Druid Bird.

In Brian Morton’s TLS review of The Oak Papers by James Canton, I was startled to find the following parenthetical etymology:

wrens (the word derives from “Drui-en”)

I’m used to false etymologies being peddled by journalists, but this one was so plainly ridiculous that I wondered where it had come from. Now that I’ve found out, I’m going to share my discovery with you. The Modern Irish word for ‘wren’ is dreoilín; the earlier words were dreän (also dréën, dreoan, droen) and dreollán. The only etymological discussion of that word-cluster I’ve turned up (I’m sure Xerîb can find more recent ones) is in a Miszellen article by Whitley Stokes, “Irish Etymologies,” Indogermanische Forschungen 26 (1909), on p. 143:

dreoán ‘wren’

dreoan, Rev. Celt. 25, 302, notes 2, 6, 7, corruptly dreaán .|. dreollän, O’Cl. This is obviously a diminutive of *dreo = Cymr. dryw ‘wren’, as eo ‘yewtree’ is = Cymr. yw. *Dreo, dryw point to an urkelt. drevo-, cognate with Germ. treu (vorgerm. drévo-) and its numerous relatives. This seems supported by the bit of folklore embodied in pseudo-Cormac’s etymology druién .|. ēn donē fāisdine ‘a druid-bird’, i. e. a bird that makes prophecy, YBL. 265a 20, and by the facts that Cymr. dryw also means ‘druid’, ‘soothsayer’, and that in a Latin Life of S. Moling the wren is called “magus avium, eo quod aliquibus praebet augurium”.

Loth, however, identifies Cymr. dryw ‘wren’ with Bret. dreo vif, alerte, joyeux, “sens corroboré par le nom breton de laouenanic, sous lequel cet oiseau est généralement connu en Bretagne”, Rev. Celt. 20, 342; and see Victor Henry, Lexique etymol. du Breton moderne s. v. dréô.

You can see pseudo-Cormac here:

And from the confusion of the English and Irish words, you get remarks like this, from Joe Mc Gowan’s Sligo Heritage site: “Medieval texts interpret the etymology of wren, the Irish for which is dreolín, as derived from ‘dreán‘ or ‘draoi éan‘ the translation of which is ‘druid bird’.” Some such source is clearly the origin of Morton’s (Canton’s?) opaque “Drui-en.” As for wren itself, it seems to be purely Germanic (OED [entry from 1928]: “Old English wrenna […], obscurely related to Old High German wrendo, wrendilo, Icelandic rindill“).

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    Might Welsh dryw “wren” and Irish dreoilín not be connected with “tree” (rather than “true”)?

    I’ve always supposed that “druid” itself goes back to the “tree” etymon; but I was perhaps influenced by the ordinary Welsh word for “druid”, which is actually derwydd (cf derw “oak trees”), and I see from GPC that this is not in fact the derivation of the word at all: it’s from Brythonic *do-are-u̯ı̆d-, and the “oak” derivation is a mere folk etymology.

    Wiktionary claims that “druid” actually is “from Proto-Celtic *druwits (literally ‘oak-knower’)”, but I wonder …

  2. pseudo-Jen says

    I want to be pseudo-Cormac.

  3. David Eddyshaw says

    Apparently (from the WP page on “druid”) it’s been suggested that Welsh dryw in the sense “druid” is actually borrowed from Irish.

  4. >I want to be pseudo-Cormac

    I think the role is yours for the taking, because in my brief research, pseudo-Cormac is a sea of knowledge the internet has yet to chart.

    If Cormac is really from corb- raven, it’s a nice upgrade from dove, or rather p-Jen.

  5. David Marjanović says

    dove, or rather p-Jen

    Day saved.

    a bird that makes prophecy

    Like a Germanic swan?

    Mir schwant Übles = “I have a bad feeling about this”, but too literary to be put into Star Wars.

  6. David Marjanović says

    Wiktionary on dryw:

    Etymology 1

    Possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dʰerh₃- (“to leap, spring forth”); see Scottish Gaelic dàir. For similar sense development, compare Ancient Greek τροχίλος (trokhílos, “Egyptian plover”) from τρέχω (trékhō, “to run”).[1][2]

    Cognate with Old Irish dreän (“wren”) and possibly Proto-Germanic *wrandijô (modern English wren).

    […]

    Etymology 2

    From Proto-Brythonic *drüw, from Proto-Celtic *druwits, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *dóru (“tree”) + *weyd- (“to see, to know”), hence meaning “tree-knower”.

