Post by megli on Mar 17, 2008 11:53:47 GMT -1
Bobcat emailed me the other day to ask for some etymologies for druidic terms that may be making it into the OED. So I wrote this load of old b*llocks which may be of interest.
awen ['au-en, properly pronounced: often the Welsh diphthong -aw- is not recognised by Anglophone pagan druids and the word is mispronounced ‘AH-wen’. As a result, the Tolkienesque misspelling arwen is fairly common.]
Welsh. ‘poetic inspiration, divine afflatus, Muse, poetic genius’
The word is attested from the 9th century in old Welsh as aguen (tunc talhaern tat aguen in poemate Britannico claruit, ‘at that time Talhaearn Father of the Muse was renowned in British poetry’, ‘Nennius’, Historia Brittonum)
From Celtic *aue-n-, from the root *aue- ‘breathe, blow’; cognate via I-E with Greek Aiolos, ‘Aeolus’, ‘god of winds’ and more closely within Celtic with Old Irish aí, ‘poetic inspiration’.
Often mis-etymologised as ‘flowing spirit’ amongst druids, following William Owen Pughe’s fanciful splitting up of the word into two non-existent terms of his own devising, namely aw, ‘fluid, gas’, and en ‘being’ (see W. Owen Pughe, A Welsh and English Dictionary, 1793); see also, e.g., P. Shallcrass, ed., Rekindling the Sacred Fire, a British Druid Order pamphlet.
There is a form awenydd, p. awenyddion, with a common agental suffix –ydd: ‘one inspired, entranced, frenzied’, first attested in Giraldus Cambriensis’ Descriptio Kambriae, (late 12th c), which remains in use among some modern druids. (viri nonnulli, quos Awennithion vocant, quasi mente ductos… [some men, whom they term Awenyddion, like people taken out of their wits…’])
nemeton ['nem-et-on]
Nemeton is attested widely in the ancient Celtic world as a place-name element, ‘sanctuary, holy place’ [often implying a woodland clearing] in Gaulish, British and Galatian. e.g. Galatian Drunemeton ‘Oak Sanctuary’ (Strabo, 1st c. BC); Gaulish nemeton and Vernemeton, ‘Great Sanctuary’ (Fortunatus, 6th c, AD); in southern Scotland, British Medionemeton, ‘Middle Sanctuary’. For discussion of these terms, see S. Piggott, The Druids (London, 1975) and P-Y Lambert, La Langue Gauloise (Paris, 1994), pp. 50, 84-5, where it is suggested that the original Gaulish nominative may have been an unattested *nemetos. It is usual, however, to treat it as a neuter o-stem, nemeton.
It has descendents in Welsh and Irish: Old Irish nemed, ‘sanctuary’ but more usually ‘professional, privileged person’, the latter two meanings with a semantic shift (see T. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2001) for discussion). Old Irish fid-nemuid, ‘woodland sanctuary’ is especially suggestive. Also perhaps Old Welsh nywet [nyfed], ‘sanctuary’, in Math uab Mathonwy, c. 1100 AD, but the reading there is obscure. For discussion, see J. E. Caerwyn Williams, ‘Nyfed, Gwernyfed’, Llên Cymru 21 (1988), pp. 151-61. See also J. Vendryes, Lexique Étymologique d’Irlandais Ancien (MNOP), p. N-9 for the Old Irish cognates.
Strictly the plural should probably be nemeta, but nemetons is usual, and the word is rarely used in the plural.
Used by modern druids, largely following E. Restall-Orr, Spirits of the Sacred Grove [Druid Priestess] (London, 1998), as a) a sacred grove in a forest (the original sense); b) any natural sanctuary, such as a stone circle; and c) the personal space or auric field of a human being, believed by many druids to extend from their body in a rough sphere, and perceptible to the psychically sensitive.
ogham
The Old Irish word properly refers to an native Irish alphabet of strokes or notches designed to be incised on stone, and probably wood, attested as inscriptions from the 5th to the 6th centuries in Ireland, and perhaps also from the late 4th. The origin of the letters has been much-debated: the current scholarly consensus is that the distribution of the letters in the system is derives from the classification of letters found in Latin grammarians of the 1st-4th centuries AD, and thus is an imitation of Latin literacy, as is the custom of inscribing stone monuments. The inscriptions, usually border markers or grave memorials, occur in a broad band across southern Ireland and areas of Irish settlement in southern Wales, always in the Irish language. The writing of other Celtic languages in ogham is completely ahistorical, with the exception of occasional examples of Pictish use of the script. The name was related by the Irish themselves to Ogma, one of the champions of the Tuatha Dé Danann or Irish gods, who was supposed to have devised the alphabet.
