Mothlach

Mothlach was a word in old Irish, meaning “rough, bushy, tangled, scraggy”, with the implication of a type of scrubbily wooded place. With the variant Mothrach being the name for an equivalent woody tangled place if the place were persistently wet and damp, such as an overgrown wet hollow.

In Welsh it took the form of the very similar mwthlach, meaning a tangled and scrubby bit of overgrown ground. Later, and within living memory in the 1900s, it was applied in parts of Wales to a soft person who was a bit of a ‘walking heap’. Presumably with the implication that a few moths or flies might be flitting about them.

The words are mentioned by Sir John Rhys in his Celtic folklore, Welsh and Manx (1901, in two volumes, I and II), and I found the variant Mothrach in an earlier Irish dictionary. There was also the related meaning of murlach from the Isle of Islay, as ‘woman having an ugly head of hair’.

I can’t discover scholars noting a link to the Norse Myrkviðr (Anglicised as Mirkwood by Scott, Powell, William Morris and then picked up by Tolkien), but the meaning is broadly similar if on a much larger scale. Myrkviðr being a “dark boundary-forest” (Tolkien) which is “untracked” (Drout, J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, p. 430) and thus implicitly defensive in military terms. Drout refers to the deeper…

   proto-Indo European roots for *mer– “to flicker,” with derivatives indicating dim states of illumination, and *merg-, “boundary, mark, border”

Interesting. Moths flicker in dim illumination, and recent linguistic scholarship seems to confirm the ‘soul’ cultural connotations…

   “certain other small, often winged, creatures are marked as special by the fact that their death, unlike that of “normal” animals, can be described with forms based on the Proto-Indo-European root *mer– (as in Lat. morior), otherwise reserved for humans.” (Anatolisch und Indogermanisch, 2001, Indogermanische Gesellschaft Kolloquium, page 209)

Those “certain other small, often winged, creatures”… again that sounds to me like moths. The ecological habitat of a dark “trackless” wood, windless and “rough, bushy, tangled, scraggy”, would certainly be conducive to abundant moth-life. One wonders if there was an ancient perception that moths were “already-dead things” or linked with human death? I found immediate confirmation of this notion via a quick search…

   “folklore describes moths or butterflies — and occasionally, bees — which appear after a person’s death and which hold their escaping soul.” Source: Henderson, George. Survivals in Belief Among the Celts. Glasgow: James MacLeose and Sons, 1911 (in The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore, 2014).

This reminded me of my recent and similar musing on a local instance in which a ‘lady well’ spirit was referred to with the curious phrase “or else an insect” by a local informant.

This brings me neatly back to Rhys’s authoritative Celtic Folklore, in which I found Mothlach. Elsewhere, on page 612 of volume 2, he notes…

   “Cornish tradition applies the term ‘pisky‘ both to the fairies and to moths, believed in Cornwall by many to be departed souls. So in Ireland: a certain reverend gentleman named Joseph Ferguson, writing in 1810 a statistical account of the parish of Ballymoyer, in the county of Armagh, states that one day a girl chasing a butterfly was chid [chided] by her companions, who said to her: ‘That may be the soul of your grandmother.’ This idea, to survive, has modified itself into a belief less objectionably pagan, that a butterfly hovering near a corpse is a sign of its everlasting happiness. … it is also stated that the country people in Yorkshire used to give the name of souls to certain night-flying white moths.”

In which case the dense tangled woods that defensively surrounded hill-forts such as The Wrekin…

   “according to him [Caesar] the British idea of a town or fortress was a place with a tangled wood round it, and fortified with a rampart and ditch” (Sir John Rhys, Celtic Britain, page 53)

… might have been understood by the ancient inhabitants to be flickering at night with the souls of their recent ancestors. And these large white moths would have visited for nectar the first wood anemones — wind-stars or windflowers in the Midlands. These beautiful flowers are the first and commonest woodland flowers of the year and are likewise white, since they have no need to attract day-time insects (there are none at that time of year). The wearing of these wood anemone flowers on the lapel or in the hair was recorded by late English folklorists as deeming bad luck, and I wonder of this was originally due to their cultural association with attracting the souls of the dead (in moth form)? In this they would be rather like Tolkien’s grave-associated Simbelmyne white flowers, which likewise grow at the edge of a large hill-fort.