  7. Just thought I’d mention an idea of mine, that folk etymologies are not irrelevant to “real” etymology. They can advance the establishment and development of an etymon by reinforcing meaning and memory.

  8. Amazon’s preview of Canton’s book shows that his immediate source for the Drui-én etymology is Graves’ White Goddess.

    My nonsubscriber’s preview of Morton’s TLS review ends at “Unfortunately, the fine writing is compounded by a reliance on literary rather than scientific sources.” Indeed.

  9. Amazon’s preview of Canton’s book shows that his immediate source for the Drui-én etymology is Graves’ White Goddess.

    *emits weary groan*

  10. Archived version of the review, for those who want to read the whole thing.

  11. David Eddyshaw says

    There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of evidence that the (real, historical) druids actually had a thing about trees in the first place (in fact, as far as I can make out, there’s not a great deal of truly reliable evidence about them at all, just an inviting space into which “researchers” can project their own fantasies. Possibly starting with Julius Caesar …)

    I wonder if the tree fetish has been retroactively attributed to them on account of the (folk?) etymology – though if so, this seems to have begun early. With Pliny, no less … but the Romans were not averse to a bit of those-wacky-barbarians exoticism, even when they didn’t have transparently political motives for it. (Looking at you, C Julius!)

  12. Yggdrasil and the irmensol and seem to suggest that tree fetishes were a long-lived thing among those wacky barbarians, even if no proper attribution to druidry is extant. I wonder how ancient Celtic cultural beliefs varied over time and space, and vis-a-vis early Germanic beliefs.

    I’m not clear on yew mythology (yewdaism?), but there is a current of scholarship suggesting yew trees were important to Celtic peoples. The association of yews with churchyards spans an area that seems more likely to be a Celtic survival than a Germanic.

    A subcurrent of yew-worship wouldn’t necessarily mean Druids were tree-priests, of course. Just mentioning potentially linked ideas.

  13. David Eddyshaw says

    How exactly is Proto-Germanic *wrandijô supposed to be connected with dryw (which may – or may not – be from *dʰerh₃-)? Are we allowed anagrams in Indo-European etymologies now? (It seems to me that, as in medicine, so in linguistics, it’s important to be able to admit that sometimes, We Just Don’t Know.)

  14. It’s one thing to “worship” individual trees, it’s another to “worship” any tree of the species in general. In our enlightened age, some British oaks and some Californian redwoods are named, visited, pampered, and made to share selfies. Others are construction material. I wouldn’t be surprised if some supposed yew-worship was a myth based on observing a special relationship with some particular yew trees.

  15. David Marjanović says

    I wonder how ancient Celtic cultural beliefs varied over time and space, and vis-a-vis early Germanic beliefs.

    In both cases we really have just the tip in time and space (medieval Ireland, where every Latin letter was associated with a different species of Irish shrub, and Snorri Sturluson) plus Caesar/Pliny/Tacitus plus a number of archeological hints that are compatible with what we knew but also don’t rule out a wide range of other possibilities.

    yewdaism?

    Ha!

    But a number of Celtic yews were actually rowans, it seems…

    Are we allowed anagrams in Indo-European etymologies now?

    Apparently. No further etymology is given at any of the links, and I can’t get it to make sense.

    it’s important to be able to admit that sometimes, We Just Don’t Know.

    Especially in this kind of case, where it would have been so easy to declare them both substrate words (see also: *mesl- ~ *a-msl-) and feel like you’ve discovered something instead of just labelled your ignorance!

  16. David Marjanović says

    (Well, redwoods aren’t construction material because they basically fall apart. But I think you can make paper from them.)

  17. David Eddyshaw says

    @Y:

    The Kusaasi do this (though not with yews); trees are grammatically animate, and particular individual trees can be witches (i.e. drain people’s life force), or can be spiritual guardians of human beings (to be more accurate, it’s the win “spiritual individuality” of the tree which is the guardian.) People are named after trees for that reason. There is no sensible sense in which the Kusaasi can be said to worship trees, however.

    I was often struck by resemblances between Kusaasi animism and the classical sort, especially the sort of thing one seems to glimpse from before the Romans remade their gods into the image of the Greek pantheon. Genius seems to overlap quite a lot with win, for example.

