Yet another reason to go to Svalbard (like I needed one!)

Buried Seed Vault Opens in Arctic [NYTimes.com]

Labels: "seed vault", Norwegian

As the title of this post suggests my particular interest in hags is with the sea variety. Anyone who has ever watched a Popeye cartoon is familiar with the Sea Hag; she's the tall witchy woman with a vulture for a familiar who suffers an unrequited crush on the our favorite roid-raged sailor. It's kind of pathetic, really. But I experienced no such empathy as a child; I just thought the Sea Hag was creepy and awesome in the way only nautical rapscallions can be (evidence: a, b and c).

Hag is a shortened form of the Old English hægtesse meaning "witch, fury." The word can be traced further back to the Proto-Germanic *hagatusjon-. The Middle Dutch cognate, haghetisse, was also shorted to form the German Hexe, meaning "witch;" and it's via the Amish we got our English hex. Now, here's where things get crazy:

[Hag's first] element is probably cognate with [Old English] haga "enclosure" [which is related to our modern hedge]...Or second element may be connected with [Norwegian} tysja "fairy, crippled woman"...from PIE *dhewes- "to fly about, smoke, be scattered, vanish."...Haga is also the haw- in hawthorn, which is a central plant in northern European pagan religion. There may be several layers of folk-etymology here. If the hægtesse was once a powerful supernatural woman..., it may have originally carried the hawthorn sense. Later, when the pagan magic was reduced to local scatterings, it might have had the sense of "hedge-rider," or "she who straddles the hedge," because the hedge was the boundary between the "civilized" world of the village and the wild world beyond. The hægtesse would have a foot in each reality...

Sea hag [TV Acres]
hag [Online Etymology Dictionary]
hex [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Häxan [IMDB.com]
The Dreams in the Witch House [Wikipedia]

Labels: German, Middle Dutch, Norwegian, Old English, Pennsylvania Dutch, PIE, Proto-Germanic, The Daily Hump

Yesterday we humped reindeer and today we're going to hump another animal with an affinity for the cold, the arctic narwhal. The narwhal is a type of whale most notable for the extremely long tusk that juts from the left jaw of the male. These tusks can grow up to 10 feet long which is pretty impressive when you consider the whale itself is no longer than 16 feet.

In Inuit legend the narwhal was created when a woman holding onto a harpoon was dragged into the sea by a beluga and became twisted upon the weapon. In Medieval folklore many Europeans equated the narwhal tusk to the unicorn horn. Vikings and other northern traders sold the tusks for large sums of gold as cups fashioned from the ivory were believed to negate the effect of any poison which they held inside.

The word narwhal comes to us from the Danish and Norwegian narhval, which itself is from the Old Norse nāhvalr. It is generally assumed that the Old Norse name is derived from nār, corpse (from its whitish color) + hvalr, whale, although this is not known for sure. Another suggestion is that the narwhal was named "the corpse whale" for its ability to lie belly up and motionless for a few minutes at a time. Or, alternatively, nā- could be short for the Old Norse nál, meaning needle, an obvious reference to the male's tusk.

Here's a fun bit of mental masturbation: If we assume the first element nā- is from nār (corpse) this is a cognate with the Old English ne, neo, which is an element associated with things that are dead. Examples in Old English include neobedd (death bed), the root of our modern word need (surprisingly enough) and orcneas (evil spirits); orcneas is the likely source of our word orc and shares a Latin root with orca, another species of whale.

narwhal [Wikipedia]
narwhal [AHD]
narwhal [Online Etymology Dictionary]
narwhal [OED]
orca [Online Etymology Dictionary]
need [OED]
orc [OED]
orc [Online Etymology Dictionary]

Labels: Danish, Latin, Norwegian, Old English, Old Norse, The Daily Hump

As warm-blooded mammals human beings seem to have a natural affinity towards snug, comfortable shelters. Perhaps this yearning for coziness is nothing more than a memory heldover from our time in the womb. The word cozy is most likely of Scandinavian origin (cf. the Norwegian kose seg, "be cozy") which is unsurprising given the cold Nordic climate.

English also has a word gemutlich (with or without umlaut) which is from zie Germans and is generally defined as "pleasant and friendly" (possibly first used as an adjective in English by Queen Victoria). In German a gemütlich person or place is one that obeys the philosphy of Gemütlichkeit, which goes beyond the English concept of coziness in its level of abstractness:

...rather than basically just describing a place as not too large, well-heated and nicely furnished (a cosy room, a cosy flat), Gemütlichkeit connotes, much more than cosiness, the notion of belonging, social acceptance, cheerfulness, the absence of anything hectic and the spending of quality time in a place as described above...A gemütlich person...is one that takes part in this lifestyle and knows about the tensions he/she is able to cause, and thus tries to avoid these things actively.

This idea of avoiding tension in one's enviroment suggests a similarity to Chinese feng shui, although I'd argue the Taoist-inspired art would likely be focused much more on passive rather than active avoidance. This being said, we do see fairly analagous ideas to Gemütlichkeit in other parts of northern Europe including the Dutch gezelligheid, the Danish hygge and the Russian уют.

From an anthropological perspective it'd be interesting to examine whether cultures from warmer climates maintain any sort of concept of cozy.

cozy [Online Etymology Dictionary]
cozy [OED]
gemütlich [OED]
Gemütlichkeit [Wikipedia]
Gezelligheid [Wikipedia]

Labels: Chinese, Danish, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Old Norse, Russian, The Daily Hump