French, and combinations thereof, such as the accounts of the Royal Exchequer.3 Unnoted in this regard is the presence of werne in another practically oriented text, albeit for an object on a very different scale. In the late thirteenth century, Walter of Bibbesworth composed a Tretiz, or treatise, that editor William Rothwell states “was written in order to provide anglophone landowners in the late thirteenth-century with French vocabulary appertaining to the management of their estates in a society where French and Latin, but not yet English, were the accepted languages of record” (Rothwell 1). However, the addressee of the tract is not the male landowner, but the mistress of the house: she is called mesuer in Anglo-Norman French and housewif in the Middle English of the tract. Walter glosses such specialized vocabularies as the terminology for the human body, clothing, various domesticated and wild animals and their calls, fields, and crops. He then addresses the baking of bread. His objective is not so much lively description or an explanation of techniques and processes as a simple communication of pertinent vocabulary. In one of the best preserved of many manuscripts (Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 1.1), the columns of French verse have interlinear English glosses in red ink. Thus, when the wheat is “ben batu, puis ventez e puis molu” or “windewith grounden”—that is, “well threshed, winnowed and ground” (lines 368–69)—the housewife may proceed to the next step: working the dough. After the baking of bread, Walter turns to the cultivation and processing of flax and hemp.4 When the plants have been weeded, harvested, retted (soaked in water to promote rotting), dried in the sun, scutched (beaten) with a pounder (glossed “swinglestock” in English), the housewife must scrape and hackle the fibers. Next is spinning:

Sea Changes in Thomas's Roman de Tristan and Dante's Inferno, Canto 5

t is generally held (1) that the punishment of the lustful in canto 5 of Inferno, the ceaseless buffeting of the wind, is borrowed from medieval visions of hell (blasts of breath from a dog or lion) with lighting effects from Virgil’s underworld, (2) that according to the logic of metaphor it is appropriate for those who were driven in life by their passions, (3) that the imagery of the canto is primarily avian, (4) that listings of the lovers of antiquity often include Tristan, and (5) lastly, that Dante’s knowledge of this victim to love was derived from the Old French prose romance, either in langue d’oïl or in Italian form as represented by the Tristano riccardiano. Yet questions remain. Why should the bufera infernal sound like the bellowing of a tempest at sea and also create momentary islands of silent calm as if intended for human communication? Why is Francesca so lavish with the words amore and amare? Have we fully understood her bold equation of Galeotto and book? Finally, had Dante no knowledge of a literary tradition that, unlike the prose Tristan, traced the love of Tristan and Yseut from its inception? As early as Boccaccio it was recognized that Dante’s Paolo and Francesca had affinities with Tristan and Yseut no less close than those with Lancelot and Guinevere. Scholarship increasingly has recognized that the compiler of the Tristano riccardiano quite substantially drew on the Roman de Tristan of Thomas d’Angleterre as well as on Béroul, Marie de France, and the textual tradition represented by the Folies of Bern and Oxford—all sources potentially available to Dante.1 In the case of Thomas, those conclusions were reached on the basis of fragments of the romance that have been arranged by modern editors to begin with Mark spying on Tristan and Yseut in the orchard, that is, well after the sharing of the love potion and the consummation of the lovers’ passion. The recently published “Carlisle fragment” of Thomas’s romance, 154 occasionally fragmentary verses, now offers invaluable complementary information. It must be considered in any

Middle English wodewose 'wilderness being': A Hybrid Etymology?

To students of English the wodewose is best known as a stock figure in Elizabethan parades and drama, a savage, naked man decked out in leaves and boughs or moss and ivy, carrying a huge club and tossing firecrackers.1 Although Europeans were then meeting a multitude of indigenous peoples in the Americas, wodewoses were not, however, their simple reflexes. Rather, they had impeccable origins in Old Europe. Such figures had appeared somewhat earlier as heraldic figures in Britain and on the continent and seem to have played an authenticating role much like legendary ancestral histories, that is, the aristocratic, lineage-based claim to landholding was buttressed by an imagined hierophany at some distant date between the nobleman’s ancestors and the spirit of the land, a territorial and subsequently tutelary deity. Thus, we find, “Pro Rege [. . .] duo de veluetto albo [. . .] cum garteriis de blu & diasprez per totam campedinem cum wodewoses”,2 in the fourteenth-century wardrobe accounts of Edward III and in the same ruler’s household inventory from 1366 the listing of a gilded and enamelled silver cup with two “wodewosez” in the bottom.3 But this domesticated, yet not tamed, wild man had congeners still at large. At about this same time the term wodewose was doing service in scriptural glosses, for example, in the Wycliffite Bible translation: “¬er shuln dwelle þere ostricchis, & wodewoosis.”4 Here wodewose glosses Latin pilosus, and it is the hairy nature of the sylvan being that is accentuated. In the medieval mind, clothing was the sign not only of rank but also of civility itself, and the presence of a pelt instead of a tunic was less a physical than a cultural characteristic.5 It is this wodewose that we meet in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Of Gawain’s travel to Hautdesert we read:

