There are a number of fells in English — a verb, several nouns, and an adjective; it is the last that concerns us here. I’m finally reading Woolf’s The Waves (I’m glad I didn’t try to do so earlier, because I would have gotten impatient and given up before figuring out what she was up to), and I’ve come to a very simple sentence that I’m having trouble interpreting. I’ll give you the whole paragraph for context and bold the sentence in question; the speaker is Susan, one of the six protagonists:
‘But who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a circle? I think sometimes (I am not twenty yet) I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people. Yet now, leaning here till the gate prints my arm, I feel the weight that has formed itself in my side. Something has formed, at school, in Switzerland, some hard thing. Not sighs and laughter, not circling and ingenious phrases; not Rhoda’s strange communications when she looks past us, over our shoulders; nor Jinny’s pirouetting, all of a piece, limbs and body. What I give is fell. I cannot float gently, mixing with other people. I like best the stare of shepherds met in the road; the stare of gipsy women beside a cart in a ditch suckling their children as I shall suckle my children. For soon in the hot midday when the bees hum round the hollyhocks my lover will come. He will stand under the cedar tree. To his one word I shall answer my one word. What has formed in me I shall give him. I shall have children; I shall have maids in aprons; men with pitchforks; a kitchen where they bring the ailing lambs to warm in baskets, where the hams hang and the onions glisten. I shall be like my mother, silent in a blue apron locking up the cupboards.
Here are Wiktionary’s definitions for fell:
1. Of a strong and cruel nature; eager and unsparing; grim; fierce; ruthless; savage.
2. (UK dialectal, Scotland) Strong and fiery; biting; keen; sharp; pungent
3. (UK dialectal, Scotland) Very large; huge.
4. (obsolete) Eager; earnest; intent.
(I’d consult the OED, but at the moment it’s telling me “The page isn’t redirecting properly.” I hate the new OED format with a burning hatred.) We can probably rule out the dialectal 2 and 3; 4 might make sense in this context, but I’ve never seen that usage, and depending on how obsolete it is it too is probably unlikely. But how to make sense of cruelty and grimness among these images of hollyhocks and love? All ideas welcome, as always.
(I note, looking further down the Wiktionary page, that Albanian fell is said to mean ‘deep, shallow.’ Say what??)
I know so little, and share the feelings towards Woolf. I may be born ‘English’, but have never felt at home in English. What struck me first was that I don’t understand the sentence. So is ‘fell’ an adjective here? Is there some mysterious expression we need to know about?
“Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it!” –attr. Lady Macbeth
I never understood what “Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell” meant, but I like its sound, as intended. (From Gus, one of TSE’s Practical Cats).
Hopkins wrote, “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.” My Norton anthology (a publisher notorious for its strange footnotes) glossed “fell” as “bitterness,” presumably associating it with Latin fel ‘gall’. I persist, however, in seeing Hopkins lying in bed feeling the night as the hide of some hairy beast lying on him.
“Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell”
Ah, that’s a different fell: “rocky ridge or chain of mountains; wild field or upland moor.”
Hopkins wrote, “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.”
I agree with you rather than Norton, but one expects impenetrable vocabulary more in Hopkins than in Woolf.
But how to make sense of cruelty and grimness among these images of hollyhocks and love?
It’s more directly between ‘some hard thing’ and ‘I cannot float gently’, so maybe fierceness and intensity aren’t completely out of place. But I don’t find it easy to understand!
The Albanian form fell cited looks a variant of thellë ‘deep’. Albanian th > f and loss of final ë are common in Albanian varieties.
It is hard to think that “the fell of dark” is not at some level trying to evoke “nightfall” (or related phrases like “darkness fell”) even there are supposedly unrelated Proto-Germanic etc. etymologies.
“When the night falls, it falls on me.
And when the day breaks, I’m in pieces.”