Due to the eccentric theories of the poet Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1948), it is common among druids to regard the script as a mystical or occult ‘tree alphabet’, because a minority of the letters are named after trees. The tree-link is probably a red-herring: see D. McManus, A Guide to Ogam (Maynooth, 1991), pp. 35-43. Further, the idea that the alphabet is a tree-calendar, in which each tree/letter corresponds to a lunar month, has developed, and even spawned a kind of ersatz Celtic ‘astrology’ in which the ‘tree-months’ are imagined as resembling the signs of the zodiac. All these are modern concepts. There is also nothing to link the script to the pre-Christian druids of Ireland, though it is not unlikely that as the pagan educated class they were familiar with it around the time of conversion. The concept of ogham as a sacred, druidic alphabet and calendar is deeply-entrenched among modern pagans and almost entirely fictitious. For a general discussion, see T. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, pp. 163-76. The major scholarly discussion remains McManus, A Guide to Ogam (see above).
Coelbren (y Beirdd) ['coilbren uh beirð]
A spurious alphabet invented by Iolo Morganwg around 1791 for his purportedly ancient order of Welsh bards. He claimed that it was the alphabet of the Druids and that it had 20 ‘letters’ and 20 other signs for the elongated vowels and consonantal mutations of the Welsh language. It consists of letters, clearly derived from the Roman alphabet, carved onto four-sided wooden rods. The rods are placed in a wooden frame, which Morganwg termed a peithynen, in which the rods could be turned so that they could be read on all four sides.. The falsity of Morganwg’s claim that his alphabet was ancient was immediately suspected by his contemporaries, and was generally entirely disbelieved in Wales by the end of the 19th century. It is occasionally used by small numbers of modern pagan druids, sometimes labouring under the misapprehension that it is a Welsh equivalent for ogham.
triad
Celtic culture shows a marked preference for setting out knowledge in sets of three, and collections of triadic sayings survive from both medieval Wales and Ireland. The Irish ones tends to be gnomic or proverbial; the earliest Welsh ones are thought to be mnemonics used in the instruction of professional poets and storytellers, and thus tend to list triadic groupings of legendary people, places, objects or events. However, the triadic style was also used in medieval Wales for setting out other kinds of technical knowledge, including legal codes. In the 18th century, Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams) developed the triadic form as a way of setting out his purported bardic lore, in imitation of the medieval triads. The composition of original triads as pithy repositories of spiritual instruction remains popular with modern druids.
See R. Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein (Cardiff, 1961) for the Welsh Triads, and K. Meyer, The Triads of Ireland (Dublin, 1906).
Annwn ['an-un]; also older Annwfn, Annwfyn ['an-uvn]
The ambivalent Welsh otherworld or underworld; the first appearance of the word is hard to date, but may well be the poem Preideu Annwfyn in The Book of Taliesin, N.L.W. MS Peniarth 2, which may be 10th century, though the MS itself dates to the 14th century. In Priedeu Annwyfn, Annwn is explicitly identified with uffern, ‘hell’; but in other appearances is more like the sumptuous, pleasant otherworld of Irish medieval literature. Elsewhere in the Book of Taliesin, it is ‘beneath the world’, connected with poetic inspiration, and filled with streams. In Pwyll Penduic Dyuet (c. 1100AD) Annwn is an idealised, supernatural version of aristocratic medieval Wales.
The etymology is obscure: either an+dwf(y)n, ‘very deep’ or an+dwf(y)n, ‘not-world’ have been suggested. See M. Haycock, Legendary Poems in the Book of Taliesin (Aberystwyth, 2007), p. 440, for references.
In Iolo Morganwg’s 18th c pseudo-druidic system, Annwn is adopted to refer to the place of life’s creation, an abyss of bestial chaos furthest from the light of deity and upwards from which the soul must progress to return to God.
The occasional modern druid spelling Annwyn is erroneous, as is the common pronunciation ‘a-NOON’.
The following three terms were coined or adapted by Iolo Morganwg as part of his 18th c. pseudo-druidic spiritual system; they are strongly influenced by both Christianity and Buddhism: see also Annwn.
