Lem and Le Guin — ‘Two mutually correlated opposites’

I’ve been following, and to some extent participating in, a discussion over at Jake Seliger’s blog, The Story’s Story, on the subject of science fiction. Why so much of it is so bad, at least by the standards of the literary establishment — insert winking censure of ‘snobbery’ here — as compared to its popularity, and which science fiction (again, by those admittedly subjective standards) is actually good. I’m not going to engage in that debate here (though you’ll want to read this post as well its lengthier follow-up).

I have a different agenda today. I want to contrast two of the authors most of us agree are among the very best science fiction has to offer: Stanisław Lem and Ursula K. Le Guin.

If you haven’t read Lem or Le Guin, good starting points might be Solaris and The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin, as some of you may know, also writes fantasy, and the Earthsea Cycle is a must-read for fans of that genre. But today I’m thinking of science fiction specifically. If you move on to other books, as I’m sure you will, you might enjoy The Chain of Chance, in which Lem reinvents the crime thriller genre as a rumination on the Malthusian consequences of statistical causality — could anybody else have done that but Lem? I don’t think so! For Le Guin, readers should move on to the rest of Hainish Cycle, three of which won Hugo awards.

Now, thinking of these two excellent writers, I can’t help but regard them as both very different, but highly complementary. The Chinese concept of yin / yang springs to mind, where Lem and Le Guin strike me as 兩儀 /liangyí/, that is, ‘two mutually correlated opposites’ — hence the title of this post. Where Le Guin is warm, emotional, and somehow always ‘human’, Lem is cold, cerebral, and distinctly alien. Le Guin is sunny, Lem is overcast. Le Guin is lush, fertile, and fur-soft; Lem is barren, sterile, and gem-hard. Yet, for balance, you need both.

As a perfect example of this harmonizing contrast, set Lem’s novel, Solaris (1961), alongside Le Guin’s short story, “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” (1971). Without spoiling either, let me just say that each one brings human beings into contact with an enormous, collective alien species, planetary in size, and asks them — and us — to meditate on one of the oldest conflicts known to humankind: the Self versus the Other. Both stories have their share of brilliant moments, and to each can be applied the series of contrasting characterizations I gave above. Solaris is cold, cerebral, and frightening, while “Vaster than Empires” is warm, emotional, and ultimately welcoming. The protagonists, Kelvin and Osden respectively, have both suffered psychological traumas, but each relates to the Other differently. At the close of her story, Le Guin writes that Osden “had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self.” One cannot imagine Lem ever writing a passage like that. Where Le Guin finds the humanity in her extraterrestrial beings, Lem’s are and remain profoundly alien.

There is one additional point of contact between Le Guin and Lem that I find interesting. In 1973, Lem was inducted into the SFWA as an honorary member, even though actually ineligible according to the organization’s bylaws. Later, once he became technically eligible, the honorary membership was rescinded. Some American members, and apparently Lem himself, regarded this as a wrap on the knuckles for public criticisms Lem had made against much of American science fiction. (Criticisms which, I might add, are in the main perfectly true.) Because of the controversy, Lem declined to remain a member of the SFWA. Le Guin was one of Lem’s most vocal advocates in this imbroglio. Balance, Grasshopper. :)

And by the way, another honorary member (though technically ineligible at the time of his induction) was J.R.R. Tolkien. Might Tolkien and C.S. Lewis also be regarded as ‘two mutually correlated opposites’? They differ less than Lem and Le Guin, but the phrase — which I can’t help thinking Lem would have especially appreciated — still seems à propos.

Read the new Harry Potter short story

I’m coming to this story a little late, but it turns out to be just as well that I waited it out, as you’ll see by the end of the post.

In case you hadn’t heard it elsewhere yet, J.K. Rowling has written another short story set in the world of Harry Potter. This one, unlike the Beedle the Bard stories auctioned for charity last year, feels much closer to the ‘present’ day. Instead of a small collection of remote fairy tales (serving as background material for Harry Potter), this 800-word story tells us about a brief encounter between Sirius Black and James Potter and a paid of clumsy, buffoonish Muggle police officers. One of the officers even shares my last name! :)

The story was auctioned by Waterstone’s to benefit English PEN and Dyslexia Action along with twelve other stories — including contributions by Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Nick Hornby, Tom Stoppard, and winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing. All are worth reading — if you can decipher their handwriting! — but I particularly enjoyed the Gaiman and Hornby stories (if that’s what you’d call Hornby’s strange little work). There’s even a competition where you can submit your own story, here, which could be chosen to appear alongside the baker’s dozen. But act quickly! The deadline is June 19.