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Sadly the excellent word mothlach doesn’t appear to have survived into English, its meaning having been superseded in use by common Norse and French words. Although in meaning “tangled, scraggy” it has a likeness to the disused Old English mothfret, meaning something moth-eaten. To say today that an item of clothing had been found to be “moth-fretted” would still be understood in modern English.

Lastly, if someone wanted a title for an eclectic magazine or academic journal then Mothlach might serve.

All around the Wrekin

My Birmingham grandmother, who grew up in rural mid-Staffordshire, used a common Staffordshire and Shropshire phrase meaning ‘going all around-about on foot, in a long and tangled journey back to where you started’. This was “all around the Wrekin”. The same phrase was also used to refer to a person who verbally rambles, taking a long time to say something that could be said more directly.

The Wrekin [ree-kin] in question is a famous and impressive hill-fort of the Cornovii in nearby Shropshire, on the Welsh Marches. Its size and location indicates it was their most significant tribal centre, although they were probably still somewhat seasonally nomadic in terms of having summer and winter palaces…

[Caesar] “had ample opportunities of observing the appearance of the country, and of learning much about the inhabitants … He considered the country very thickly inhabited, and the abundance of cattle to be deserving of notice. The buildings he saw resembled those of Gaul, and were very numerous, but according to him the British idea of a town or fortress was a place with a tangled wood [the mwthlach or mothlach] round it, and fortified with a rampart and ditch; inside this they would, as Strabo tells us, build their huts and collect their cattle, but not with a view of remaining there long.” (Sir John Rhys, Celtic Britain, page 53)

These are the words of J.R.R. Tolkien’s early inspiration on matters Celtic, Sir John Rhys. He published an essay on the Wrekin and its various linguistics in 1908, and this is now online: “All around the Wrekin”, Y Cymmrodor XXI, printed November 1908.

Tolkien was familiar with Rhys from a young age. He had read Rhys’s Celtic Britain (probably in the second edition of 1884) as a boy in Birmingham. Later he very likely sat in on Rhys’s series of lectures at Jesus College, Oxford, even though Tolkien was then at another Oxford college and the lectures were not required for his degree. There is, however, no evidence that I know of that the Wrekin was “the inspiration for Middle-earth” — a claim made in local Tourist Board piffle.

Rhys’s essay on the Wrekin mostly delves very deeply in the history and word-meanings, and is as digressive as its title suggests. But everyday readers may be interested to know that, buried deep among the dense philology, Rhys notes (page 11) a similar surviving phrase of the 1900s…

“a local toast in our day describes [the district] comprehensively as: “All friends round the Wrekin”.”

Rhys passes this swiftly by and he assumes the phrase was a conflation of the people of the district with the district itself. In effect a phrase meaning that: ‘all are friends who live around the Wrekin’, because from a common stock. But the use of the phrase in print, as a dedication for the book The Recruiting Officer (1706), seems to me to indicate that it then meant something slightly different: ‘too many friends to go all-around and mention each person by name’. In the era of heavy-drinking banquets, this would have been a convenient and welcome phrase for a toast-giver, getting him out of having to remember and recount a string of names while drunk. And risk mispronouncing or forgetting people’s names. This meaning is then congruent with the modern use of “all around the Wrekin” meaning someone who verbally rambles. In effect, at a banquet it would have been easily remembered shorthand for: ‘Here’s a toast to all my friends… but I won’t go all around the Wrekin, by trying to mention each of them by name’.

One might recall Bilbo’s party speech here, at the start of The Lord of the Rings, when he thanks the…

“”Bagginses and Boffins … Tooks and Brandybucks, and Grubbs, and Chubbs, and Burrowses, and Hornblowers, and Bolgers, Bracegirdles, Goodbodies, Brockhouses and Proudfoots …” Why couldn’t he stop talking and let them drink his health?”