Abred refers to be material world, as a state of evil, chaos or disorder, in which human beings are reincarnated in an effort to purify themselves and ascend to Gwynfyd. This use of abred is first attested by William Owen Pughe in 1793, and then in 1794 by Iolo Morganwg. It is in fact attested as a Welsh word from the 14th century, but seems to mean ‘deliverance, release’, but uncertainly. (cf. also the cognate verb, W. abredu, ‘to transmigrate’) It seems fair to say that Iolo Morganwg and Owen-Pughe substantially altered the meaning.
Gwynfyd or gwynvyd [gwin-vid] indicates ‘beatitude’, a blissful, sinless state enjoyed by the soul on its reuniting with the Deity. It is a compound of Welsh gwyn ‘white, blessed’ with byd, ‘world’ and recalls the Welsh idiom applied to a worthy person: gwyn ei fyd, ‘blessed’, lit: ‘white his world’. The nearest English word is thus ‘Blessedness, Bliss’. The word in fact is old – attested from the 14th century, and in the plural being the W. term for the ‘Beatitudes’ of the New Testament - but its 18th-19th c. use as a kind of pseudo-druidic Nirvana is down to Iolo Morganwg and his circle.
Ceugant ['kei-gant] The original meaning in W. is an adj. ‘certain, sure, undoubted, inevitable’, from British *couo-cant, and is attested from the 12th-13th century. It was misetymologised by Iolo Morganwg as a noun, cau ‘vacant, empty’ + cant ‘periphery, circle’, and thus ‘circle of infinity’, the abode of the Deity alone, of the fullness of God, under which meaning it is attested from 1794.
The best place to look for analyses of these coinages is probably the numerous, very recent publications of the Iolo Morganwg Project of the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, University of Aberystwyth. The relevant texts may well have been re-edited and they will be able to supply the most up-to-date references.
The terms are not popular with many polytheistic Pagan druids, because of their monotheistic overtones, but still enjoy some currency. See R. Hutton, The Druids, pp. 58-60.
bard
From Common Celtic bardos, ‘poet, praise-singer’, which survives in all six Modern Celtic languages: Irish bard, Welsh bardd, Breton barz, Cornish barth, etc. Hellenised and Latinised forms of Continental Celtic bardos, pl. bardoi are attested in the 1st c. BC both by Strabo (Geographica, IV, 4, 5) and by Diodorus Siculus (Bibliotecha historica, V, 31, 2.) Bizarre, ungrammatical hyper-Gaelic spellings such as bhaird are occasionally found in texts produced by modern druids. The status of bards as opposed to other learned poetic types varies considerably over the centuries; among the continental Celts, the bards were below the vates and druids; in Wales, bardd has always been the usual, general term for a poet; in the Irish medieval texts, the bards are an order rather lower than that of the filid, or learned poets.
ovate [o:vait]
A mistranscription of Strabo’s ouateis (1st c BC) referring to the second of the three divisions of the druidic caste in Gaul, the ‘seers’ or ‘prophets’; the form in the Latin alphabet is uates [Greek ou- and Latin u- = English w-] and is so used by Latin authors. The mistake goes back to the 18th century Welsh scholar Henry Rowlands and was taken up by Iolo Morganwg, who devised the Welsh form ofydd thence, which is quite unetymological, and which is really the Welsh version of the name of the Roman poet Ovid. (The true cognates of Gaulish uates are Welsh gwawd, ‘[prophetic] poetry, poetry’, later ‘mockery, satire, scorn’ and Irish fáith, ‘prophet, seer’.) ‘Ovate’ was Iolo Morganwg’s English equivalent for his ofydd, and is now firmly established.
See R. Hutton, The Druids (London, 2007), p. 60.
gorsedd ['gor seð]
Welsh ‘over seat’: possesses a wide variety of meanings in W., from ‘mound, tumulus’ to ‘episcopal throne’, though often with explicitly supernatural associations. The second element, sedd, is cognate with Irish sídh, ‘fairy-mound, hollow hill’.
Used by Iolo Morganwg in the late 18th c. as his term for a gathering of his pseudo-ancient Order of Bards; he translated the term ‘sublime moot’. It is still used in this sense of ‘a formal gathering’ by both modern pagan druids and by Morganwg’s more direct descendents, the Welsh cultural Druids of the Gorsedd y Beirdd, ‘The Gorsedd of Bards’. The latter is a Welsh national body the purpose of which is to bestow public honours for outstanding cultural achievement. Thus a regular, open gathering of pagan druids at a particular place, often a prehistoric site such as a stone circle, is termed a gorsedd.