Rowling’s story — one of only two that ran on the front and back of the note card — sold for £25,000 (about $49,000 USD), accounting for more than half the total proceeds of the auction. That’s about $60 per word! Nice work if you can get it, eh? And not terribly surprising. The story is cute, and as we all know, the real world hasn’t gotten nearly enough of the Harry Potter world yet. You can read the entire story, as well as the other twelve, here. The link requires Flash; alternatively, you can read the Harry Potter story here.

Some thoughts on the names, Marcho and Blanco

It’s always been taken more or less for granted that the two progenitors of the Hobbit settlements in the west of Middle-earth, Marcho and Blanco Fallohide, represent a kind of private joke on Tolkien’s part, playing on the legendary brothers Hengest and Horsa, conquerors of England in the Fifth Century. As indeed they clearly are, historically. But since we know that in such borrowings Tolkien invariably had a linguistic source in mind as well, what about that angle? (No pun intended! :)

It’s believed that the names of Hengest and Horsa are both Germanic, with the meanings “stallion” and “horse”, respectively (though the latter has been disputed somewhat). Tom Shippey has argued that the names Marcho and Blanco mean more or less the same thing, from “Old English *marh, ‘horse’, blanca (only in Beowulf) ‘white horse’” [1]. This has been taken up by other scholars, and has seldom been questioned. And why should it be? Bosworth-Toller indeed gives us mearh “a horse, steed” and blanca, blonca “a white or grey horse” [2].

However, we should remember that Hengest and Horsa were, after all, outsiders who traveled to English soil to capture the land from its native Celtic and Roman-British population. Why should they have English names? (Whether these names were bestowed later, by the subdued English population, is a possibility I will not take up, as this is clearly not applicable to the hobbits, Marcho and Blanco.) Their names are believed to be Germanic, but that allows for considerable geographical flexibility. Some say they were Jutes, others says Frisians — we really don’t know for certain. We only know they weren’t English, ab origine. And so, if Marcho and Blanco were modeled on them, could we look further abroad for the meanings of their names too?

Marcho need not be derived directly from OE mearh. Other possibilities that might readily suffice include Old Norse marr “horse, steed” and Old High German marah “battle-horse”, and these (according to Skeat) “are cognate with (if not borrowed from) Irish and Gael[ic] marc, W[elsh] and Corn[ish] march […]. Root uncertain.” [3]. I have also seen the Cornish form recorded as margh, and additionally, the Breton as marc’h, either of which seems phonologically convincing. It’s somewhat surprising, isn’t it, to see Germanic and Celtic forms so similar, but on the other hand, all of these forms ultimately derive from Indo-European *marko “horse”. On the basis of the linguistic source alone, I don’t think we can really determine a precise geographical locus.

The case for Blanco is similar. While the presence of blanca in Beowulf (and only in Beowulf) is suggestive, there are other possible sources for the word. One thinks immediately of French / Old French blanc “white”, from which we derive Modern English blanch and blank. The French word, however, comes not from Latin (as did most of its vocabulary), but from a Proto-Germanic source, *blenk, *blank “to shine, dazzle, blind”. There is also Old Norse bleikr “shining, white”. Also closely related is Modern English blond, from Old French blond, from Frankish *blund, Proto-Germanic *blunda. It seems pretty clear to me that blanca = “white horse” more precisely = “white (merely applied in this case to a horse)”.

So, what is the upshot of all of this? Am I saying Marcho and Blanco’s names are definitely not taken from Old English? No, nothing so definitive. But I am suggesting that since Hengest and Horsa were “outsiders” to England, as Marcho and Blanco were to the Shire, then it might be worth considering linguistic sources outside Anglo-Saxon. And in doing so, one finds some pretty strong candidates — especially among the Celtic languages. Did Tolkien intend us to follow these names so far down the rabbit hole — or in this case, hobbit hole? Perhaps not, but I can’t think he would disapprove of our digging the hole a little deeper.


