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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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There is some suggestion, contrary to my introductory post, that Robin was not purely an English legend.
...the citizens of Edinburgh foregathered at the Greenside, under the patronage of the magistrates, to witness the frolics of the famous outlaw and his band...
And Morris dancing? I had no idea that this was a traditional thing in Scotland as well as England. |
But Edinburgh is in the lowlands and for ancient, ethnic purposes should be considered English. When cultural purposes branch off from ethnic purposes is another matter.
Someone who makes pins or "an officer of a manor, in charge of impounding stray animals". Take your pick.
| the Gypsy plays, in particular Robin Hood. |
That's a third ethnic/cultural variable. Is this going to be a manageable question?
| I've since found more about the hoodening horse, although I still don't entirely understand what it's all about.... |
Ah, the hobby-horse: "By-form of Robbie abbrev. of the name Robert" [New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary]
Same as Robin, then.
Is bestowing fertility by catching a maiden under the 'drapes' of the hobby/hoodening horse a genuine tradition, or just one from the movies? Is that what hoodening means: throwing the cloth over someone?
| Your 'hooden' horse has a wooden horse resonance. "Hood" might have been 'wood' originally, as per our Guy Fawkes discussion. |
Odin was also mentioned and wood meaning crazy refers to him.
Grim (the Reaper) is also an aspect of Odin, latterly equated with the Devil. Cf. Robin Goodfellow.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Lots of fighting and frightening going on. (Very Samhain. Jack-o'-lantern... Jack-in-the-Green...?) Anything to do with kelpies?
"A water-spirit or demon assuming various shapes, usu. that of a horse, reputed to haunt lakes and rivers and to take delight in the drowning of travellers etc."
(No obvious connection with horses as sacrificial offerings?)
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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the Gypsy plays, in particular Robin Hood.
That's a third ethnic/cultural variable. Is this going to be a manageable question? |
Gypsies are sometimes cited to account for the ubiquity of the green man/foliate head that appears more or less everywhere from India to America. (Maybe because gypsies are synonymous with travellers and their obscure origins means they're a convenient clothes peg to hang cultural phenomena on).
Herne the Hunter is usually associated with Cernunnos (corn, horn, etc.) who is of course Pan, Bacchus, etc. Most recent version is probably Jack as in Jack and the Beanstalk.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Anything to do with kelpies?
"A water-spirit or demon assuming various shapes, usu. that of a horse, reputed to haunt lakes and rivers and to take delight in the drowning of travellers etc." |
Any connection between Kelpies and Selkies, seals who changed into maidens, on the seashore, the indeterminate margin between land and water? Shape-shifting is also a Dionysian characteristic but occurs in many folk tales of course. The water/horse connection seems to have essentially feminine overtones as in mermaids (mare and other mar words we discussed already) and there's a clear visual parallel between seaweed and hair.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Has anyone come across a connection between Hood and the hood they put over the person-just-about-to-be-hanged? Though I don't necessarily want to revisit All-Gallows Day.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Grim (the Reaper) is also an aspect of Odin, latterly equated with the Devil |
So reaper is another form of reeve and brings to mind the sickle moon, the curved sickle -- which could be construed as 'devilish'.
| Has anyone come across a connection between Hood and the hood they put over the person-just-about-to-be-hanged? Though I don't necessarily want to revisit All-Gallows Day. |
Horses also had hoods placed over their heads, not just blinkers, usually in battle. As protection or disguise? Horse's heads are well-known to mafiosi (Irish-American tradition?). Not to mention hoods.
Hoods are reminiscent of masks and the green man comes to mind, again, as does Greek play-acting; masks don't just hide physical features, they change the personality, an indication of an actor's metamorphosis. The most complete metamorphosis is from life to death or vice versa. The hangman was also hooded. A hood is a form of disguise; there's also 'hoodwink', to blindfold, pull the wool over someone's eyes or to disguise your 'wink'. Perhaps 'marriage' comes from harnessing a horse, bridling its head.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| So reaper is another form of reeve |
I don't get why reap or rip should be "of unknown origin": looks like ripe to me. And one sense of ripe is "engage in robbery, plunder, grope, search, rifle, ransack, scrutinize, break, dig, plough up...".