    While “animism” is obviously no more a valid category within “religion” than “theism” (and much less so than “monotheism”), it does seem at least possible that my Celtic forebears would have found Kusaasi concepts of these things less exotic than the more Hellenistic sort of Roman concepts (and that the Romans might have misunderstood the Celts in ways not unlike the ways that Europeans have misunderstood African “pagans.” Like the Greeks before them – and us after them – the Romans seem to have had an untroubled notion that all religions were basically pretty much the same kind of thing as their own, but with a few different labels.)

    It’s interesting that some classical authors attribute sophisticated philosophical beliefs to the Druids, while also saying that they were forbidden from writing any of them down. This reminds me of the difficulty one has in investigating the “religion” of the culture to which the Kusaasi belong: but there it’s not that anybody is forbidden from writing the doctrines, it’s that there aren’t “doctrines” in the tidy systematic way that Christians and Muslims and Jews think are inseparable from “religion.” (Well, some Christians and Muslims and Jews … the ones who write all those books …)

  18. Not at all. In California, redwood is the preferred lumber for unfinished outdoor construction (e.g. porch steps, decks, and such), because it is very resistant to weathering. Redwood lumber today comes from young trees and is rather soft. Back when people did such things, heartwood from old-growth redwoods was used as well, and it is quite hard.

  19. How exactly is Proto-Germanic *wrandijô supposed to be connected with dryw (which may – or may not – be from *dʰerh₃-)?

    I had the same question.

  20. J.W. Brewer says

    One can come up with plausible sociological reasons why medical professionals in practice are extremely reluctant to admit that We Just Don’t Know. Not clear to me why etymologists are in the same boat, since it’s not as if they’ve been socialized by years of grueling apprenticeship in order to enter a highly-paid and politically-influential caste whose social/economic power depends on Always Seeming Authoritative.

  21. >But a number of Celtic yews were actually rowans, it seems…

    I seem to recall one was a Cowan, but I may be misremembering his eponymology.

  22. Trond Engen says

    I wonder if one might connect druid with dervish. Wiktionary:

    From Turkish derviş, from Ottoman Turkish درویش‎, from Persian درویش‎ (darviš), from Middle Persian dlgwš (driyōš, “poor, needy”).

    I don’t know how broadly this word for “poor” is attested, but it could perhaps explain (by contamination) the semantics of Gmc. *þarbō-, Old Norse þǫrf “want, need”, etc.

  23. David Marjanović says

    Not clear to me why etymologists are in the same boat, since it’s not as if they’ve been socialized by years of grueling apprenticeship in order to enter a highly-paid and politically-influential caste whose social/economic power depends on Always Seeming Authoritative.

    Physician envy instead of physics envy?

    Not at all.

    Ah.

  24. > J.W. Brewer : One can come up with plausible sociological reasons why medical professionals in practice are extremely reluctant to admit that We Just Don’t Know.

    The ones who do admit that are few and far between.

    David Marjanović: I was reading Lameen Souag’s blog “Jabal al-Lighat” that you linked to, and I encountered the Bulgarian word “keshki”, from Persian via Turkish. it means the same thing in my grandmother’s Bulgarian that it means is Algerian Arabic.

  25. David Eddyshaw says

    The ones who do admit that are few and far between.

    Perhaps, when it comes to admitting it to patients; though my own experience is that the effect on a patient’s trust and confidence is very unlikely to be negative so long as you do your admitting properly; for example, you need to take the trouble to explain why you don’t know, what you propose to do about it, and indeed whether anybody else does know. (The answer is all too often, “If you find someone who says that they do know, run a mile. They just want your money and they won’t make you better, only poorer.”)

    When it comes to admitting it to colleagues, I think it’s an indispensable part of basic medical ethics; and above all, when it comes to admitting it to yourself. The only kind of trainee that has ever really worried me (as opposed to merely annoying me) is the sort who doesn’t know when to ask the boss when they’re out of their depth. Such people are dangerous, and need to be gently steered into politics or etymology.

  26. Such people are dangerous, and need to be gently steered into politics or etymology.

    Pshaw! Etymologists aren’t _that_ bad.

  27. David Eddyshaw says

    I like the druid/dervish/poverty angle. It reminds me of those alarming Irish saints, like Ronan Finn. When he cursed you, you stayed cursed.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buile_Shuibhne#The_saint's_curse

  28. Trond Engen says

    Synchronicity:

    Another version from the Irish text, titled The Poems of Sweeny, Peregrine, was published by the Irish poet Trevor Joyce.

  29. Trond Engen says

    The druid-dervish idea is hardly even a suggestion, just a speculation from roughly similar phoneme sequences. But if it were to be viable, it would place the druids more in the tradition of mystics and holy hermits than public cult leaders and priests. That’s an aspect of pre-Christian Irish religion that we maybe should expect anyway, since monasticism and hermitry were central elements in early Irish Christianity.