[1] Shippey, Tom. The Road to Middle-earth. Revised and expanded edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003, p.102.

[2] Bosworth-Toller, pp.674 and 108, respectively.

[3] Skeat, Rev. Walter W. An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Second ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893, p.353. See also Alexander McBain’s Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, Gairm Publications, 1982.

Attention Tolkien Scholars — Call For Papers [Updated]

Walking Tree Publishers has certainly kept busy lately! They’ve brought out some ten books in just the past two years, and what’s more, their books have generally set the bar pretty high for Tolkien studies. I’ve contributed to two recent Walking Tree collections myself, Tolkien and Modernity (Volume 1) and The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On. Please note that I intend no deliberate or implied connection between “setting the bar high” and publishing an essay by me! It’s just coincidence. ;)

I have just read a new CFP from Walking Tree. The planned publication comes with a pair of editors, Friedhelm Schneidewind and Heidi Steimel, and will be published simultaneously in English and German (by Walking Tree and the aptly named Stein und Baum). I presume that contributions submitted in one language will be translated into the other by the editors; the CFP makes no mention of any prerequisite knowledge of both. The subject is Music in Middle-earth — I wonder if the editors are aware of Brad Eden’s forthcoming collection on the same topic? It would seem not, given their confident statement that “[t]hough numerous melodies for his poems have been composed, sung, played and recorded, secondary literature on Middle-earth hardly mentions the subject.” [Update: I have just come across another book on the subject, published last August: Projecting Tolkien’s Musical Worlds: A Study of Musical Affect in Howard Shore’s Soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings, by Matthew Young. This book sounds interesting! Has anybody seen it?]

I refer interested parties to the Call For Papers (PDF format) for more details, including possible topics, the deadline for proposals, and so forth.

WOTD: Anacoluthon

Inspired by Omniglot, I’ve decided to start periodically posting a Word of the Day. However, unlike those on Omniglot, I intend to limit myself to English words. Well, more or less. I mean, how English are most English words, really? Case in point, today’s word: anacoluthon.

Not in most people’s vocabulary, I daresay. Nor was it in mine; I had to look it up. Rather amazingly, the spell-check in Microsoft Word apparently knows the word! So what does it mean?

Those familiar with Greek combing forms might be able to make a guess at the meaning, as I attempted to do — with some small success. The forms in question suggest a meaning along the lines of “not following, not on the path.” Another hint: the relatively common English word acolyte, with its meaning of “following, on the path”, is more or less antonymic to it. Some of you might also guess it’s a term used in rhetoric, grammar, or linguistics, as are so many of these direct Greek borrowings.

So what does it really mean? It’s a grammatical construction in which the end of the sentence does not match up grammatically to the beginning. For instance, “the professor was talking about — I couldn’t really understand him at all,” or “I warned him that if he continues to drink, what will become of him?” Technically speaking, such a thing should suggest a poor command of grammar; however, by giving it a sesquipedalian name, one can call it a deliberate rhetorical effect. :)

Does anybody actually use this word?! Well, how do you think I came across it? In June 1911, in the King Edward’s School Debating Society Report, the young J.R.R. Tolkien is described as:

An energetic Secretary who does not consider that his duties excuse him from speaking. Has displayed great zeal in arranging meetings throughout the session and considerable ingenuity in advertising them. He is an eccentric humorist who has made many excellent speeches, at times rather burdened with anacolutha. Made one valiant attempt to revive Beowulfic oratory. [1]

Since Tolkien was the Secretary of the Debating Society, I think one can presume this description was self-imposed, tongue in cheek. Certainly the use of the plural anacolutha, as well as the eponymic adjective Beowulfic, suggest Tolkien might have been the author. That he was only 19 years old makes the use of this rare word all the more remarkable. Or at least, it would be remarkable today. Can you imagine the word on the lips of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, for example? Their public speeches are certainly full of such anacolutha; however, I think it’s safe to say that any rhetorical effects were uninentional. ;)

[1] King Edward’s School Chronicle, Vol. XXVI, No. 187 (June 1911), p. 46.

“Let them sa-si, if they can speak no better.”

