Old English bird-names (I)

English Studies

Volumn 79, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 481-505

  Kitson, P R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 0347024146     PISSN: 0013838X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (67)

1. Which dialect it belonged to is another matter. The Otho manuscript is a copy made for a bishop of Sherborne (Sisam 1953.202, 225-230), but Harting (1937.292 etc.) has shown that it preserved the vocabulary of the translator Wærferth bishop of Worcester better than the Corpus manuscript which is the basis of the standard edition. If strosle is Wæferth's it belongs presumably somewhere within west midland 'Anglian', if the copyist's presumably either in Dorset or somewhere further into the south-West. Neither dialect has been closely placed. If the isolatedness of strosle is significant, not just an accident of a small sample, analogy may be sought in any of Kitson 1995 maps 7-9, 13, and 15-16. If the relation of meaning with Ælfric's prostle is significant, not just source-user's inertia, it may narrow plausible analogies to 8-9 and 16. If the similar equation in the Brussels glossary, whose spellings are south-eastern, is not a scribal conflation, that implies copying from an archetype from the NW Wessex - SW midland region.
2. He also compares the German curlew-name Keilhaken, but according to Suolahti (282 and refs.) its second element may well be German Hacke 'mattock'.
3. The St. Gall 913 glossary mainly of bird-names printed by Lapidge (1994.534-5) is the one cited by Whitman from Cockayne's edition in The Shrine. Lapidge (1994.173-9) gives the best summary account of the 'Leyden family' of glosses, whose non-alphabetical archetype being slightly earlier than that of the alphabetical EEC as he says 'stands at the head of an entire tradition of early medieval glossography'.
4. 3a Parsons and Styles (1966.13), comparing modern dialect 'clod-bird', think it meant the corn bunting.
5. Cf. Kluge-Seebold on the semantic development of German bunt. Lockwood's interpretation is based on a naval noun first attested in the late sixteenth century, 'of unknown origin' according to the OED, possibly from the Dutch side of the North Sea.
6. Glossaries also (Lindsay 1918.4) identify ficedula with Greek oi>KaX(X.)ic the blackcap (Thompson 1936.274; cf. Pollard 1977.54).
7. All Lehmann cites for Irdling is Davis (1903.191), all Förster cites is Davis plus Lehmann, and all Davis says is 'Irdling ein Vogel, Brehm Bild. 90 (S. Erg. Wb.)'. The author meant is presumably - given the subject-matter - the early nineteenth-century ornithologist Christian Ludwig Brehm; neither that name for pied wagtail nor an illustration numbered 90 is in any book by him traced by me (cf. 1820-2 I 924, 1831.347, 1823.249), nor can I decipher the reference to a dictionary. Lehmann equates the OE and HG, Förster remarks that they match phonetically, yet Irdling is hardly to OHG art as yroling to yro. It would seem to imply as base some Low German equivalent of Old Frisian erd cited by Holthausen. Perhaps the name is genuine, perhaps identical in origin with the OE, perhaps antecedent dialect borrowing within German even strengthens the possibility, but given the messiness of the details I can check and of Lehmann's reasoning on salthaga I am not disposed to trust it as evidence. Neither Suolahti nor Gozmány includes it.
8. That now called Norton Ditch south-west of Witney. Of the other river-names Gelling (PNOxon I 9) adduces as possibly names of birds, Culvery (PNDevon 4) is likely to be a compound in ēa 'river'. Thrushel (PNDevon 14) is despite Holthausen's advocacy (PNWark xliv) also dubious: not only is there possibility of back-formation from Thrushelton (Ekwall 1928.406, PNDevon 210), but the earliest form of either, DB's for Thrushelton, resembles perhaps significantly the Staffordshire river-name Tresel. What the forms of both may show is blending between prȳscele and Tresel. That said, it is clear that an etymon with y is involved. Presumably bird-names used substantively as river-names express some particular quality of the particular river. Local investigation might reveal whether the Thrushel is especially musical, the Yarty pied or waggish, or if Norton Ditch 'dives, or appears to dive, underground' (PNOxon I 9). In the Thames flood-plain, the wording 'appears' is judicious. Holthausen cites for comparison German Elster as if it were the word for magpie, but the early forms (Förstemann Ortsnamen I 115, 812-3) lack any trace of the -g- which they should have if it were, and show rather a Germanic formation with the agent-suffix found in OE stream-names such as Medestre and Ballestre on the 'Old European' river-naming root Al-.