The more casual reader of Rhys’s essay may also find useful his appendix, where in three pages he deftly summarises a long scholarly monograph on the name Wrekin: in Mercian the name was Wreocen, going back to a Celtic Wrikon-. Later authors (1949, 1963) have tentatively suggested a relation of Wrikon- to the Welsh gwrygio, meaning something like ‘to wax (grow, swell) strong and manly | to exert strength and thus thrive’.

The cost of roaming the fields

From a blog post I noted while searching, “A reviewer’s complaint”…

Thomas Honegger [in 2015, complained of Tolkien] scholars unaware of major and basic work in the areas they are covering. “How are we going to advance Tolkien studies if scholars in the field are ignorant of each others research?”

Well, I know how and why this happened. It’s the explosion in the size of our field.

I’d also suggest it’s the cost, and sometimes the difficulty, of obtaining the needed items. To obtain the “little opinion piece by Thomas Honegger”, for instance, I’d need to spend £20 plus postage for a print copy of a little-known German scholarly journal. Since I don’t need anything else that’s in the journal issue, and a quarter of the essays are in German anyway, £20 is not an enticing price.

Let’s say that one wishes to make a basic start in Tolkien scholarship. That’s a little less daunting than starting on someone comparable like H.P. Lovecraft, since Tolkien scholarship is not so saddled with rare book collectors (Tolkien collectors are only interested in what Tolkien wrote, not what’s been written about him). Even so, a basic small shelf for Tolkien is probably around £500. That’s less than the perhaps-£800 you’d need to make a start on Lovecraft and do proper fannish scholarship (not the risible slander which Lovecraft usually gets from fly-by university professors). But with Tolkien, the somewhat lower per-item costs are then balanced out by the larger range of items you’d need to see a clear outline of the field. There are also higher ongoing costs to keep up with the ongoing wash of Tolkien scholarship, compared to the relatively small trickle of annual Lovecraft scholarship (the valiant efforts of S.T. Joshi and co. aside) that’s worth reading. There is admittedly a very good survey in each annual issue of Tolkien Studies, but just acquiring the last four issues of Tolkien Studies would cost me $280.

Such startup costs would be no problem for an academic on a whopping £38,000+ a year, or even for an £18k funded PhD who has miraculously found a friendly librarian with ample funds for inter-library loans and book purchases. But even an initial £500 outlay would be daunting for most impoverished independent scholars. Especially as that initial £500 would soon need to be matched by another £500 for runs of paper journals, books and obscure out-of-print items. Even if one was very frugal, and also knew how and where to hunt items online, and how best to wrangle with Google Books etc, one could still end up having to spend at least £300 on ‘needed item’ print books. All in order to write a new book that may only sell 30 copies and get one review.

The other problem, in terms of Honegger’s complaint, may be the cost of getting a detailed pre-publication reader’s report from someone at the top of the field. Thus enabling one to sidestep the sort of small snags that so antagonise reviewers in the field. Perhaps Tolkien studies now needs some kind of subsidised pre-publication peer review system, for substantial new books from outside the academy. Or one might publish the PDF online for free for 18 months, with a public “call for comments” and commenting system, then publish a revised and corrected final-version in print two years later.

Arthur Machen, weaver of fantasy

New on Hathi, in public full-text: the book Arthur Machen, weaver of fantasy (1949).

Mary Flynn in Stoke

“Farewell to Faha’s Friend”, the orthopaedic nurse Mary Flynn…

“Last week the small community of Faha outside Kilmacthomas [County Waterford, Ireland] mourned the death of one of its oldest and longest residents.

[When young] Mary and [her sister] Philomena found it difficult to get [nursing] work experience at home [in Co. Waterford, deep in rural Ireland]. Undeterred, they decided to travel to England to seek work, heading for Stoke-on-Trent where their aunt worked as a radiographer and a ward sister in City General Hospital. Mary had embarked on the daunting journey firstly, followed shortly afterwards by Philomena.

With little money and no modern telecommunications, they travelled to Dún Laoghaire to catch a ferry to Holyhead [in north Wales], a train to Crewe, and another train to Stoke-on-Trent. Travelling outside Waterford for the first time, Mary and Philomena faced many challenges but recounted their time in England with fond memories. Mary spoke of nursing the late English soccer international Sir Stanley Matthews, widely regarded as one of the greatest ever players of the game in Britain.”