Today’s post is about allophones, speech impediments, and onomatopoeia — with a little Tolkien thrown in for good measure. (What isn’t improved by the addition of a little Tolkien? ;)

Browsing Omniglot today, I came across a great WOTD: the Czech verb šišlat, which means something like “to lisp”. More specifically, it refers to the substitution of /∫/ for /s/ (whereas, lisping in English is the substitution of /θ/ for /s/). The word is marvelously onomatopoeic, isn’t it? It’s lovely how the word includes the very sound in question, isn’t it? Just as the English lisp contains the very sibilant a lisper can’t pronounce. Wait, did I say that’s lovely? I think I meant rather that it’s a bit of a cruel joke on lispers. ;)

While the Czech refers to a speech impediment, Spanish speakers are aware of a deliberate regional variation in the pronunciation of the sibilant sound. Speakers in parts of Spain and Argentina recognize a distinción between /s / and /θ/, meaning that casa and caza are not homophones. The so-called Castilian lisp. In Mexico and most of the rest of Latin America, by contrast, these are allophones. Where pronounced like /θ/, the term used is ceceo; where /s/, seseo. Those terms, once again, exhibit an apt onomatopoeia. Have I lost you? Perhaps it’s me; try Wikipedia for a more detailed explanation.

The Czech word šišlat also reminds me of the story of the shibboleth. In the Bible, there is a passage in the Book of Judges where the pronunciation of the Hebrew word שיבולת (”shibboleth”) proved quite significant. There, the same distinction between /s/ and /∫/ identified members of rival tribal groups. For anyone who couldn’t pronounce the shin (ש) properly, the price was death. Once again — are you hearing an echo? — the word shibboleth contains the sound in question, though in this case, it’s not inventive onomatopoeia, but rather an existing word with an identifying pronunciation which gave the speech pattern its name.

J.R.R. Tolkien — I promised I’d be coming round to him eventually! — adopted this terminology to describe a similar phonological distinction in his Elvish language, Quenya. In the late essay, “The Shibboleth of Fëanor” (circa 1968, published in The Peoples of Middle-earth), Tolkien discusses the change from Quenya /θ/ to /s/ — though Tolkien uses the letter Þ in place of θ in the essay. As in the Biblical story, the Quenya pronunciation became a matter of political struggle. Tolkien writes that:

Into the strife and confusion of loyalties in that time this seemingly trivial matter, the change of Þ to s, was caught up to its embitterment, and to lasting detriment to the Quenya tongue. Had peace been maintained there can be no doubt that the advice of Fëanor, with which all the other loremasters privately or openly agreed, would have prevailed. But an opinion in which he was certainly right was rejected because of the follies and evil deeds into which he was later led. He made it a personal matter: he and his sons adhered to Þ, and they demanded that all those who were sincere in their support should do the same. Therefore those who resented his arrogance, and still more those whose support later turned to hatred, rejected his shibboleth.

A fascinating and diverse collection of words for describing the pronunciation, or mispronunciation, of sibilant sounds, eh?

One year online!

So now I can say tempus *really* fugit. It’s been a full year since the inception of Lingwë – Musings of a Fish. :)

Some 136 posts on a variety of topics — many of them quite arcane, I suppose, but judging by the growing feedback I have been receiving, welcome nonetheless. My daily traffic hasn’t grown a great deal yet, which may be for the best because it still allows me the freedom to respond to each comment individually. But I’ve had almost 3,500 unique visitors, with more than 10,000 pageviews. And the number of countries to have discovered Lingwë has grown sharply. I’m on the map, so to speak, in 95 countries, including such surprising visitors as Uzbekistan, Martinique, Bahrain, Cameroon, and Saudi Arabia. Still no ping from Iraq (despite hearing from most of its neighbors) — but I suppose the folks there have other priorities.

I should apologize for the sound of crickets around here over the last two weeks. I’ve been busy at work and at home, and I had another cold on top of that — my fourth in six months; what is wrong with my immune system?! But I’m back now and should be posting again regularly.