    And the story of Shuibhne could just as well be that of a holy madman as that of a cursed king.

  30. Trond Engen says

    And all those yews that he sets alight… He may also be a very Christian madman destroying symbols of pre-Christian cult.

  31. Stu Clayton says

    Pshaw! Etymologists aren’t _that_ bad.

    David Etypshaw is proof of that.

  32. Trond Engen says

    Me: And all those yews that he sets alight…

    A hero of the Irish alightenment.

  33. Another version from the Irish text, titled The Poems of Sweeny, Peregrine, was published by the Irish poet Trevor Joyce.

    Yes, in 1976 — I think it was his second book. I like it very much; it starts:

    It’s no secret how Sweeny, king of Dal Araidhe and scion of noble though disputed stock, wandered deranged from battle. These periods recount his flight, its reasons and results. These are the records of Sweeny’s madness.

  34. Trond Engen says

    That’s a very good start, both very medieval and very modern at the same time.

  35. For LH readers who are curious, R.I. Best edited a text of Middle Irish wren omens here, in “Prognostications from the Raven and the Wren”, Ériu, vol. 8 (1916), pp. 120-126. A sample of what the calls of the wren mean:

    Mad ad cluais cli comrac fri hóg ua cein no fess la mnai óic.
    If it be at thy left ear, union with a young man from afar, or sleeping with a young woman.

    (LH readers who do not have institutional access to this publication can sign up for a free JSTOR account providing access to 100 articles a month.)

  36. “union with a young man from afar, or sleeping with a young woman.”

    Лучше синица в руке, чем журавль в небе (“a tit in the hand is better than a crane in the sky”) as the saying goes.

  37. in a Latin Life of S. Moling the wren is called “magus avium, eo quod aliquibus praebet augurium”.

    The preeminence of wrens in divination is also found in Greek tradition. The following incident is mentioned in passing and without detail in Ovid Metamorphoses 13:717–718, but Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses (apparently following a lost work of Nicander of Colophon) tells the full story here, §14:

    Μούνιχος ὁ Δρύαντος ἐβασίλευσε Μολοσσῶν καὶ ἐγένετο μάντις ἀγαθὸς καὶ ἀνήρ δίκαιος. ἔσχε δὲ παῖδας ἐκ Ληλάντης Ἄλκανδρον, ἀμείνονα μάντιν ἑαυτοῦ, καὶ Μεγαλήτορα καὶ Φιλαῖον καὶ θυγατέρα Ὑπερίππην. τούτους γενομένους πάντας ἀγαθοὺς καὶ δικαίους ἐφίλησαν οἱ θεοί. ἐπεὶ δὲ αὐτοὺς ἐπὶ τῶν ἀγρῶν νυκτὸς ἐπελθόντες λῃσταὶ συνελάμβανον, οἱ δὲ ἐκ τῶν πύργων ἔβαλλον (οὐ γαρ ἦσαν αὐτοῖς ἰσόμαχοι) <καὶ> πῦρ ἐνέβαλλον οἱ κλῶπες εἰς τὰ οἰκία. Ζεὺς δ΄ οὐ περιεῖδεν αὐτοὺς ὁσιότητος ἕνεκα τελευτήσαντας οἰκτήστῳ θανάτῳ, μετέβαλε δὲ πάντας εἰς ὄρνιθας. καὶ Ὑπερίππη μὲν ἐπεὶ φυγοῦσα τὸ πῦρ εἰς ὕδωρ κατέδυ γέγονεν αἴθυια· οἱ δ΄ ἄλλοι ἐκ τοῦ πυρὸς ἀνέπτησαν, Μούνιχος μὲν τριόρχης γενόμενος, Ἄλκανδρος δὲ ὀρχίλος. Μεγαλήτωρ δὲ καὶ Φιλαῖος, ὅτι τὸ πῦρ φεύγοντες διὰ τοῦ τοίχου παρὰ τὴν γῆν ἔδυσαν, ἐγένοντο μικροὶ δύο ὄρνιθες· καὶ ἔστιν ὁ μὲν αὐτῶν ἰχνεύμων, Φιλαῖος δ’ ὀνομάζεται κύων. ἡ δὲ μήτηρ αὐτῶν ἐγένετο κνιπολόγος πιπώ.

