I came across that wonderful word metheglin and thought “we must have discussed it at the Hattery,” but no, it seems it’s never been mentioned, so here it is; OED (entry revised 2001):
Now historical and regional.
A spiced or medicated variety of mead, originally esp. popular in Wales.c1450 For the cough a p[re]cious drinke..is clepid mede eglyn and also wyne of tyrie..and this is the p[er]fite makynge.
in W. R. Dawson, Leechbook (1934) 881541 Metheglyn, whiche is moste used in Wales, by reason of hotte herbes boyled with hony, is hotter than meade.
T. Elyot, Castel of Helthe (new edition) 36
[…]1620 If Rosemary, Hyssop, Time, Orgaine, and Sage, be first well boyled in the water, wherof you make the Metheglin, it will be the better.
T. Venner, Via Recta ii. 41
[…]1887 Cambria’s old metheglin demon Breathed against our rushing tide.
G. Meredith, Ballads & Poems 1051940 In the cellars of the monasteries the butlers were tapping new and old ale, mead, port,..beer, metheglyn, perry, [etc.].
T. H. White, Ill-made Knight xxv. 1631975 The colonists also followed the British tradition of fermenting honey with yeast to make a drink called mead or metheglin.
L. Perl, Slumps, Grunts, & Snickerdoodles xv. 114
The etymology:
< Welsh meddyglyn (13th cent. in sense ‘medicine, potion, elixir’; 14th cent. in sense ‘a drink of (esp. spiced) mead’) < meddyg healer, doctor (13th cent.; < classical Latin medicus medic n.¹) + llyn liquor (see linn n.¹ [1. A torrent running over rocks; a cascade, waterfall; 2. A pool, esp. one into which a cataract falls]).
Notes
The sense-development in Welsh is influenced by the reinterpretation of the first element of the word as being connected with medd mead n.¹, an interpretation which may also be reflected in the form in quot. c1450 at main sense. The English form was reborrowed into Welsh in the non-medicinal sense in the 18th cent.The 17th-cent. forms Mathew Glinn, Mathew Glynne, Matthewglin, Matthew Glinn are alterations, by folk etymology, after the male forename Matthew, compare:
1637 Matthew Glinn..is generally received by the History of Monmoth, to be the Author’s name of this Mellifluous mixture; for this Matthew dwelling in a Valley (for so the word Glinn imports Englished from the Welsh) being master of a very great stocke of Bees, and wanting vent for the issue of their labours, in an abundant yeare betooke himselfe..to his study [etc.].
J. Taylor, Drinke & Welcome sig. A3
The stress is on the second syllable: /mᵻˈθɛɡlɪn/ muh-THEG-lin (although there are apparently Brits who, in their lamentable ignorance of the Welsh, say /ˈmɛθəɡlɪn/ METH-uh-glin). I hadn’t been aware of the delightful folk etymology.
Never occurred to me that it was Welsh (I don’t think I’ve ever been called upon to say meddyglyn, and although that is indeed a transparent compound, the components don’t relate to the meaning of the whole at all obviously.)
[mᵻˈθɛɡlɪn] is, of course, “wrong” anyway. (Should be [mɛˈðəɡlɪn], as near as the pagan English can reasonably be expected to manage the Language of Heaven.)
What does the folk etymology Matthew Glynn tell about stress in 17th C. Welsh English?
Edit (in light of the comment above): Probably not much. The folk etymology would have to be based on an English reading pronunciation anyway.
Dunno if “Matthew” still had final stress in English then, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Welsh had its modern stress rules by then. (The change from final stress probably happened in the earlier part of the Middle Welsh period: there’s a lot of dispute about the timing, but it had certainly been completed well before the 17th century.)
GPC tells me that meddyglyn just means “medicinal draught”*, but there is also metheglyn “metheglin”, borrowed right back again.
* Well; also “bragget” (whatever that is) and “wild carrot.” This rather reminds me of the saying about all Classical Arabic words having three meanings …
meddyglyn just means “medicinal draught”
Most efficacious in every case?
I feel like I’ve come across the word metheglyn somewhere, possibly as a semi-magical substance, but if it’s The Dark is Rising, which seemed most likely, google isn’t telling me so.
@Jen: that spelling is used in “The White Witch” by Elizabeth Gouden
Metheglyn (with that spelling) is in The Dark Is Rising — Hawkin first appears offering Will a glass of it. The book doesn’t indicate the pronunciation, and I had indeed guessed METH-uh-glin, probably assuming it was related to “methyl”.
Most efficacious in every case?
“Let’s drink-a-drink-a-drink to Ma-a-thew Glinn…” nah, doesn’t have the same ring to it…
How odd – I had googled with Hat’s spelling, and got no results except one that told me that it didn’t include the word, and then came back over here and wrote it without thinking using the spelling that would have got me results!