New languages at Google — not quite ready for prime time

For some time now, Google has offered a suite of online language tools, including automatic translation for text and web pages, dictionaries, and more. The idea was to compete with the tried and true Babelfish, about the only useful surviving* piece of the once-great Internet search giant Altavista. For most of its life so far, Google Translation hasn’t offered very much more than Babelfish: rather clunky, but certainly serviceable, translation between a dozen or so languages. Recently, however, Google broadened its offerings.
Like most of the new widgets coming out of Google on what seems like a daily basis, there was little in the way of fanfare. I made the discovery accidentally, in fact, when I happened to drop by there earlier this week. The front-page interface (linked above) looked the same, but I noticed eleven new languages — Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, and Swedish. This brings Google’s total to a whopping 22 different languages, double what Babelfish offers (though Babelfish still offers two forms of Chinese script: traditional and simplified). It used to be that I had to resort to obscure sites for languages like Finnish and Polish. No longer!

* Update: Babelfish is no longer with us, alas. Babelfish (as such) went offline a few years after this post. It was driven to extinction by Google Translate and other competitors. Read more about it here.

But how accurate is it? For its more well-heeled languages, Google is pretty good. As I said above, clunky but serviceable. But for the newer ones, there are some significant problems. Testing out Hindi, I made quite an alarming discovery, in fact.
I don’t speak Hindi myself (though I am learning some from my friend Arun). He volunteered to help me check a few simple phrases. You can probably guess what I tried — the names of some of Tolkien’s books. Perhaps I thought to test these out in Hindi because there is, so far, no Hindi translation of The Lord of the Rings or even The Hobbit. For “The Lord of the Rings”, Google was right on: अंगूठियों का मालिक. But add a full-stop to the phrase, and Google tacks a है onto the end that simply shouldn’t be there. “The Two Towers” also had problems. In the translation suggested by Google, इस दो टॉवर, the first word you see there doesn’t belong; to get the correct translation, दो टॉवर, you have to strip the definite article off of the phrase you feed to Google. Finally, and this is the alarming discovery I mentioned: just try “The Fellowship of the Ring” — without hesitation, Google gives back: राजा की वापसी. What’s the problem? This actually means “The Return of the King” in perfect Hindi!
How could this have happened? My guess is that somebody used the feature where Google allows human beings to suggest their own “better translations” — but whomever supplied this one probably made a bad copy-paste. Tsk, tsk. The service is bound to improve, and it is free, but at the moment, it appears rather unreliable. My friend Arun helped me identify many problems with the Hindi, and I would suppose the other new languages have their share of beta problems as well. Perhaps other readers will test out the Scandinavian and Slavic additions. I know I’ve got Polish readers — how is it?

More on Sir Gawain: Trolls, Ogres — and Rings?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — in particular, about the choices he made in two or three specific lines of the poem. This has continued to gnaw at me. Was Tolkien’s solution the only one, or even the best one? It certainly was a faithful one, if we believe Shippey’s theory that Tolkien intended his translation to mimic an error on the part of the author. But was that faithfulness worth abandoning a word of clear Germanic origin for a more Romantic one (in the linguistic sense)? In that case, one kind of fidelity comes at the cost of another.

The question continued to bug Marjorie Burns, too. She sent me this response:

In the back of my mind is the urge to try rewriting the ogre line for Tolkien and so avoid ogre. It seem obvious to me that ogre works for the alliteration. Shippey is dead right about that; but I don’t see why recognizing Tolkien’s alliterative intent locks us into the use of ogre. Surely some other word and alliterative string would work as well. Tolkien has already used troll two lines above [for the Middle English wodwos], but there must be something else. Couldn’t we have a line like: “And with trolls that trailed him from the tall heights of the fells.” Of course, then we’d need something else where Tolkien uses “wood-trolls” two lines above. Still, I’m sure that too can be solved — not that Tolkien cares or that anyone is going to change what he wrote, but only for the sake of exercise. Trolls and giants are often interchangeable in the sagas, as Tolkien well knew. So I’d go for one of several ways to indicate giant, or wood-giant in this case. I’ll leave that for another day or for some other inventive mind.

My own suggestion for ME wodwos would naturally be “woodwose”, a word Tolkien used in his fiction. Most readers will remember the Woses in The Lord of the Rings; but also, in the Narn i Chîn Húrin (in Unfinished Tales and in the more recent Children of Húrin, based on the Narn), Saeros refers to Túrin, contemptuously, as a woodwose. Picture a wild, aboriginal man of some kind, scarcely distinguishable from an animal of the woods. This would work in place of “wood-trolls”, I think, and although arcane, it has the added benefit of being extremely close to the original (OE wuduwása). Certainly better than “satyrs” [1] or “fauns” [2].