I was hoping you were going to go with the (present tense) verb ‘fell.’ It is half of just a handful of transitive/intransitive pairs surviving from Old English: fell/fall, raise/rise, lay/lie (albeit this one is moribund outside of usage manuals), and, um, the other one that isn’t coming to mind at the moment.
The Albanian form fell cited looks a variant of thellë ‘deep’. Albanian th > f and loss of final ë are common in Albanian varieties.
Ah, yes; I looked it up in Huld’s Basic Albanian Etymologies and he gives a Gheg form fell. (He also gives several competing etymologies — I don’t think Wikt should only present Pedersen’s.) But how do you explain ‘deep, shallow’?
…But wait, Wiktionary gives a totally different etymology for fell, as if it has nothing to do with thellë! That seems fishy.
One of the other characters in the same Woolf novel says “To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird’s sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door.” Implying he finds her to be … well “fell” might be a good-if-archaic word for it. (This after saying “She has the stealthy yet assured movements (even among tables and chairs) of a wild beast.”)
So I guess the whole “I am the seasons” thing is less Stevie-Nicks-hippie-chick and more nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw?
@Richard H.: set/sit?
Yeah, the unreliability is one of the top fails of the OED redesign. I worry it’s going into a death spiral, as users like you stop bothering because it so often can’t even serve a page. That would be an unconscionable waste of the work of the actual lexicographers who did a full revision of fell, adj. and adv. in 2017. It’s quite complicated with various obsolete and regional senses; possibly this is “4. Of a person or animal, their actions, mind, or attributes: fierce, savage; cruel, ruthless; dreadful, terrible.” That fits Lady Macbeth; Woolf’s character may be saying she’s relentless in purpose, unshakable, determined, with “a hard thing” driving her.
On the other hand, it could be “7. In weakened sense, with intensifying force usually determined by the context: exceedingly great, huge, mighty, sudden, strange, etc. Now chiefly in at one fell swoop”. (This sense was marked “Obs. exc. Sc.” in the old edition, but “English regional (northern), Scottish English (northern), poetic and literary” in the revision, though the 20th- and 21st-century citations are either Scottish or the fixed phrase “in one fell swoop”.) If it’s that, the “hard thing” could be mighty and strange, but not savage and cruel.
OED is also newly kept from me today (reason yet unknown!).
I do find online that “fell” reoccurs a page or so later:
“The desire which is loaded behind my lips, cold as lead, fell as a bullet….”
It’s more directly between ‘some hard thing’ and ‘I cannot float gently’, so maybe fierceness and intensity aren’t completely out of place.
One of the other characters in the same Woolf novel says “To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird’s sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door.” Implying he finds her to be … well “fell” might be a good-if-archaic word for it.
I do find online that “fell” reoccurs a page or so later:
“The desire which is loaded behind my lips, cold as lead, fell as a bullet….”
OK, y’all have provided some excellent context — obviously one has to cast a wide net when reading Woolf! Many thanks to all, and yes, Susan is sharp.
The OED’s revised etymology of fell is also much improved from the cursory version from 1885, which was
They can now fill in a great deal of the development in Anglo-Norman and parallel developments in continental languages:
The origin of the Latin noun fellō is uncertain; the OED’s etymology of felon is unrevised from 1895, and collects a wild variety of speculation. Current dictionaries seem to have converged on a Germanic origin, or at least, a possible Germanic origin and nothing else worth mentioning.
Oddly, Wiktionary has this adjective fell coming directly through Old English from Germanic. I don’t believe it. Every other dictionary says it entered Middle English from French.
Great stuff, thanks!
You fell for Virginia’s wacky way with words. I read it in my youth, when I was a patient person, avid to admire, not yet wary of wooziness.
“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
Since Tolkien never names the probably reptilian winged monsters ridden by the remounted Nazgul, they are often referred to as “fell beasts.”
