Professor Quirrell

Potterphiles will remember “p-p-poor, st-stuttering P-Professor Quirrell”, the ill-fated DADA teacher in Harry Potter’s first year at Hogwarts. For an etymology of the name Quirrell, I’ve seen a few different theories. I give them here in order or popularity and likelihood (in my opinion, of course):

1. From squirrel, evoking the furtive, fearful, scurrying mannerisms of the familiar rodent — the most common theory, by far, and the most likely explanation;
2. From Middle English querele (< Old French querele < Latin queri) “complaint, lament(ation)” — going back to same root that gives us querulous — from Quirrell’s whining, complaining personality; or
3. From Middle English querele “quarrel, dispute, altercation” — going back to the same root as the previous, but with more belligerent than sniveling connotations.
4. And incidentally, it might just be possible that Rowling borrowed the name from Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever series, which has a character named Quirrel.

I’m not sure whether Rowling herself ever said anything about this particular name, but I happened upon a word in the Oxford English Dictionary which may shed some light on the etymology: quirily, an adverb marked both rare and obsolete, meaning “perh[aps]: quiveringly” (the first edition OED has a question mark in place of the “perhaps”). This certainly sounds like a word that could have suggested the name, Quirrell, don’t you think? It definitely reinforces Quirrell’s diffident personality.

The “perhaps” and question mark indicate that the makers of the OED themselves were not sure of the meaning. A single citation is offered to attest the word, from Richard Stanyhurst’s 1582 translation, The First Foure Bookes of Virgils Æneis: “Soom doe slise owt collops on spits yeet quirilye trembling” (Book I). Of all the strange coincidences, coming across collops again is one of the most unlikely! Stanyhurst’s translation is not well-regarded. No less than C.S. Lewis called it “a monstrosity”, “trounced as it deserves” by most critics, with “no place in the history of even the English hexameter, for it is barely English” [1]. Harsh words!

Whether Rowling had ever come across this word is not at all certain, but it’s possible. She’s admitted to getting names from references like Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1870) and Nicholas Culpeper’s Complete Herbal (1653), and she’s resurrected a number of obsolete and dialectal words, such as dumbledore, hagrid, and mundungus. Why not the OED?

On the other hand, it seems she isn’t the inveterate dictionary-diver I would have expected. In a 2005 interview, Stephen Fry asked her, “Now do you actually trawl through books of rare words or OED or things, or are they [your names] just things that you somehow, you’ve got a good memory for words?” Rowling replied, “I don’t really trawl books. They tend to be things I’ve collected or stumbled across in general reading.” It seems more than a bit unlikely that quirily would ever come up in general reading. Then again, neither would dumbledore, hagrid, or mundungus.



[1] Lewis, C S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954, p. 365.

WOTD: Collops

As attentive readers will know, I am currently reading C.S. Lewis’s translation of the Aeneid. This, by the way, is really wonderful. Brilliant, in fact. The best translation since Gavin Douglas’s 16th-century rendition into Early Modern Scots. The more of it I read, the more I lament that it is incomplete; it’s a must-read for admirers of Lewis and/or Virgil.

Anyway, I came across a pretty uncommon word in the Lewis translation — two rare words, actually, but one of them, collops, got me thinking about etymology. First, let me give you Lewis’s lines:

While they about their meal bestir them and lay bare
The ribs and draw the numbles out and at the flame
Roast the yet quivering collops of the fatted game [1]

Isn’t that a tasty translation? For the sake of comparison, here is Robert Fitzgerald’s rather more mundane rendering (no pun intended): “They skinned the deer, bared ribs and viscera, / Then one lot sliced the flesh and skewered it / On spits, all quivering […]” [2]. Both translations are pretty accurate, but Lewis’s is much more, well, visceral. The choice of “numbles” for the Latin viscera and “quivering collops” for frusta […] trementia verubus gives Lewis the edge, at least according to my aesthetic.

So, numbles and collop are pretty rare words. Editor Andres Reyes includes them in his glossary — a good thing, since most readers, including me, will not be familiar with either word — defining them as “entrails” and “a slice of meat”, respectively. The second word caught my eye. Can you guess why?

When I see an unfamiliar word, the first thing I try to do is determine its meaning from my knowledge of Indo-European etymological principles. Possible cognate forms swim into my mind, often revealing the meaning and origin of the word — but occasionally leading me down the primrose path. In this case, seeing that a collop is a slice of meat, what would you think of? If you’re me, it’s Italian scaloppe (think of veal scaloppini, a dish of thinly sliced veal), Spanish escalope, French escalope, all meaning a “cutlet, cut of meat”. The derivation is from Latin scalpere “to carve, cut”, cp. English scalpel. (One is tempted to think of the Native American practice of scalping, but this is a red herring. Back to this later.)

So this seems like an obvious etymology for English collop, right? Well, I think so, but my etymological dictionaries say no! Are they right, or am I? Let’s take a closer look at the evidence.

One turns to the Oxford English Dictionary in vain (to paraphrase Tolkien). It says “derivation obscure” and gives only a couple of cognate forms, echoing an earlier scholar’s suggestion that the first element might be col– “coal”. Walter Skeat says the same, more assertively, giving the Middle English forms coloppe, col-hoppe, and (by way of analogy) the Swedish glö(d)hoppa “a cake baked over gledes or hot coals”. Ernest Weekley cites the same antecedent forms and also suggests the first syllable is “coal”, but the second (he says) is obscure. He gives the Old Swedish kol-huppadher “roasted on coals”, and he adds that the word originally meant “bacon and eggs”. Hmm. This agrees with Tolkien’s gloss in A Middle English Vocabulary, coloppes “collops, eggs fried on bacon”. And finally, the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology recaps all of the above, but again with an emphasis on bacon and eggs. The bacon, it would seem, is actually the collop (the slice of meat).