For discussion, see T. Ó Cathasaigh, ‘The Semantics of Síd’, Éigse 17 (1978), pp. 137-55; see also R. Hutton, The Druids, pp. 29ff.
Alban Arthan / Eilir / Hefin / Elfed
These are used by modern druids as the Welsh names of the winter solstice, spring equinox, summer solstice, and autumn equinox. The terms are coinages of Iolo Morganwg (late 18th century); he formed alban from al- ‘great, supreme’ and ban ‘peak, region, corner, quarter of the year’. They are attested in his writings (18th-19th century), and the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru places the first occurrences of all four terms in that part of the Llanover collection which is in the hand of Iolo Morganwg. These may well now have been published by the Iolo Morganwg project at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies at the University of Aberystwyth.
Arthan ‘little bear’ (arth, ‘bear’ + diminutive suffix), used for the pole star first in 1772, in John Walters’ English-Welsh Dictionary (1770-94). Often used by modern druids in the erroneous form Arthuan.
Eilir: another 18th-19th c. Iolo Morganwg coinage, which he derived from ail, ‘second, re-’ and ir ‘growth’, thus ‘regrowth’, and meaning ‘spring, regeneration, renewal’. There is a real Welsh word eilir, ‘butterfly’, attested from the 16th c., but this link has not to my knowledge been made by modern druids.
Hefin: a back-formation by Iolo Morganwg from genuine words like cyntefin, ‘start of summer’, Mehefin ‘month of June’; the ultimate root is therefore British *saminos, ‘summer’, but its descendent hefin was not a genuine, stand-alone Welsh word before Iolo.
Elfed appears to have been coined by William Owen-Pughe (late 18th c), from el+med; el was a word of his own devising, meaning ‘spirit, intelligence’ and med was isolated as an independent word by Iolo Morganwg from aeddfed, ‘ripe, mellow’, ?also occurring in Medi, ‘September’; therefore elfed = ‘spirit of ripeness’. Often used by modern druids as Elued, Elved. The orthography of Elued occasionally gives rise to the mistaken pronunciation /elwed/.
Salmon of Wisdom (Irish bradán feasa) (also ‘Salmon of Knowledge’)
A creature appearing in the 12th c. Irish text Macgnímartha Finn, ‘Finn’s Boyhood Deeds’, in which the hero Finn mac Cool/Fionn mac Cumhail as a boy accidentally tastes the flesh of a magical salmon from the river Boyne. The salmon has eaten the hazelnuts which have fallen into an otherworldly well, and thus its flesh is able to bestow wisdom and knowledge to those that consume it. It is one of a number of salmon in Celtic medieval literature associated with wisdom or great age. See K. Meyer, ‘Macgnimartha Find’, Revue Celtique 5 (1891), pp. 195-204, 508.
To what extent this reflects pre-Christian Irish beliefs is unknown; for suggestive parallels see J. McKillop, The Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, p. 376. The Salmon of Wisdom is often taken by modern druids as a totem or symbol of the element of water.
Arianrhod's Castle: Welsh Caer Arianrhod, Caer Aranrhod [kair ar i: 'an rhod]
The sea-girt fortress of Aranrhod, the daughter of Dôn, sister of Gwydion and mother of Lleu, in Math uab Mathonwy, c. 1100.
Whether the character’s name contains arian, ‘silver’, or aran (?huge, ?round) is difficult to determine from the medieval texts: throughout the texts of Math uab Mathonwy the spelling is Aranrot, as it is in the Book of Taliesin (c. 1325). It could be interpreted as ‘Silver Wheel’.
Caer Arianrhod, locally known as Trega’r Anthrag, is the name of a rock visible at low tide about a mile seaward of Dinas Dinlle off the coast of north Wales, and identified with the mythic locale.
The form Arianrhod was popular with later medieval Welsh poets, and continues to be so with modern druids; the latter, selecting the ‘Silver Wheel’ etymology, tend to see her as a goddess of the moon and stars. (See for instance J. Matthews and C. Matthews, The Western Way.)
Some sections of the Ystoria Taliesin which survives in an early-modern version refer to the carchar, ‘prison’, and hual, ‘fetter’, of Arianrhod, probably referring to her castle, in which Taliesin is described as having been three times; modern druids often interpret this as a place of poetic initiation.
See Ystoria Taliesin, ed. & trans. P. K. Ford (Cardiff, 1992), lines 426-7 and 540;
also Trioedd Ynys Prydein, ed. & trans R. Bromwich (Cardiff, 1961), pp. 277-8.
----
Math uab Mathonwy, ed. P. K. Ford (Belmont, MA, 1999).
Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet, ed. R. L. Thomson (Dublin, 1986).
awen ['au-en, properly pronounced: often the Welsh diphthong -aw- is not recognised by Anglophone pagan druids and the word is mispronounced ‘AH-wen’. As a result, the Tolkienesque misspelling arwen is fairly common.]
Welsh. ‘poetic inspiration, divine afflatus, Muse, poetic genius’
The word is attested from the 9th century in old Welsh as aguen (tunc talhaern tat aguen in poemate Britannico claruit, ‘at that time Talhaearn Father of the Muse was renowned in British poetry’, ‘Nennius’, Historia Brittonum)
From Celtic *aue-n-, from the root *aue- ‘breathe, blow’; cognate via I-E with Greek Aiolos, ‘Aeolus’, ‘god of winds’ and more closely within Celtic with Old Irish aí, ‘poetic inspiration’.
Often mis-etymologised as ‘flowing spirit’ amongst druids, following William Owen Pughe’s fanciful splitting up of the word into two non-existent terms of his own devising, namely aw, ‘fluid, gas’, and en ‘being’ (see W. Owen Pughe, A Welsh and English Dictionary, 1793); see also, e.g., P. Shallcrass, ed., Rekindling the Sacred Fire, a British Druid Order pamphlet.
There is a form awenydd, p. awenyddion, with a common agental suffix –ydd: ‘one inspired, entranced, frenzied’, first attested in Giraldus Cambriensis’ Descriptio Kambriae, (late 12th c), which remains in use among some modern druids. (viri nonnulli, quos Awennithion vocant, quasi mente ductos… [some men, whom they term Awenyddion, like people taken out of their wits…’])
nemeton ['nem-et-on]
Nemeton is attested widely in the ancient Celtic world as a place-name element, ‘sanctuary, holy place’ [often implying a woodland clearing] in Gaulish, British and Galatian. e.g. Galatian Drunemeton ‘Oak Sanctuary’ (Strabo, 1st c. BC); Gaulish nemeton and Vernemeton, ‘Great Sanctuary’ (Fortunatus, 6th c, AD); in southern Scotland, British Medionemeton, ‘Middle Sanctuary’. For discussion of these terms, see S. Piggott, The Druids (London, 1975) and P-Y Lambert, La Langue Gauloise (Paris, 1994), pp. 50, 84-5, where it is suggested that the original Gaulish nominative may have been an unattested *nemetos. It is usual, however, to treat it as a neuter o-stem, nemeton.
It has descendents in Welsh and Irish: Old Irish nemed, ‘sanctuary’ but more usually ‘professional, privileged person’, the latter two meanings with a semantic shift (see T. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge, 2001) for discussion). Old Irish fid-nemuid, ‘woodland sanctuary’ is especially suggestive. Also perhaps Old Welsh nywet [nyfed], ‘sanctuary’, in Math uab Mathonwy, c. 1100 AD, but the reading there is obscure. For discussion, see J. E. Caerwyn Williams, ‘Nyfed, Gwernyfed’, Llên Cymru 21 (1988), pp. 151-61. See also J. Vendryes, Lexique Étymologique d’Irlandais Ancien (MNOP), p. N-9 for the Old Irish cognates.
Strictly the plural should probably be nemeta, but nemetons is usual, and the word is rarely used in the plural.
Used by modern druids, largely following E. Restall-Orr, Spirits of the Sacred Grove [Druid Priestess] (London, 1998), as a) a sacred grove in a forest (the original sense); b) any natural sanctuary, such as a stone circle; and c) the personal space or auric field of a human being, believed by many druids to extend from their body in a rough sphere, and perceptible to the psychically sensitive.
ogham
The Old Irish word properly refers to an native Irish alphabet of strokes or notches designed to be incised on stone, and probably wood, attested as inscriptions from the 5th to the 6th centuries in Ireland, and perhaps also from the late 4th. The origin of the letters has been much-debated: the current scholarly consensus is that the distribution of the letters in the system is derives from the classification of letters found in Latin grammarians of the 1st-4th centuries AD, and thus is an imitation of Latin literacy, as is the custom of inscribing stone monuments. The inscriptions, usually border markers or grave memorials, occur in a broad band across southern Ireland and areas of Irish settlement in southern Wales, always in the Irish language. The writing of other Celtic languages in ogham is completely ahistorical, with the exception of occasional examples of Pictish use of the script. The name was related by the Irish themselves to Ogma, one of the champions of the Tuatha Dé Danann or Irish gods, who was supposed to have devised the alphabet.