9. I confess to not having the information to make a balanced judgement on this, but my general impression is that Suolahti was rather too ready to believe in loans from Low German to Swedish and not ready enough to consider the possibility of dialect formations in the North Sea Germanic of the migration period, involving parts of Scandinavia as well as the Low German-Old English region.
10. 8a Cf. the well-known fable of the goldcrest defeating the eagle as king of birds. German scholarship since von Kralik (1914.134-8), whence Lockwood (1984.91) and Hough (1995.145), has posited the sense "iron" as primary, with OE īsern and German Eisvogel both reduced from a hypothetical earlier compound that would be archaic OE *īsernfugel. Visually that is a non-starter: the kingfisher's blue does resemble the hue of ice in some lights (especially in bergs and glaciers), but has nothing in common with the brown that is the normal colour of iron, and was so even more in those days (for technical reasons explained by Walker 1952.518-520). Nor is the dropping of -fugel from the Old English form required by that hypothesis, to leave a current bird-name undifferentiated from the thing it was named after, at all satisfactorily motivated.
11. André (140) gives it only as ripariola f., but Provençal rivieirolo, rebeirolo which he quotes imply a masculine variant in Vulgar Latin.
12. 'The bird-list of "Herm."' would be easiest for our purposes.
13. Grimm (1882-8) provides no grounds for it.
14. Pokorny I 598 and Mann 502 disagree.
15. On the verb 'deducible from MLG hicken with this meaning' see Lockwood (1984.82).
16. Not in the Vita Martini of Sulpicius Severus but in his third Epistle, a companion work. It is this letter which Arnott (1964.257-8) states gives the most exact ornithological detail of any antique description of a bird called mergus; though one must add that the description is of behaviour not of the bird as such.
17. André (1967.100) notes that diminutive is a Vulgar Latinism condemned in the Appendix Probi.
18. The latter tends to betray an upbringing in North America, where divers are called loons.
19. The nihtlecan Whitman (184) gives as another word for quail is as Swaen (1907.388) and others have pointed out really adj. pl. 'nightly', the error due to Eadwine, the idiosyncratic scribe of the twelfth-century Canterbury Psalter.
20. 17a But Somerset 942(XIV) S481 Worhanan berghe looks like counter-evidence.
21. PrN wurre (Collinder 1933.217), ON orri 'capercaillie' represents either a diminutive of the compound or a parallel form (the latter de Vries s.v.; cf. Pokorny I 336).
22. Styrian waldhahn 'capercaillie' (Suo. 251) is semantically comparable.
23. The information about the pantagathi is that they were good-omened birds and made their nest in the house of the future emperor Macrinus when his son Diadumenianus was born in 202. The choice by Capponi (1979.380) of wren or goldcrest rests on very vague considerations about nest-building and the well-known folktale about the king of birds, which hardly amount to evidence.
24. As to me is Holthausen's suggestion that it was on account of the voice. If so the name would have to have been given by people a long distance away! Allusion to diet, and/or perhaps posture, seems more likely.
25. And Swaen's equation of frisca with ephebus is not authorized by the data at all.
26. But N.B. it is West Saxon bȳmere that is the etymon, not Anglian bēmere as implied by the phrasing in the article which she kindly allowed me to read in advance of publication.
27. 'Le sanderling' in French as well! 'Ce nom employé par les naturalistes français est emprunté à l'allemand ou à l'anglais' says Rolland (1879.358) impartially. The bird is 'almost confined to sandy shores' (HFP 128), and flocks with other waders. Kluge-Seebold's preference for the form Sonderling [which is the bird-name, cf. entry for Kauz], etymologized as 'one that keeps itself apart', is misguided.