(Ripe, ripa, riparian: does a river bank have anything to do with the dead/reaped coming to the Styx? Or is it 'just' ripa = river, by the P = F = V rule?
River: rive-er? Pull or tear apart, riven, rift, ripper, raphe.)
Variants of ripe/rip clearly include rifle and rape. (Maybe grope/grip/gripe = yrope/yrip/yripe = a-rope/a-rip/a-ripe? Greifa, fork (as in tearing apart?) and burrows/ditches (as in rivers) are mentioned in connection with these.)
A rape was an administrative division of Sussex: back to reeves again?
Also rape = rope. Maybe rope (Cf. rob) has to do with taking by force (rape, rapid, rapt, raptor, rapier) while other synonyms, such as 'stout cord', refer to it being stout cord.
{Rap/rape, as in rape-seed, has to do with turnips and radishes: radix, root... a separate thread, I suppose.}
Then, of course, there's rend, render, rent: tearing apart, dividing up... paying the reeve?
Rip also means "a strickle for a scythe" and "an inferior, worthless, or worn-out horse"; and rifle is "a piece of wood used for sharpening scythes" or "a bent stick attached to the butt of a scythe for laying corn in rows", by the way.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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And to think, all this happened since the Anglo-Saxons arrived.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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A lot of it -- maybe most of it -- probably did, but not because language evolves so rapidly, but because writing the vernacular down (and being exponentially developmental) with disparate spellings creates the illusion of differences in words. Seeing them as necessarily different words is linguistic rectitude. Very hard to distinguish cognates from rectograms. As far as I can tell, the latter is woefully under-estimated.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Canna agree wi' youse, Crispie. If you look at Chaucer, there are very few words he uses that are totally unfamiliar to us. But every time you post, you introduce us to words that have disappeared completely (and not only because hayricks have been replaced by black polythene tubettes -- see, there isn't a word for them yet!).
In my opinion Merrie England must go back at least five thousand years.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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This is off-topic for this thread...
| In my opinion Merrie England must go back at least five thousand years. |
I agree... but the under-estimation of the impact of literacy is complementary, not contrary, to your argument. We have been developing a different attitude to what the written record is a record of from that of the linguists.
| If you look at Chaucer, there are very few words he uses that are totally unfamiliar to us. But every time you post, you introduce us to words that have disappeared completely |
How much of that is down to Chaucer's influence, I wonder...
Anyway, I don't understand your point. I can only dredge things up from the OED because they are attested somewhere and put at our fingertips. But what is attested is only the spelling. The OED makes some cross-references, but doesn't treat variants as essentially the same word; whereas we can see a whole ganglion as one. (Presented with picture of a man and a picture of a boy, the OED will say they are father and son, say; while I would say we often/usually can't tell father-and-son from the same person at different ages.)
OED is all about the specifics of the sources. (Did you watch any Balderdash and Piffle?) If one spelling occurs in a certain context, that's it, that word has that meaning; and other spellings in contexts with (even slightly) different senses are treated as separate words.
I don't know whether different versions of the word had developed naturally and had distinct lives on the lips of the illiterate, with different spellings following in due course; or one and the same word was used, with a natural variety of meanings, and entered the record under different spellings. But I do know that the written record is not necessarily able to tell us the difference. (Linguistics proceeds on the basis that it is.)
I also know that different spelling conventions are possible for the very same pronunciations and it is often evident that rectograms have formed because RP rules are used (almost) invariably, giving different pronunciations and the illusion of different words. (I've mentioned newt/eft often. Can you look at newt and automatically say "neft"?)