Due to the eccentric theories of the poet Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1948), it is common among druids to regard the script as a mystical or occult ‘tree alphabet’, because a minority of the letters are named after trees. The tree-link is probably a red-herring: see D. McManus, A Guide to Ogam (Maynooth, 1991), pp. 35-43. Further, the idea that the alphabet is a tree-calendar, in which each tree/letter corresponds to a lunar month, has developed, and even spawned a kind of ersatz Celtic ‘astrology’ in which the ‘tree-months’ are imagined as resembling the signs of the zodiac. All these are modern concepts. There is also nothing to link the script to the pre-Christian druids of Ireland, though it is not unlikely that as the pagan educated class they were familiar with it around the time of conversion. The concept of ogham as a sacred, druidic alphabet and calendar is deeply-entrenched among modern pagans and almost entirely fictitious. For a general discussion, see T. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, pp. 163-76. The major scholarly discussion remains McManus, A Guide to Ogam (see above).
Coelbren (y Beirdd) ['coilbren uh beirð]
A spurious alphabet invented by Iolo Morganwg around 1791 for his purportedly ancient order of Welsh bards. He claimed that it was the alphabet of the Druids and that it had 20 ‘letters’ and 20 other signs for the elongated vowels and consonantal mutations of the Welsh language. It consists of letters, clearly derived from the Roman alphabet, carved onto four-sided wooden rods. The rods are placed in a wooden frame, which Morganwg termed a peithynen, in which the rods could be turned so that they could be read on all four sides.. The falsity of Morganwg’s claim that his alphabet was ancient was immediately suspected by his contemporaries, and was generally entirely disbelieved in Wales by the end of the 19th century. It is occasionally used by small numbers of modern pagan druids, sometimes labouring under the misapprehension that it is a Welsh equivalent for ogham.
triad
Celtic culture shows a marked preference for setting out knowledge in sets of three, and collections of triadic sayings survive from both medieval Wales and Ireland. The Irish ones tends to be gnomic or proverbial; the earliest Welsh ones are thought to be mnemonics used in the instruction of professional poets and storytellers, and thus tend to list triadic groupings of legendary people, places, objects or events. However, the triadic style was also used in medieval Wales for setting out other kinds of technical knowledge, including legal codes. In the 18th century, Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams) developed the triadic form as a way of setting out his purported bardic lore, in imitation of the medieval triads. The composition of original triads as pithy repositories of spiritual instruction remains popular with modern druids.
See R. Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein (Cardiff, 1961) for the Welsh Triads, and K. Meyer, The Triads of Ireland (Dublin, 1906).
Annwn ['an-un]; also older Annwfn, Annwfyn ['an-uvn]
The ambivalent Welsh otherworld or underworld; the first appearance of the word is hard to date, but may well be the poem Preideu Annwfyn in The Book of Taliesin, N.L.W. MS Peniarth 2, which may be 10th century, though the MS itself dates to the 14th century. In Priedeu Annwyfn, Annwn is explicitly identified with uffern, ‘hell’; but in other appearances is more like the sumptuous, pleasant otherworld of Irish medieval literature. Elsewhere in the Book of Taliesin, it is ‘beneath the world’, connected with poetic inspiration, and filled with streams. In Pwyll Penduic Dyuet (c. 1100AD) Annwn is an idealised, supernatural version of aristocratic medieval Wales.
The etymology is obscure: either an+dwf(y)n, ‘very deep’ or an+dwf(y)n, ‘not-world’ have been suggested. See M. Haycock, Legendary Poems in the Book of Taliesin (Aberystwyth, 2007), p. 440, for references.
In Iolo Morganwg’s 18th c pseudo-druidic system, Annwn is adopted to refer to the place of life’s creation, an abyss of bestial chaos furthest from the light of deity and upwards from which the soul must progress to return to God.
The occasional modern druid spelling Annwyn is erroneous, as is the common pronunciation ‘a-NOON’.
The following three terms were coined or adapted by Iolo Morganwg as part of his 18th c. pseudo-druidic spiritual system; they are strongly influenced by both Christianity and Buddhism: see also Annwn.
Abred refers to be material world, as a state of evil, chaos or disorder, in which human beings are reincarnated in an effort to purify themselves and ascend to Gwynfyd. This use of abred is first attested by William Owen Pughe in 1793, and then in 1794 by Iolo Morganwg. It is in fact attested as a Welsh word from the 14th century, but seems to mean ‘deliverance, release’, but uncertainly. (cf. also the cognate verb, W. abredu, ‘to transmigrate’) It seems fair to say that Iolo Morganwg and Owen-Pughe substantially altered the meaning.