Thanks for the confirmation, ktschwarz – I couldn’t find the book last night to check that scene.
See Gilbert White’s “Natural History of Selborne”, Dec. 12, 1775:
“Where metheglin was making he would linger round the tubs and vessels, begging a draught of what he called bee-wine. As he ran about he used to make a humming noise with his lips, resembling the buzzing of bees.”
(the story of the idiot bee-boy)
The full story is here.
Would it be inappropriate to draw attention to what is, mystifyingly, the single most popular post on my own blog? It does contain some useful elucidation of White’s allusions, if nothing else:
https://idiotic-hat.blogspot.com/2017/04/bee-boy.html
Apologies for a bit of shameless self-promotion…
Would it be inappropriate to draw attention to what is, mystifyingly, the single most popular post on my own blog?
It most certainly would not — shameless self-promotion is a big part of the raison d’être (or “raisinette,” as they say in my wife’s family) of blogging! The post makes great reading; it’s worth it just for “our idiot-boy, had he not been several worker-bees short of a hive…”
Wikipedia tells me that ‘dis manibus’ is written on Roman tombstones, but why that would be suitable material for a pun I have no idea.
Roman tombstones often included the letters D.M., which stood for Dis Manibus, literally “to the Manes”, or figuratively, “to the spirits of the dead”, an abbreviation that continued to appear even in Christian inscriptions.
Surely dis manibus actually means “to the gods and manes”? (or is a hendiadys for “to the divine manes.”) Perhaps the Wikipedian thinks that dis is a definite article or preposition …
I agree that it is hardly likely that nudis manibus is meant as a pun. (If it is, it is both a lame and a tasteless one.)
If someone took folk-etymology far enough to turn meddyglyn all the way to “medd y glyn” (mead of the valley), that would get the stress aligned to the Matthew Glinn version.
Good point.
I loved The Dark is Rising Sequence* when I was in third and fourth grade. I still remember the verse prophecies from the books (except the sentence in Welsh), and I have mentioned the books occasionally here. They were recommended to me by my school’s assistant librarian,** but I haven’t reread them since I was nine or ten. I suspect that they would not hold up very well, except Over Sea, Under Stone, which was a realistic, if weird, standalone novel before Susan Cooper decided to turn it into a series.
* That was the official name of the series. I can’t think of any set of books that used sequence that way, although there doubtless are some.
** She was not somebody that I particularly respected, even in elementary school. She made a big deal about the fact that her brother was the state treasurer, and at one point I asked her how she felt about the fact that he was always wanting to cut expenditures*** on supplementary programs in schools, including libraries.
*** For non-Americans, perhaps I should explain that school funding is primarily the responsibility of state governments. It is, in fact, the biggest state government expenditure, accounting for roughly half of state expnditures.
Perhaps the Wikipedian thinks that dis is a definite article or preposition …
Dis Ain’t What U Want
It’s also used as a verb of contempt. That is a mode, similar to “ablative of agent” for nouns.
Mollymooly – ‘The White Witch’ is by Elizabeth Goudge.
I have a feeling I first came across ‘metheglin’ in the novels of Rosemary Sutcliff.
@Brett: I was a big fan of Over Sea, Under Stone and especially The Dark is Rising, which I encountered when somewhat older than you. Not Greenwitch so much (though I remember “We’m church and they’m chapel”). I read the last two books as an adult and didn’t like them, but maybe if I’d read them in sixth grade I would have.
I feel like I’ve come across the word metheglyn somewhere
I knew it from T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. It crops up on the second page, not long after the famously cryptic but captivating opening sentence (“On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology”):
I’ll bet that’s where I first ran across it.
The explanation of “Eton” and “port” didn’t look familiar, and I see it’s one of those things that White added to The Sword in the Stone when he published it as part of The Once and Future King. Probably leaving the anachronisms unexplained is one of the reasons some people prefer the stand-alone versions.
@Jerry Friedman: Greenwitch has more significant problems, both with plotting and retcons than any other part of the series. I did respect Cooper quite a bit for how, when she decided to change the nature of the series, she must have planned a lot of it right from the beginning. Just a few pages into The Dark is Rising Will gets a cryptic description of what is going to happen at the Midsummer Tree at the final climax four books later.
The Sword in the Stone was edited a lot more than the other books when White put together The Once and Future King. One of the animal transformation episodes was cut, as was Merlin’s duel with Madame Mim. (In the Disney comic books I read as a kid, Mim appeared occasionally as an enemy of Chip and Dale.)
As a kid I had a book based on the Disney film based on “Sword in the Stone”, with stills*) from the film (which I never watched) as illustrations. I remember the duel; I assume Disney cranked up the silliness while White toned it down?
*) If you can call them that in an animated movie.