My pal Monica loves odd words as much as I do, and she recently sent me one so weird I have to share it with all and sundry. OED (entry from 1976):
hoden, adj.
Pronunciation: /ˈuːdən/
Forms: Also hooden.
Etymology: Origin uncertain: perhaps from association with wooden from the wooden horse’s head.Kentish dialect.
Of or pertaining to the horse with wooden head and clapping jaws featured in a masquerade which formerly took place, spec. in Kent, on Christmas Eve. ˈhodener n. a performer in this masquerade. ˈhodening n. the name of the performance; also attributive.
1807 European Mag. 51 358 This [mumming] is called, provincially, a Hodening, and the figure above described a Hoden, or Woden horse.
1887 W. D. Parish & W. F. Shaw Dict. Kentish Dial. 77 Hoodening.., the name formerly given to a mumming or masquerade.
1891 Church Times 2 Jan. 20/1 ‘Hodening’ still goes on..at Deal and Walmer.
1909 P. Maylam Hooden Horse i. 2 Everyone springs up, saying, ‘The hoodeners have come, let us go and see the fun.’
[…]
1966 G. E. Evans Pattern under Plough xix. 193 The hobby-horses that appear in many countryside ceremonies and ritual dances, notably the Hodening Horse.
1971 Country Life 17 June 1533/1 The Hooden Horse, a mystic man-animal found only in East Kent, will be at large in Folkestone..June 19.
So much weirdness here, starting with the pronunciation, as if it were “ooden”! If there’s no /h/, why is it spelled that way? Do they no longer have the masquerade at all, even in the remoter regions of the county? Does the expression survive even if the thing itself has vanished? Any Kentishpersons (or persons of Kentishness) among my readership?
Evidently Kent is H-dropper country, and the h is etymological speculation from the association of hood with masquerades.
In German, of course, Hoden is pronounced as expected and means “testicle(s)”…
It has reportedly been revived by Morris dancers:
Never seen a Morris dancer or a Hoden horse, but I’ll have to keep an eye out if I pass through Margate – if the notorious difficulty of connecting anything with anything there doesn’t stop me from making the link.
This article is quite detailed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodening#Etymology_and_origins
Detailed but swampy; none of the hypotheses are especially convincing. The OED’s “Origin uncertain” is disappointing but honest.
Monica says: “Death of a Fool is a mystery novel by Ngaio Marsh that goes into great detail about the thing.”
This particular one uses a wooden horse head, but other similar customs use a real horse skull, so I would be suspicious about a derivation from “wooden”. Maybe Woden, or something to do with Robin Hood? Just speculation.
The English Dialect Dictionary, FWIW:
A whole book was written about it. The practice is documented from the 18th century. The name is recorded as early as 1807. Other than the “wooden” and “Odin” theories, nothing here either.
Maybe somehow apropos, how did voodoo become hoodoo?
In Silver on the Tree, the young protagonists meet the Welsh version.
Apparently, in more magical times, such creatures dwelled on Earth, but now they only exist in the Lost Land. However, a memory of them persists.
I assume Bran‘s description of the local custom is accurate—although it might not necessarily have been something that the author Susan Cooper witnessed herself, so it might or might not have been current in the second half of the twentieth century, when the book was written.
OED’s 1807 cite, Lameen’s link, and M’s (gold-star) Wikipedia article all have “a ho[o]den~” rather than “an h~”.
The wiki starts by giving pronunciation /ʊd.ɛnɪŋ/, which is haitchless but also differs from OED. Later it says “Maylam noted that most nineteenth-century sources describing the tradition had spelled the word as hoden, but that he favoured hooden because it better reflected the pronunciation of the word with its long vowel.” And yet Wiki favours oo spelling with short vowel pronunciation while OED has o with long vowel.
Wikipedia’s Hobby horse article lists Mari Llwyd, Hooden Horse, and others in Britain and elsewhere
The old Mari Llwyd, she ain’t what she used to be…
It made me think of oo/ool type forms for ‘wool’, and ‘owling’ for smuggling wool, but the OED says of the latter ‘Any connection with northern forms of the word wool n. is made unlikely by the association of owling and owlers particularly with Kent and Sussex.’
Connections with ‘wooden’ seem a bit semantically unlikely, anyway – why would the wood be the most striking thing about it?
Bosworth-Toller has
wóda = A madman,an insane person, one possessed
wóden-dreám = Madness, fury
German Wut n., wüten v. “rage”, wütend “enraged”, “mad as hell”. Apparently the state of mind you get into when you’re possessed by old Wuotan.
There’s a hop hoodening festival in Canterbury every September, although it seems to be a 1950s revival. I always thought “hooden” was “wooden” with the W dropped, which seems to have been a feature of dialects across the south-east – you often see eg “old ‘ooman” for “old woman” in 19th-century novels.
An encounter with Robin Hood, From TH White, “The Sword in the Stone”:
“Oh!” cried the Wart in delight. “I have heard of you, often, when they tell Saxon stories in the evening, of you and Robin Hood.”
“Not Hood,” said Little John reprovingly. “That bain’t the way to name ‘un, measter, not in the ‘ood.”
“But it is Robin Hood in the stories,” said Kay.
“Ah, them book-learning chaps. They don’t know all. How’m ever, ’tis time us do be stepping along.”
They fell in on either side of the enormous man, and had to run one step in three to keep up with him; for, although he talked very slowly, he walked on his bare feet very fast. The dog trotted at heel.
“Please,” asked the Wart, “where are you taking us?”
“Why, to Robin ‘ood, seemingly. An’t you sharp enough to guess that also, Measter Art?”
The giant gave him a sly peep out of the corner of his eye at this, for he knew that he had set the boys two problems at once—first, what was Robin’s real name, and second, how did Little John come to know the Wart’s?
The Wart fixed on the second question first.
“How did you know my name?”
“Ah,” said Little John. “Us knowed.”
“Does Robin ‘ood know we are coming?”
“Nay, my duck, a young scholard like thee should speak his name scholarly.”
“Well, what is his name?” cried the boy, between exasperation and being out of breath from running to keep up. “You said ‘ood.”
“So it is ‘ood, my duck. Robin ‘ood, like the ‘oods you’m running through. And a grand fine name it is.”
“Robin Wood!”
If you want to go there, riding trusty Hathi, there was in early 1600s in Kent the estate Hoden of the family St. Nicholas.
My default assumption is that any explanation of anything that involves Woden is a nineteenth-century “pagan survival school” conjecture unless demonstrated otherwise.