Gwynfyd or gwynvyd [gwin-vid] indicates ‘beatitude’, a blissful, sinless state enjoyed by the soul on its reuniting with the Deity. It is a compound of Welsh gwyn ‘white, blessed’ with byd, ‘world’ and recalls the Welsh idiom applied to a worthy person: gwyn ei fyd, ‘blessed’, lit: ‘white his world’. The nearest English word is thus ‘Blessedness, Bliss’. The word in fact is old – attested from the 14th century, and in the plural being the W. term for the ‘Beatitudes’ of the New Testament - but its 18th-19th c. use as a kind of pseudo-druidic Nirvana is down to Iolo Morganwg and his circle.
Ceugant ['kei-gant] The original meaning in W. is an adj. ‘certain, sure, undoubted, inevitable’, from British *couo-cant, and is attested from the 12th-13th century. It was misetymologised by Iolo Morganwg as a noun, cau ‘vacant, empty’ + cant ‘periphery, circle’, and thus ‘circle of infinity’, the abode of the Deity alone, of the fullness of God, under which meaning it is attested from 1794.
The best place to look for analyses of these coinages is probably the numerous, very recent publications of the Iolo Morganwg Project of the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, University of Aberystwyth. The relevant texts may well have been re-edited and they will be able to supply the most up-to-date references.
The terms are not popular with many polytheistic Pagan druids, because of their monotheistic overtones, but still enjoy some currency. See R. Hutton, The Druids, pp. 58-60.
bard
From Common Celtic bardos, ‘poet, praise-singer’, which survives in all six Modern Celtic languages: Irish bard, Welsh bardd, Breton barz, Cornish barth, etc. Hellenised and Latinised forms of Continental Celtic bardos, pl. bardoi are attested in the 1st c. BC both by Strabo (Geographica, IV, 4, 5) and by Diodorus Siculus (Bibliotecha historica, V, 31, 2.) Bizarre, ungrammatical hyper-Gaelic spellings such as bhaird are occasionally found in texts produced by modern druids. The status of bards as opposed to other learned poetic types varies considerably over the centuries; among the continental Celts, the bards were below the vates and druids; in Wales, bardd has always been the usual, general term for a poet; in the Irish medieval texts, the bards are an order rather lower than that of the filid, or learned poets.
ovate [o:vait]
A mistranscription of Strabo’s ouateis (1st c BC) referring to the second of the three divisions of the druidic caste in Gaul, the ‘seers’ or ‘prophets’; the form in the Latin alphabet is uates [Greek ou- and Latin u- = English w-] and is so used by Latin authors. The mistake goes back to the 18th century Welsh scholar Henry Rowlands and was taken up by Iolo Morganwg, who devised the Welsh form ofydd thence, which is quite unetymological, and which is really the Welsh version of the name of the Roman poet Ovid. (The true cognates of Gaulish uates are Welsh gwawd, ‘[prophetic] poetry, poetry’, later ‘mockery, satire, scorn’ and Irish fáith, ‘prophet, seer’.) ‘Ovate’ was Iolo Morganwg’s English equivalent for his ofydd, and is now firmly established.
See R. Hutton, The Druids (London, 2007), p. 60.
gorsedd ['gor seð]
Welsh ‘over seat’: possesses a wide variety of meanings in W., from ‘mound, tumulus’ to ‘episcopal throne’, though often with explicitly supernatural associations. The second element, sedd, is cognate with Irish sídh, ‘fairy-mound, hollow hill’.
Used by Iolo Morganwg in the late 18th c. as his term for a gathering of his pseudo-ancient Order of Bards; he translated the term ‘sublime moot’. It is still used in this sense of ‘a formal gathering’ by both modern pagan druids and by Morganwg’s more direct descendents, the Welsh cultural Druids of the Gorsedd y Beirdd, ‘The Gorsedd of Bards’. The latter is a Welsh national body the purpose of which is to bestow public honours for outstanding cultural achievement. Thus a regular, open gathering of pagan druids at a particular place, often a prehistoric site such as a stone circle, is termed a gorsedd.
For discussion, see T. Ó Cathasaigh, ‘The Semantics of Síd’, Éigse 17 (1978), pp. 137-55; see also R. Hutton, The Druids, pp. 29ff.
