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Mead
Mead is essentially honey wine, made by fermenting watered honey, and sometimes, adding additional flavors like spices or fruit juice. Mead was a fairly popular alcoholic beverage in the European Middle ages, and earlier. Mead residue has been found in vessels in Celtic ritual burials, and even in the tomb of King Midas of Phrygia, c. 740-700 B.C. Mead is so closely associated with the Anglo-Saxon senses of community and conviviality that the central building for community ceremony and conviviality is the mead-hall (Old English meduseld, borrowed by Tolkien as the name of King Théoden’s great hall at Edoras). So important was mead to the Anglo-Saxons that the word mead…
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Gorse, Furze, and Whin
A few years ago, an acquaintance emailed me in extreme frustration because he’d looked up furze, a word he encountered while reading a mystery set in Scotland, in a dictionary. The definition for furze was “whin; gorse.” When he looked up whin and gorse their entries referred him to furze. I’ve had similar and equally annoying experiences with dictionaries, and immediately understood his frustration. I promised him I’d post about all three words. Gorse, as the AHD notes, is Any of several spiny shrubs of the genus Ulex, especially U. europaeus, native to Europe and having fragrant yellow flowers and black pods. Also called furze, whin. Ulex europaeus from Ayrshire, Scotland…
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Dray
A dray or drey is a squirrel’s nest. Dray is also sometimes applied to a nest of squirrels, or a litter of squirrels. The OED s.v. dray offers “A squirrel’s nest” with the following in context citations: 1607 E. Topsell Hist. Fovre-footed Beastes 497 They..make their nestes, like the draies of squirrels. 1627 M. Drayton Quest of Cynthia in Battaile Agincourt 141 The nimble Squirrell..Her mossy Dray that makes. The etymology of dray isn’t clear; it’s generally associated with the dray that means a sled or cart that lacks wheels, and is thus dragged. That dray derives from Old English dragan to draw; the OED suggests…
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Haggis
If you mention to anyone, at all, that you’re going to visit Scotland, you’re bound to be warned about Scotland’s national dish; haggis. Haggis is, according to the AHD “A Scottish dish consisting of a mixture of the minced heart, lungs, and liver of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the slaughtered animal.” The closest thing I can compare with haggis to in terms of standard American dishes is stuffing, made with giblets. People tend to think of haggis around the 25th of January, the date reserved to celebrate the birth of Scottish poet Robert Burns. All over the…
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Ye Olde Shoppe
Right smack dab in the middle of Main Street in Keene N.H. in the 1970s was Ye Goodie Shoppe, purveyors of fine hand-made candies. They are, to this day, the only place I’ve ever known to make Dark Chocolate Cashew Turtles. (They also make really good Milk Chocolate Turtles). Ye Goodie Shop opened in 1931, and is still going strong (though no longer on Main St.). The use of “ye” and “shoppe” in the name (like “Goodie”) Ye Goodie Shoppe are deliberate attempts to present a brand that is old fashioned, and even quaint. Finding a store that used ye, goodie and shoppe is a trifecta of sorts. However charming…
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Halloween
And pleasant is the fairy land, But, an eerie tale to tell, Ay at the end of seven years We pay a tiend to hell; I am sae fair and fu o flesh, I’m feard it be mysel. But the night is Halloween, lady, The morn is Hallowday; Then win me, win me, an ye will, For weel I wat ye may. Tam Lin Child #39 In 609 Pope Boniface IV pronounced November 1 All Saints’ Day. It was a day to commemorate all the saints of the church. In 837 Pope Gregory IV formally ordered the observance of All Saints’ Day. All Saints’ Day n. November 1, the day…
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Sóþlíce we gesáwon hys steorran on east-daéle
1. Eornustlice ðá se Haélend ácenned wæs on Iudeiscre Bethleem, on ðæs cyninges dagum Herodes, ðá comon ða tungol-wítegen fram east-dæle to Hierusalem, 2. And cwaédon, Hwær ys se, Iudea cyning ðe ácenned ys? sóþlíce we gesáwon hys steorran on east-daéle, and we comon us him to ge-eadmédenne. 3. Ðá Herodes ðæt gehýrde ðá wearþ he gedréfed, and eal Hierosolim-waru mid him. 4. And ðá gegaderode Herodes ealle ealdras ðæra sacerda, and folces wríteras, and áxode, hwær Crist ácenned waére. 5. Ðá saédon hí him, On Iudeiscere Bethlem; wítodlíce ðus ys áwriten þurh ðone wítegan, 6. And ðú, Bethleem, Iudea land, wítodlíce ne eart ðú læstþ on Iuda ealdrum; of…
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Neal Stephenson and Beowulf
Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite authors, was interviewed by Slashdot. Stephenson is best known for his SF, especially for Snowcrash and The Diamond Age. His recent work, including a mammoth trilogyThe Baroque Cycle, has brought him to the attention of people who might not ordinarily read SF. Stephenson has also written In the Beginning was the Command Line, a very readable treatise on the nature of computer interfaces. In the Slashdot interview, Stephenson draws a distinction between two types of modern writers and, in an extended analogy, compares them with Dante, who had wealthy aristocratic patrons, and to the Beowulf poet. Regarding the Beowulf poet Stephenson says: But I…
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Medieval Unicode and Word Processing
I’ve been using Mellel for about a month now for the dreaded dissertation. Mellel is a different kind of word processor; the theoretical model seems to be of text in “streams” rather than in an endless scrolling page. So far Mellel has been quite easy to use, and has super support for scholarly writing and Unicode, including yoghs, thorns, and even medieval Irish and Welsh. I’ve yet to see if Mellel supports the very specific dissertation layout requirements, particularly in terms of footnotes and headers. Mellel also supports Bookends a bibliographic database that “hooks” into various word processors. I’m not very interested in the bibliography/footnote generation features of Bookends, but…
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More on the Yogh
You’d be amazed at how hard it is to find information about the yogh. First, I’ve managed to learn that Unicode 4.0 Latin Extended B does indeed have both an upper and a lower case yogh, a yogh is that not an ezh. Take a look, if your browser supports Unicode 4.0 characters: an uppercase yogh Ȝ or U+021C and a lower case yogh ȝ or U+021D. And there are even Mac OS X fonts that support yogh as part of the Unicode character set (I particularly like Junicode). That’s the good news. The problem is that the only word processor (versus text editor) for Mac OS X that supports…