28. As it is curious that Jordan mentions several times rūh 'rough, hairy' but never hrēoh.
29. If as Fisher (1966.297-8) quoting current authorities says the carrion and hooded crows are really just races of one species, and since hybridization can occur, that suggests that in the past they were even more tidily separated than the year-round domains mapped by Heinzel-Fitter- Parslow (1972.310). Parslow (1967.275) tells of sharp replacements of populations of one by the other; his information implies too that were it not for nineteenth-century game preservation the proportion of carrion crows in England would be even higher.
30. It has certainly increased greatly this century: Sharrock (1974.209) and the common observation of people my age. But it was earlier reduced by gamekeeping (Parslow 1967.277-8).
31. There are obvious declensional problems: a strong masculine noun should not have a weak genitive singular. But weak genitive plural for a strong noun reduced from -ena to -an is not impossible by this date, and the bare possibility deserves mention in case with Smith's place-name it bespeaks a south-eastern regional word. Reshaping of an original strong genitive to weak by analogy with the personal name Ufa after ūf became obsolete is also a possibility to be reckoned with (as of course is a personal name tout court).
32. Zupitza's J and R, Ker 1957 nos. 158, 269. Ker is silent on the provenance of either; one would like to believe a document alleging misdemeanours in Sandon, Essex, in 1540 bound in R a clue to its origin.
33. In making its size that of a peregrine or gyr falcon where the Latin says larger than a vulture.
34. Suolahti (349-350) presents both OHG ering(r)eoz and ON gjóor primarily as names of the sea eagle, which may be what led Förster (1917.118) to gloss them and earngēot as 'seeadler' tout court. But Suolahti adds (351) that the names for the sea eagle have for the most part held good for the osprey too. (The equivalent of *fiscearn as an additional name for osprey in early modern German perhaps deserves mention: since forms without n have been on the whole normal in that language, whether OHG aro or modern Adler, it might just indicate West Germanic date and an unrecorded second osprey-name for Old English.) Cleasby-Vígfússon and de Vries both make gjóor the osprey only. De Vries mysteriously translates earngēot and ering(r)eoz as 'Edelfalke', presumably intending gyrfalcon rather than peregrine (cf. Suolahti 333 on ranks of 'nobility' in falcons).
35. The dental consonant t in earngēot, rather than p which would correspond exactly to the Old Norse, probably is already a folk-etymological reshaping, presumably by association with gēotan 'to pour'. Some etymologists, including Holthausen (1908.164. 1963), von Kralik (1914.158-164), and de Vries, take earngēap as a genuine word connected with ON gaupa 'lynx'. The corollary that earngēap and earngēot both existed as inherited names for one bird (de Vries 1962.158, 170) is not credible. Förster (1917.118) rejected the etymology peremptorily as 'kaum richtig'. A connection with gaupa had been made by Hessels (1906.64-65), who however attributed it to folk-etymology, and took spellings like geup to show the second element as not a native word at all but a loan via Latin of Greek yxV or yx>m\ 'vulture'.
36. Much less likely that they had independent information about arpa to put with the equation arpa: earngeot.
37. Lapidge 1994.364-5, 482, 535, 537, 543. The piece from Cockayne's Shrine Whitman (165) quotes in discussing the relation of meanings 'gryphon' and 'vulture' contains some garbling; Lapidge (534, 537) clears it up without mentioning it. But he adds a little linguistic garbling of his own in calling the relation between gi(i)g of the early glossaries and giw of later ones a sound-change (537); the w was restored by analogy from oblique cases (Campbell §411).
38. The cliff-nesting habit, which to Brown (1976.259) makes there 'no likelihood that it ever bred here', could be satisfied in Sussex. Brown states that 'griffons thrive best in lands where primitive herdsmen maintain large herds of domestic stock in overgrazed or poor conditions'. That could fit Sussex in St. Wilfrid's time! We might rashly speculate that griffon vultures were marginally present in the chaotic human conditions of the migration period but became extinct around 900. Anyway, 'To breed, griffons depend on carrion over a long period of time but will travel a hundred miles per day to get it' nicely confirms the Theodoran glosses.
39. The latter naturally in the county famous for place-names such as Piddletrenthide.
40. 38).