    Munichus, son of Dryas and king of the Molossians, was an excellent seer and a just man. By his wife Lelante he had as children Alcander, a better seer than himself, and Megaletor and Philaeus, as well as a daughter Hyperippe. They were all good and just and the gods loved them. When one night they were in the fields some raiders came up and tried to capture them. The family shot at them from towers (not being able to equal them in fight) but the robbers sent fiery arrows into the buildings. Zeus, because of their piety, could not overlook that their lives were ending in a pitiable death. He changed them all into birds. Hyperippe, who had fled the flames by diving into water, was turned into a shearwater. The others who flew up out of the flames were Munichus who became a buzzard and Alcander who became a wren. Megaletor and Philaeus, escaping the flames through the stockade at ground level, turned into two tiny birds. The former became an ichneumon bird while Philaeus became a dog bird. Their mother became an insect-eating woodpecker.

    Etymologically, ὀρχίλος, thought to be ‘wren’, may be the ‘active one’ like Welsh dryw, Irish dreoán. For the root of ὀρχίλος, compare Greek ὀρχέομαι ‘dance’ and possibly ἔρχομαι ‘go, come’. For the suffix -ίλος in bird names, compare τροχίλος ‘wren (Troglodytes troglodytes); Egyptian plover (Pluvianus aegyptius)?; spur-winged lapwing (Vanellus spinosus)?’—as mentioned earlier in the thread, root-related to τρέχω “run, move quickly”, as ὀρχίλος to ὀρχέομαι. There are also φρυγίλος ‘cattle egret(??), chaffinch(??)’, perhaps from Φρύξ, ‘Phrygian’; a personal name in Aristophanes’ Birds, Σποργίλος ‘sparrow(?)’, going with Middle High German sperke “sparrow” and Greek σπέργυς ‘wren(?)’; ῥόβιλλος (in Hesychius), apparently ‘wren (Troglodytes troglodytes)’ yet again. Many names for the wren in Greek…

  38. >union with a young man from afar, or sleeping with a young woman.

    The medieval euphemism processing app on my iphone is down at the moment. Can someone tell me what “union with a young man from afar” means? Does “from afar” describe the union or the origin of the young man? Is something sexual being suggested? And is there an implied change of the interested party when the object changes from young man to young woman or is it a homosexual union that is foretold?

    Or maybe it’s this?

  39. Can someone tell me what “union with a young man from afar” means?

    Well, comrac (verbal noun of con-ricc ‘meet’) is ‘meeting’ and can be used of sexual relations; óg (OIr. óc) is ‘young (man)’; and cein (OIr. cían) is ‘long, enduring; far, distant.’ See the linked eDIL entries for subtleties of meaning and usage.

  40. David Eddyshaw says

    The medieval euphemism processing app on my iphone is down at the moment

    I hate it when that happens. The Android ones aren’t much more reliable, either.

  41. verbal noun of con-ricc ‘meet’

    I note in this regard that Thurneysen’s Grammar of Old Irish, never-to-be-sufficiently-praised as it is, does occasionally have infuriating lacunae, and one of these is its exiguous treatment of this common and difficult verb. Where it should have an entry in §756 (p. 465), along with t-ic ‘comes’ and r-ic ‘reaches,’ not only is it missing but there is the dangerously similar (and even more common) verb con-ic ‘can.’ (And on the next page is the even more dangerously similar con-rig ‘binds.’) The index has only “con∙ric(c)i 502” (a side use as a conjunction) and omits p. 448: “Thus comrac, vb. n. of con∙ric ‘meets’, is treated as masculine in is hé caín-chomrac 19ᶜ14, acc. pl. comtherchomrucu 37ᶜ8 beside neuter plural comtherchomrac 37c6.” Note that the Proto-Irish *-egg- from which comes -ic is reduced to a simple -c- (i.e., /g/) in most forms. Whee, Old Irish is fun!

  42. >>comrac (verbal noun of con-ricc – meet)
    > but there is the dangerously similar (and even more common) verb con-ic ‘can.’

    The thread has truly come full circle. We’re now discussing pseudo Comrac.

  43. Gave me a good laugh, thanks!

  44. синица в руке

    It’s a grouse, actually.

  45. For some reason, the characters 三十三才 /sanjūsansai/ ’33 years of age’ can also be read as misosazai ‘(Eurasian) wren’.

    https://trilltrill.jp/articles/2282791

  46. David Marjanović says

    For some reason

    “3”: Chinese (on’yomi) san, native (kun’yomi) mi

    ns = z historically

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