Alban Arthan / Eilir / Hefin / Elfed
These are used by modern druids as the Welsh names of the winter solstice, spring equinox, summer solstice, and autumn equinox. The terms are coinages of Iolo Morganwg (late 18th century); he formed alban from al- ‘great, supreme’ and ban ‘peak, region, corner, quarter of the year’. They are attested in his writings (18th-19th century), and the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru places the first occurrences of all four terms in that part of the Llanover collection which is in the hand of Iolo Morganwg. These may well now have been published by the Iolo Morganwg project at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies at the University of Aberystwyth.
Arthan ‘little bear’ (arth, ‘bear’ + diminutive suffix), used for the pole star first in 1772, in John Walters’ English-Welsh Dictionary (1770-94). Often used by modern druids in the erroneous form Arthuan.
Eilir: another 18th-19th c. Iolo Morganwg coinage, which he derived from ail, ‘second, re-’ and ir ‘growth’, thus ‘regrowth’, and meaning ‘spring, regeneration, renewal’. There is a real Welsh word eilir, ‘butterfly’, attested from the 16th c., but this link has not to my knowledge been made by modern druids.
Hefin: a back-formation by Iolo Morganwg from genuine words like cyntefin, ‘start of summer’, Mehefin ‘month of June’; the ultimate root is therefore British *saminos, ‘summer’, but its descendent hefin was not a genuine, stand-alone Welsh word before Iolo.
Elfed appears to have been coined by William Owen-Pughe (late 18th c), from el+med; el was a word of his own devising, meaning ‘spirit, intelligence’ and med was isolated as an independent word by Iolo Morganwg from aeddfed, ‘ripe, mellow’, ?also occurring in Medi, ‘September’; therefore elfed = ‘spirit of ripeness’. Often used by modern druids as Elued, Elved. The orthography of Elued occasionally gives rise to the mistaken pronunciation /elwed/.
Salmon of Wisdom (Irish bradán feasa) (also ‘Salmon of Knowledge’)
A creature appearing in the 12th c. Irish text Macgnímartha Finn, ‘Finn’s Boyhood Deeds’, in which the hero Finn mac Cool/Fionn mac Cumhail as a boy accidentally tastes the flesh of a magical salmon from the river Boyne. The salmon has eaten the hazelnuts which have fallen into an otherworldly well, and thus its flesh is able to bestow wisdom and knowledge to those that consume it. It is one of a number of salmon in Celtic medieval literature associated with wisdom or great age. See K. Meyer, ‘Macgnimartha Find’, Revue Celtique 5 (1891), pp. 195-204, 508.
To what extent this reflects pre-Christian Irish beliefs is unknown; for suggestive parallels see J. McKillop, The Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, p. 376. The Salmon of Wisdom is often taken by modern druids as a totem or symbol of the element of water.
Arianrhod's Castle: Welsh Caer Arianrhod, Caer Aranrhod [kair ar i: 'an rhod]
The sea-girt fortress of Aranrhod, the daughter of Dôn, sister of Gwydion and mother of Lleu, in Math uab Mathonwy, c. 1100.
Whether the character’s name contains arian, ‘silver’, or aran (?huge, ?round) is difficult to determine from the medieval texts: throughout the texts of Math uab Mathonwy the spelling is Aranrot, as it is in the Book of Taliesin (c. 1325). It could be interpreted as ‘Silver Wheel’.
Caer Arianrhod, locally known as Trega’r Anthrag, is the name of a rock visible at low tide about a mile seaward of Dinas Dinlle off the coast of north Wales, and identified with the mythic locale.
The form Arianrhod was popular with later medieval Welsh poets, and continues to be so with modern druids; the latter, selecting the ‘Silver Wheel’ etymology, tend to see her as a goddess of the moon and stars. (See for instance J. Matthews and C. Matthews, The Western Way.)
Some sections of the Ystoria Taliesin which survives in an early-modern version refer to the carchar, ‘prison’, and hual, ‘fetter’, of Arianrhod, probably referring to her castle, in which Taliesin is described as having been three times; modern druids often interpret this as a place of poetic initiation.
See Ystoria Taliesin, ed. & trans. P. K. Ford (Cardiff, 1992), lines 426-7 and 540;
also Trioedd Ynys Prydein, ed. & trans R. Bromwich (Cardiff, 1961), pp. 277-8.
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Math uab Mathonwy, ed. P. K. Ford (Belmont, MA, 1999).
Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet, ed. R. L. Thomson (Dublin, 1986).