41. The link may be accepted even though Holthausen s.v. cȳta and Pokorny I 403 both misun-derstand buteo and therefore cȳta as 'bittern'. Suolahti (320) has a different etymology for Kauz but he too makes it refer to the sound. Lockwood's (1975.180) a priori rejection of genetic connection or transference between names of owl and buzzard is contradicted by known facts such as 'mouse-hawk' as a name for the short-eared owl (S. 129).
42. The name survives as Glanty.
43. PMH 71 note that the black kite was formerly a breeding bird in Sweden. It seems from Brown (1976.258) that the red kite's later reaching abundance constitutes in itself evidence that the black kite was not ever more than marginally present in Britain.
44. The rough-legged buzzard, invoked by Whitman (167) for mūshafoc, being a far northern species is likely to have been even less significant as a winter vagrant in Anglo-Saxon England than now. If it was seen it is unlikely to have had a specific name, on the strength of its white upper tail with black terminal band it might have been counted a bleri(a)pyttel. If per improbabile it did have a proper name the only candidate would be tysca.
45. 'Crows' in the translation of Talbot (1954.143) is presumably a misprint rather than a mistranslation.
46. The n is present in all but one of the Chronicle manuscripts and in all three manuscripts of the eighth-century 'Anglian' collection of genealogies (Dumville 1976.30-35), so Suolahti (330) was certainly wrong to relate the element to a different word which lacks it.
47. Suolahti (335) and Lockwood (1969.260-2, 1984.76) take the geir- of geirfalki to be originally the word for 'spear', Lockwood assuming, which seems unwise to me, that it is the same in origin as that of geirfugl 'great auk, "garefowl"'. If the ranges of gyrfalcon and lammergeier were ever close enough for the same people to know both, then it would be relevant that Heinzel-Fitter-Parslow (1972.82) comment on the lammergeier's 'quite different flight outline from the typical vultures ... looking almost like a giant Gyrfalcon'.
48. Which to show how different the sound-changes can be is the equivalent of ōsle plus the k-suffix which is the trouble with wealh and gwalch. Its etymology is discussed among others by Hamp (1982.77-79, 1989.198, 1991), and briefly Lockwood (1981.181, 1987.125).
49. He relied upon a passage of Julius Firmicus Maternus (c. 330) which Birkhan (1968.119) stresses 'has been exposed as a Renaissance forgery'. Kronasser (1953.67) attributes the exposure to F. Skutsch apud F. Roeder apud J. Hoops Reallexikon d. germ. Altertumskunde (Strasbourg, 1911-19) II 5.
50. He missed the riddle and rejected the evidence of names.
51. From the dates given in the opening list of writers and their subjects that would seem to indicate Alexander Neckam; but in the section on hawks and falcons De Natura Rerum XXV-XXIX I do not find it.
52. Gottfried's Tristan c.1210 is the earliest I have encountered.
53. Mr. P.A. Schofield, who in a letter of 3.vii.1979 told me he had mislaid the references. Domesday Book mentions 42 nests of hawks (Darby 1977.205-7, 356), not distinguished by species but generally in a woodland context which tells against peregrines. Their strong geographical bias, 32 in Cheshire and S. Lancs, 8 in the rest of the Welsh Marches and Worcestershire, only 2 in eastern England, deserves noting.
54. The hawks that were caught on migration were according to Illingworth 1964.119-120) principally goshawks, and mainly on a yearly migration route across Holland. The sheriff of Worcester's annual render of a gyrfalcon is much likelier to represent a successful breeding establishment than a reliable migration-route. Neckam DNR XXVIII speaks of migration of gyrfalcons across the sea as a well known fact, but he does not say just where. In 'the Berkshire/Lambourn/Marlborough Downs and the Salisbury Plain ... noted for their migrant birds of prey' (Jones and Dillon 1987.100) peregrines are just one of several migrant species.
55. Similar semantics will underlie the cognacy, noted by the OED s.v. Dove, of Latin columba and Greek KOX-uußoc diver, KoXu|iß{<; diver (bird).