Is this right? Or is it possible that collop = “slice of meat” and collop = “dish roasted on coals; eggs and bacon” were once two entirely separate words, only coincidentally homonymic? It is extraordinarily hard to resist an etymology of collop from Latin, with those conspicuous and phonologically sound cognate forms in the Romance languages.

This also put me in mind of the word scallop. Might this refer to the “(slice of) meat” inside the bivalve? With the original sense being “cut, carve, slice”, if the word scallop is just as old as collop, then no, probably not — but, if collop came to mean simply “meat”, losing the sense of slicing and carving, and scallop is attested much later, then maybe. So I looked up scallop too. According to the OED, (e)scallop, (e)scollop goes back to Old French escalope “shell”, and it entered the Romance lexis as a borrowing from the Germanic branch, exemplary of which the OED gives Middle Dutch schelpe “shell”. Hmm, that’s plausible, but the first attested use of this word is a century later than collop, so my theory that scallop = collop could hold water too. At least as much water as could fill a scallop shell.

Couldn’t it? What do you think?

Oh, and back to the stereotypical Native American practice of scalping an enemy … It’s a funny coincidence that the verb scalp (i.e., to remove the hair from the scalp), arising through back formation from the noun, should also resemble the same root giving us scalpel, and suggesting cutting or carving. The noun scalp comes from the Germanic “shell” root I talked about above, suggesting the skull is your brain’s shell. This is analogous to Vulgar Latin testa “head”, with the earlier sense of an earthen pot, a shell, and even a shellfish. And this is the reason we have Italian testa, French tête “head”, but Spanish cabeza, German Kopf (cognate to Latin caput). This root also originally meant “a drinking vessel”, and I’ve written about it before.

It’s all a mess of metaphors and poetic diction, isn’t it? What a tangled web of words we weave when first we practice to conceive!


[1] Reyes, A.T., ed. C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011, p. 51, ll. 210–2.

[2] Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage, 1990, p. 11, ll. 288–90.

Lewis’s Lost Aeneid [Updated]

“Hardly any lawful price would seem to me too high for what I have gained by being made to learn Latin and Greek.”
— C.S. Lewis [1]

The remarkable news of the publication of Lewis’s partial translation of Virgil’s Aeneid is just beginning to spread across the internet. I learned of it myself via Facebook only this morning. A friend had posted a link to an article published in today’s Independent. This in turn led me to Amazon, where you can preorder C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile for a really good price right now (do it!). And from there to the Yale University Press, which describes the book thus:

C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) is best remembered as a literary critic, essayist, theologian, and novelist, and his famed tales The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters have been read by millions. Now, [editor] A.T. Reyes reveals a different side of this diverse man of letters: translator.

Reyes introduces the surviving fragments of Lewis’s translation of Virgil’s epic poem, which were rescued from a bonfire. They are presented in parallel with the Latin text, and are accompanied by synopses of missing sections, and an informative glossary, making them accessible to the general reader. Writes Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost, “Virgil uses something more subtle than mere length of time…. It is this which gives the reader of the Aeneid the sense of having lived through so much. No man who has read it with full perception remains an adolescent.” Lewis’s admiration for the Aeneid, written in the 1st century BC and unfolding the adventures of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy and became the ancestor of the Romans, is evident in his remarkably lyrical translation.

C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid is part detective story, as Reyes recounts the dramatic rescue of the fragments and his efforts to collect and organize them, and part illuminating look at a lesser-known and intriguing aspect of Lewis’s work.

A few additional details are known now (and I will share anything else I learn as soon as I know it): the ISBN is 978-0300167177, the book is 184 pp., and the list price is $27.50 ($17.06 on Amazon right now). You can see the cover design above.

Scholars have been aware of this translation for years. Tolkien alluded to it in a couple of letters to his son, Christopher, in the 1940s. In one of these, not published in Tolkien’s collected letters, but quoted in a footnote to letter #81, Tolkien referred Lewis’s “new translation in rhymed alexandrines of the Aeneid”. It was therefore apparently new (or newish) in the Fall of 1943 — or at least new to the Inklings. Editor Andy Reyes tells us that Lewis first began work on the translation a decade earlier, in 1935, but returned to it periodically over the ensuing twenty-five years or so. I am not going to troll through Lewis’s letters searching for references to this translation in order to attempt to say more — surely this will be a big part of Reyes’s introduction, and I look forward as much as any of you to learning more.

The appearance of this translation is a most welcome addition to Lewis’s published works. I can only hope it opens the door a little wider to let Tolkien’s unpublished Beowulf translations come through in the near future as well. More details to come!

Update:
I have heard back from editor A.T. Reyes, who kindly provided a few additional details:

The translation is not complete, with the largest selections coming from books 1 (which is complete), 2, and 6. There are also fragments from books 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 12. The book itself consists of: a foreword by Walter Hooper; a preface by David Ross, formerly Professor of Latin at the University of Michigan and one of the great experts on Virgil; an introduction by me; the transcription of Lewis’s translation, together with a parallel Latin text; and then assorted appendices with a final index of classical names and allusions.

[1] Lewis, C.S. Rehabilitations and Other Essays. London: Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 64.