It's the same with mispronouncing foreign words. Imagine someone spelled chaise 'shez' and then saw the correct spelling, too, and concluded that the French have two words for chair, pronounced "shez" and "chase" (or "shay" and "shez").
I've often seen that an -SK word is listed as an "obsolete except dialectical" variation of an -SH word; and it didn't take long to find an example: bosk = bush.
And the OED says it's pronounced "bosk". But SK can be pronounced "sh". So did two variants arise naturally and one die out? Or was bosk pronounced "bush" but its spelling not chosen as the standard?
Furious changes and variations in spelling can still overlie quiet continuity in the language. The linguists don't get that. Bosk didn't die out, its spelling did.
A lot of variation arose after the Anglo-Saxons because writing vernacular English was a new thing (subsequently standardised).
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AJMorton
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Has anyone come across a connection between Hood and the hood they put over the person-just-about-to-be-hanged? |
Yeah. It is in my first post. I found it the most tantalising piece of Wallace/Hood evidence.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Also rape = rope. Maybe rope (Cf. rob) has to do with taking by force (rape, rapid, rapt, raptor, rapier) |
Can't remember where we got to with 'rob'; ploughing through some intensely interesting and convoluted discussions on Gilles's French language discussion forum, intrigued to find one of the words highlighted in the 'does French come from Latin?' argument is 'slave' (esclave). As it's commonly agreed to be derived from Slav (why were Russians, Serbs, et al. enslaved anyway?) I checked on OED and found
O.E. Wealh "Briton" also began to be used in the sense of "serf, slave" c.850; and Skt. dasa-, which can mean "slave," is apparently connected to dasyu- "pre-Aryan inhabitant of India." More common O.E. words for slave were þeow (related to þeowian "to serve") and þræl(see thrall). The Slavic words for "slave" (Rus. rab, Serbo-Croatian rob, O.C.S. rabu) are from O.Slav. *orbu, from the PIE base *orbh- (also source of orphan) the ground sense of which seems to be "thing that changes allegiance" (in the case of the slave, from himself to his master)
Could be baloney but more inventive at least than the tired old Slavic stuff. (On a slightly frivolous note, Rupert the definitive upper-class name was the one who held the rope? cf. Robert)
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Boreades
In: finity and beyond
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Anyone who has studied Native British Martial Arts in sufficient depth will know of Scáthach, the legendary Scottish warrior.
A friend who is an expert on Gaelic tells me that Scáthach is pronounced "Skaahlochk". It came as a pleasant surprise to learn that this makes it the same as "Scathelock", the original form of Will Scarlett's surname (he of the Robin Hood tales).
Copperlily had some nice material on the origins of the names.
| The real Will Scarlet? No one has ever found a really suitable candidate. P Valentine Harris conducted an exhaustive search of the Wakefield manor court rolls for his 1973 book 'The Truth About Robin Hood'. But he could only find a reference to an Adam Schacklock of Crigglestone in April 1317 who he suggests could be a member of Will Scarlet's family. He concludes rather lamely that Scarlet could also be an alias. |
That's not much good, dig deeper, further north.
| John Bellamy discovered a William Schakelock to whom the Chamberlain of Scotland had paid a sum in April 1305. There is another reference to a Schakelock who was a soldier in the Berwick town garrison in December 1316, and later a William Scarlet among the names of those who in November 1318 were granted pardons for felonies. If these are the same person, it would suggest that this candidate fought in the northern wars. |
It seems the further back in time we can track Schakelock and related names, the further north they go. Just like some other characters in Robin Hood.
It appears that Hood is also a Scottish and Yorkshire name (see : Hood surname statistics).
There are also as many Littlejohns in Scotland as in England, see : Littlejohn Forebears
For Mutches in Aberdeen, see : Find My Past : Mutch
Almost equal in total number, but with England having a much larger population, this means the names like Hood and Littlejohn occur more frequently (per capita) and are more statistically significant in Scotland than England.
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