I think it’s pretty clearly the first, though the Scots variants are related. The implication is of something cruel, merciless, and somewhat inhuman. Archaic, but probably still fairly familiar to anyone who grew up reading fantasy novels. For instance, from “The Fellowship of the Ring”:
“It seemed to Frodo that he was lifted up, and passing over he saw that the rock-wall was a circle of hills, and that within it was a plain, and in the midst of the plain stood a pinnacle of stone, like a vast tower but not made by hands. On its top stood the figure of a man. The moon as it rose seemed to hang for a moment above his head and glistened in his white hair as the wind stirred it. Up from the dark plain below came the crying of fell voices, and the howling of many wolves.”
Unlike the other fells, this one shares an etymology with “felon”—see https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED15492
It also still survives in modern usage in the phrase “one fell swoop,” which like so many of our best idioms comes from Shakespeare:
“MACDUFF: … All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? Oh hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam
At one fell swoop?”
[Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3]
The original causative is actually rear.
drench/drink
Hark hark! I hear Lang Wull’s clear voice sounding through the Kielder Glen,
Where the raven flaps her glossy wing and the fell fox has his den;
There the shepherds they were gathering up wi mony a guid yauld grew,
Wi wiry terrier game an keen, an fox hund fleet and true.
Hark away! Hark away!
O’er the bonnie hills o Kielder, hark away!
“The Kielder Hunt”, a Northumbrian song, written by James Armstrong of Redesdale, Northumberland, and published in 1879 in a book called Wannie Blossoms.
The fox in this song must have a close relationship to other ‘giant’ folk animals like the Boilhope Tup and the Derby Ram, as the country covered in the hunt is an enormous area.
(Src: https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/thekielderhunt.html)
Performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h4cpeWIPIQ
If I were trying to explain it to a translator into another language, I would say that Woolf is bending the “unsparing” meaning just a bit. Fell as in the opposite of something that can float and circle or pirouette or be tossed about, something hard and heavy and fixed and irrevocable. I would definitely look for a word with some link to gravity. The beauty, to me, of the passage lies precisely in the unexpected contrast of the hollyhocks and bees and lambs and suckling and so on: not things one thinks of as grim or fateful, even though they’re mixed in with more disquieting elements (the stares, the ditch, the heat, the pitchforks, the silence). I haven’t read The Waves, but I would suspect she’s describing something about female experience, about how even things that seem luminous and beautiful can take on a frightening, terrible weight when they become social or psychological inevitabilities.
Thanks, that’s very helpful and convincing!
The OED’s sense 4 is “of a person or animal, their actions, mind, or attributes: fierce, savage; cruel, ruthless; dreadful, terrible.” I think Woolf is using it to mean stern, hard, unyielding.
The words that she likens to fell are: hard, stare. The words that she does not associate with fell are: float, pirouette, circling, sigh, laughter.
Stare is cognate to the suffixed form stark (itself meaning “strong” in German; strong is yet another cognate in English). The common element is rigidity. Relatives are actually easy to find all over Indo-European, for example steric in chemistry, taken from Greek, is one where the connection to rigidity is also very clear.
Within German, there’s starren “stare” and starr “rigid, unmoving”.
Which is only natural: a stare is a fixed, rigid gaze. What’s strange is that starr and English stark mean the same thing aboriginally, and yet they don’t seem to be related even at the PIE level.
@John Cowan: That’s not what the OED thinks. Peculiarly placed at the entry for starblind, it said:
There are Middle English examples, however, where stark seems to have been conflated with the unrelated (although equally Germanic) streck (meaning “straight”) by metathesis.
I hate the new OED format with a burning hatred.
I came here a couple of weeks ago to see if anyone else was fuming about the new OED design. Haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else, so I’ll just add my comment of fervent agreement here. What a sad mess. Not only does it look dreadful, and require extra clicks to see all the information, but it makes me log in fresh every time I go there now.
The OED should have done what Wikipedia has recently done: the entire text of each article is immediately visible, as before, and a table of contents with active fields has been added in the left-hand column for anyone who immediately wants to go to a certain section of the article without having to scroll down to find it.
> and (by suffixation)
Suffixation of what?