A MeFi post by clavdivs (who’s been a member even longer than I have, and whom I think of when my wife and I watch an episode of I, CLAVDIVS) sent me to Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s long poem “Satan Absolved,” written in odd-for-English Alexandrine couplets, and there I found this passage:
Tʜᴇ Lᴏʀᴅ Gᴏᴅ
And thou wouldst be incarnate?Sᴀᴛᴀɴ
As the least strong thing,
The frailest, the most fond, an insect on the wind,
Which shall prevail by love, by ignorance, by lack
Of all that Man most trusteth to secure his back,
To arm his hand with might. What Thy Son dreamed of Man
Will I work out anew as some poor cateran,
The weakest of the Earth, with only beauty’s power
And Thy good grace to aid, the creature of an hour
Too fugitive for fight, too frail even far to fly,
And at the hour’s end, Lord, to close my wings and die.
Such were the new redemption.
I was pretty sure I’d never seen the word cateran before; the OED (entry from 1889) has:
1.a. † As a collective noun. Common people of the Highlands in a troop or band, fighting men. Obsolete.
(?a1513) Full mony catherein hes he chaist..Amang thay dully glennis.
W. Dunbar, Poems (1998) vol. I. 133 [Composed ?a1513]
1768 Ask yon highland kettrin what they mean.
A. Ross, The Fortunate Shepherdess, A Pastoral Tale 120 (in Jamieson’s Dictionary)1.b. One of a Highland band; a Highland irregular fighting man, reiver, or marauder.
1371–90 Of Ketharines or Sorneris. They quha travells as ketharans..etand the cuntrie and..takand their gudis be force and violence.
Stat. 12 Robt. II (in Jamieson’s Dictionary)
[c1430 Per duos pestiferos cateranos et eorum sequaces.
Bower, Contn. Fordun anno 1396 (in Jamieson’s Dictionary)]
[…]
1832 These overgrown proprietors with their armies of catherans.
Blackwood’s Magazine 65/2
1887 Plundering Caterans always ready to flock to those who promised booty.
Duke of Argyll, Scotland as it Was vol. II. 6
And the etymology:
Lowland Scots catherein, kettrin, appears to represent Gaelic ceathairne collective ‘peasantry’, whence ceathairneach ‘sturdy fellow, freebooter’ (McAlpine); Cormac has Irish ceithern, which O’Donovan renders ‘band of soldiers’, thence ceithernach ‘one of a band’.
Notes
The th has long been mute in Celtic, and the Irish ceithern /ˈkeərn/ is phonetically represented by English kern n.¹ It is not easy to account for the preservation of the dental in Lowland Scots, unless perhaps through the intermediation of medieval Latin as in Bower’s cateranos. (Stokes refers ceithern to Old Irish *keitern, Old Celtic keterna, a feminine ā-stem.)
I’m dubious about “the preservation of the dental in Lowland Scots,” but it certainly does look like the same word. The eDIL entry is here, Wikipedia has an article that doesn’t add much (it’s one of the ones based on an old 11th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica entry), and M-W says “Middle English (Scots) ketharan, probably from Medieval Latin katheranus, from Scottish Gaelic ceithearn band of fighting men.” An odd word that doesn’t seem especially appropriate to the context of the poem and was certainly not needed for the rhyme; I presume Blunt was just showing off.
I knew this word. Most likely, I picked it up from some fantasy novel, but I don’t know which one. It’s the kind of thing that might show up in The Well of the Unicorn, but the geography is wrong. (Anyway, I checked, and it doesn’t appear.) It would be less characteristic, but not impossible, in The Book of the New Sun, but it’s not there either. I also thought of the video game Gemfire, but the Elite Highlanders never receive that appellation there either.
I have always found this type of verse, with changes of speaker in the middle of metered lines, very peculiar. I can’t see how they are supposed to be read or scanned. To get the meter right, the speaker labels have to be ignored, which might work for something intended as a dramatic, multi-role reading, but it hard to do when presented with a verse on the page.
These kinds of dialogue poems always make me think of “Incident in a Rose Garden” by Donald Justice—which may have been the first one I encountered. There, the format of successive speakers really works. However, in “Incident in a Rose Garden,” the speaker never changes in the middle of a line, and only once in the midst of one of the three-line stanzas. Moreover, the poem is unrhymed and loose with the meter, and (when correctly formatted, as in the linked version) the speaker labels are placed less obtrusively off to the side.
But… but… Shakespeare!
I knew “cateran” from somewhere, though not sure where. Walter Scott?
It looks tantalisingly like Welsh cadarn “strong”, notably found in the Four Branches in the kenning Ynys y Kedyrn “the Island of the Mighty” (i.e. Britain.) As a noun it can mean “warrior.” GPC reckons it’s from the same root as cad “battle, throng, army.”
The vowels look wrong; though, come to think of it, Welsh cadarn might go back to an earlier *cadern.
I can find absolutely no support for the idea that the Lowland Scots word might be originally from Bythonic rather than Goidelic; but Strathclyde was Cumbric-speaking, quite possibly up until the eleventh century.
An odd word that doesn’t seem especially appropriate to the context of the poem and was certainly not needed for the rhyme; I presume Blunt was just showing off.
Is this another of the many word that Walter Scott popularized or made generally familiar? (Rob Roy and here; another work here.)
It’s especially odd, though, because the meaning of the word is *so* off. Who uses a word meaning “a brigand, robber, or highwayman; usually works in groups” to mean “something beautiful, but weak, frail, short-lived, and incapable of violence”?