56. Found in Middle English guise as Rahere as a name of persons from the eleventh century on (Tengvik 1938.365), famously the founder of St. Bartholomew's hospital, London.
57. De Natura Rerum chapter XLVIII; variant readings bernek, berneke.
58. Smith's attribution of this (EPNE II 12) to the etymon of a south country dialect word meaning 'marsh' is highly unlikely because words meaning 'marsh' just are not used as qualifiers for words meaning 'stream' in the very large sample in charter boundaries; and streams called burna are on average the least marshy.
59. The Lincolnshire provenance of the cry 'Lag'em! Lag'em!' (Newton 1896.372) fits.
60. Lockwood (66) quite fails to justify his view of it as 'basically an onomatopoeic name'. If he were right to take the variant gaddel, first recorded at about the same time as gadwall in the seventeenth century, as the earlier form, then it could be reduced from OE *gœdeling 'companion', with reference to the chatter of gossips, chattering being the most noted characteristic of this duck. But gaddel is much likelier to be a phonetic reduction of gadwall (cf. gunwale always pronounced as gunnel), and a convincing origin is still to seek.
61. Lockwood's theory (1974.76-79) of a West Germanic onomatopoeic *smī to denote whistling birds fails on a variety of counts, not least the assumption that an English name would be immune to the Great Vowel Shift. To his rhetorical question 'Does the epithet "small" figure in popular bird nomenclature?' the answer from Swainson is unambiguously 'Yes'. The OED in this as in some other water-bird names suffers from lacking the data of Suolahti. Its smeath, though attested earlier in the seventeenth century than smee, is not to be regarded as the original form, but as a relic of late OE substitution of an obsolete word by a phonetically close current one, smēpe 'smooth'.
62. Loss of -h- with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel would work as in Old English: see Franck (1910) §85; on i-mutation §§32-33.
63. Perhaps it should be mentioned that burrow in the modern sense is a development of OE burh.
64. The OED separates sheld, which it translates 'particoloured, pied, piebald', from shield, saying 'Connexion with shield sb. is improbable, since "spot of colour" is not an established sense of this word, as it is of the cognate G. schild and ON skjQld (cf. skjQldóttr dappled)'. The separation is shown to be wrong by the combined facts that sheld in this bird-name has apparently the same meaning as schild in a number of German bird-names given by Suolahti, and that all five of the geographically perspicuous quotations given for sheld belong to the south-east, four specifically to East Anglia. Thus what is probably involved is agreement of the south-eastern dialect region of Old English with continental usage. It may arguably either be a relic of the early stages of settlement or derive from Scandinavian settlers in the Danelaw; *scylddraca would be an early or late formation accordingly. Consistent e in sheldrake is due partly to the regular south-eastern dialect development of IWS y > ME e, partly to the fact that the non-West Saxon form of scyld is sceld anyway. Also relevant, but obscurely, is scyld in The Phoenix 308: is se scyld ufan/ frœtwum gefeged ofer pœs fugles bœc, translated by Gollancz 'the shield above, over the bird's back, is richly put together'. It looks prima facie as if scyld denotes part of the body. If the usage is real and applicable to birds other than the Phoenix, either the top of the back not covered by the closed wings or the back of the neck is presumably meant. Should it be special to the phoenix, the picture of one in British Library Cotton Tiberius B. v, fol. 86v., has a splash of colour that could be seen as shield-shaped made by the secondary feathers at the top of the wing, and a green neck variegated with a few white streaks and red spots. The possibility most relevant to 'sheldrake' would be scribal error for se is scyld ufan 'It is variegated above', if the poet used a south-eastern word which the Exeter scribe did not recognize. There is no way to decide between these possibilities unless a parallel turns up to one or other of them.
65. There was interchange of names, too, between the shoveller and the spoonbill. Lockwood (139, 145) disagrees with Swainson (158-9) about priority. The spoonbill has bred in Norfolk but seems unlikely for Kent.
66. A vivid description of eiders is given in stanzas 22-26 of the thirteenth(?)-century Latin poem edited by Sharpe (1985).
67. Cf. German Zwergsäger, Danish lille skallesluger (Jørgensen 1958.20).