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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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When English and Old Irish Collide: Slew and Slogan
There aren’t a lot of Irish words in English, but there are some. See for instance, slew and slogan.
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In Dúil Bélrai
Dennis King has created “In Dúil Bélrai“, an antique term for a glossary. In this case, a new English – Old Irish glossary in the form of a searchable database, with over 5,000 Old and Middle Irish words, with a little Early Modern Irish mixed in. Dennis King writes to the Old Irish List “We’re still tinkering with it and adding new vocabulary, but we invite you all to give it a try.”