Mesocosms and the Organization of Interior Space in Early Ireland

In early medieval Ireland, the cosmos was conceived as tripartite, composed of the heavens, earth’s surface, and underearth and undersea. Harmonious relations with cosmic forces were assured by just royal rule. Crossing this vertical coordinate, which also had implications for the human hierarchies of rank and function, were the manifold phenomena as known to human life. This external reality was mentally organized as a vast set of homologies, the recognition and maintenance of which contributed to the prosperity and fertility of the kingdom. The literate record displays multiple taxonomies and categories, often expressed in numerical values. Among these are the pentad and, in spatial terms, the quincunx. This fivefoldness and the order it represented were recognized and replicated on a variety of scales: the five provinces of Ireland, the family farm and its neighbors, the house and its outbuildings. Also implicated as mesocosms were the interior arrangements of royal banquet halls, hostels for kings on circuit and other travelers, and law courts. The quincuncial organization of interior space reflects and promotes macrocosmic order but in the great corpus of literate works is the setting for disruptive human dynamics — the stuff of story — often associated with themes of the heroic life and royal rule. This conception of interior space was elaborated in the pagan period and, in formal terms, was readily accommodated in subsequent Christian centuries, with new hierarchies and the perdurable conception of the kingship as stabilizing factors.

Pun, Quibble, Carwitchet, Clench

In the written record of eighteenth-century England, the word pun often occurs in the company of a number of now outmoded words or word uses that reference wordplay and which include quibble, carwitchet, and clench. This note explores this set and seeks satisfactory etymologies. Pun in the sense of a play on words is, according to the OED, without a sure etymology: “Perhaps shortened < punctilio n. or its etymon Italian puntiglio, although no exact semantic parallel has been attested for either the English or the Italian word.”1 In this one of several senses, pun is first attested from 1644 and has a distinct popular flavor. John Taylor writes in Mercvrivs Aqvaticvs (Chapter 3): “It being yet a question whether of his Lawrells were the best, that of Glocester or that of . . . Oxford, where he was well Tamed (there’s a Pun halfe a dram better then yours upon Sir Iohn Winter”). Some two decades later, Dryden lists pun among then-current synonyms: “A bare clinch will serve the turn; a Carwichet, a Quarterquibble, or a Punn” (Wild Gallant i. i. 2). John Eachard makes a similar pairing: “Wits both Antient and Modern . . . that never . . . received their improvements by employing their Time in Puns and Quibbles” (37) and by 1711 Addison can offer a quite modern analytical definition in the Spectator: “Having pursued the History of a Punn, . . . I shall here define it to be a Conceit arising from the use of two Words that agree in the Sound, but differ in the Sense” (6). Quibble: In the search for a more satisfactory etymology for pun, the association with quibble is worth pursuing. While a first definition (“A play on words, a pun,” OED) is without a sharply focused historical context, a second makes several points of interest: “An equivocation, evasion, or frivolous objection based on an ambiguity or uncertainty of wording, a trivial circumstance, etc. In later use freq.: an objection to a point of detail, a minor complaint or criticism.”2 While puns and quibbles became popular among men of letters, another arena was the law courts, according to Lord Shaftesbury: “All Humour had something of the Quibble. The very Language of the Court was Punning.”3 Here both formal and informal exchanges are doubtless meant (see below). Quibble is traced by the OED to a putative quib; this, in turn, has been derived from Latin: “Apparently < (originally in plural) classical Latin quibus, dative and ablative plural of quı̄ who . . . , as a word of frequent occurrence in legal documents and hence associated with the length and unnecessary complexity of legal documents.”4 A more convincing origin has recently been proposed by William Rothwell, who relates the word to cavil and compares it to Anglo-Norman kevil “small, ethically dubious matter,” a variant of keville “peg, nail, plug.” A cavil and quibble are then points on which a reader or listener gets “hung up” or about which the discussion turns. To anticipate the further discussion of the dyadic nature of the pun, the quibble exhibits polyvalence in that it embodies a notion that is assessed in both positive and negative fashion, positively by the originator, negatively by the critic.