As to the other line, I like Marjorie’s suggestion pretty well — “And with trolls that trailed him from the tall heights of the fells” — though it introduces an entirely new word (“tall”) purely for the sake of alliteration. I prefer not to do that if it can be helped, even though it’s probably permissible here, because “heights” could be said to imply “tall.” What else might we try? Puzzling over that very question led me to zero in on the ME anelede, which Tolkien translated “hounded” and for which Marjorie suggests “trailed.” Tolkien and Gordon give “pursued” in their glossary [3] and identify the source of the word as the Old French aneler. So my first reaction is this: Tolkien substituted a Germanic verb (hounded) for a Romantic one (anelede), so it’s not unreasonable he should achieve linguistic parity by changing a Germanic noun (etayne3) into a Romantic one (ogres).

But even more interesting is the Old French aneler. According to Stratmann (in his entry for anelen), OF aneler derives from Latin anhelāre, and means something closer to “pant after, puff at” [4]. One or two Old French dictionaries I consulted gave OF aneler = ModF aspirer, inhaler. One recalls the folktale of the Three Little Pigs. Well, far be it from me (but that’s never stopped me before!), but I can’t see how this etymology is correct. Rather — now stay with me here — I think the source is something much nearer and dearer to the good Professor. Namely, rings!

Turning to the Dictionnaire Historique de l’Ancien Langage François, sort of the Bosworth/Toller of Old French, the etymology given for aneler is very different. In part, it reads:

Figurer en cercle; tourner en boucles, en anneaux; courber, arquer. Garnir d’anneaux. Attacher, suspender, fermer avec des anneaux. On observera qu’en particularisant l’acception générale dont Cotgrave paroit être le seul garant, on a dit et l’on dit encore anneler, en parlant des cheveux qu’on frise et qu’on tourne en boucles. (Voy. Dict. de l’Acad. Fr.) [5]

For those who don’t read French, this means, more or less:

To form into a circle; to turn in loops, in rings; to bend, to arch. To garnish with rings. To tie, suspend, close with rings. One should note that in particularizing the general acceptance of this meaning, Cotgrave appears to be the sole source; it was said and one still says anneler [= “to form into rings”], speaking of frizzy hair that turns in loops. (cf. The Dictionary of the French Academy)

Related to OF aneler are anel “circle, ring” (= ModF anneau), from Latin anus “ring”; and anelet “a small ring” from Latin an(n)ulus “small ring” (cf. English annulus). One can’t help but remember Boromir’s words at the Council of Elrond: “The Ring! Is it not a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt for so small a thing?” Or those of the Sauron’s messenger to Dáin, calling it “a little ring, the least of rings.” How wonderfully disingenuous!

But the definition in the Dictionnaire Historique seems nowhere near the idea of pursuit; and yet, Tolkien, Stratmann, and others identify OF aneler as the source for ME anelen, which clearly has that meaning. The answer to this riddle? My thinking: an enemy who encircles, turning and looping back in the pursuit, drawing an ever tightening ring around his prey. Perfect. So if I am right, has anyone else proposed this etymology? And if not, why not? I admit I like this much better than Stratmann’s “huff and puff” etymology, but is it merely an overzealous delight in the Tolkienian implications? And if this is the etymology, one boggles at the thought that Tolkien could have resisted the temptation to do something metaphorical with rings in his rendition of the poem — especially since there is a literal ring later in the poem. Christopher Tolkien dates his father’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to “soon after 1950” — so Tolkien would clearly have had rings on his mind.

Well, if the idea of “ringing him round” or “circling him” ever occurred to Tolkien, he must have dismissed it for lack of a suitable alliterative substitute for etayne3. And I can do no better, in spite of wasting plenty of thought on it — curses! What about you? Care to offer a suggestion — “for the sake of exercise”? :)


[1] Tolkien, J.R.R. and E.V. Gordon, eds. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. London: OUP, 1925, p. 229.

[2] Stratmann, Francis Henry. A Middle-English Dictionary. Rev. ed. London: OUP, 1891, p. 698.

[3] Tolkien and Gordon, p. 162.

[4] Stratmann, p. 24.

[5] Dictionnaire Historique de l’Ancien Langage François. Tome Premier A–AO. 1875, p. 441.