Chapter 11

{66} See _Les Scythes_, _les Ancêtres des Peuples Germaniques et Slaves_, par F. G. Bergmann, professeur à la faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg: Colmar, 1858. But Professor Bergmann’s etymologies are often, says Lord Strangford, ‘false lights, held by an uncertain hand.’ And Lord Strangford continues:—‘The Apian land certainly meant the watery land, _Meer-Umschlungon_, among the pre-Hellenic Greeks, just as the same land is called Morea by the modern post-Hellenic or Romaic Greeks from _more_, the name for the sea in the Slavonic vernacular of its inhabitants during the heart of the middle ages. But it is only connected by a remote and secondary affinity, if connected at all, with the _avia_ of Scandinavia, assuming that to be the true German word for _water_, which, if it had come down to us in Gothic, would have been _avi_, genitive _aujôs_, and not a mere Latinised termination. Scythian is surely a negative rather than a positive term, much like our _Indian_, or the _Turanian_ of modern ethnologists, used to comprehend nomads and barbarians of all sorts and races north and east of the Black and Caspian seas. It is unsafe to connect their name with anything as yet; it is quite as likely that it refers to the bow and arrow as to the shield, and is connected with our word to _shoot_, _sceótan_, _skiutan_, Lithuanian _szau-ti_. Some of the Scythian peoples may have been Anarian, Allophylic, Mongolian; some were demonstrably Aryan, and not only that, but Iranian as well, as is best shown in a memoir read before the Berlin Academy this last year; the evidence having been first indicated in the rough by Schaffarik the Slavonic antiquary. Coins, glosses, proper names, and inscriptions prove it. Targitaos (not -tavus) and the rest is guess-work or wrong. Herodotus’s Ταβιτι for the goddess Vesta is not connected with the root _div_ whence Dêvas, Deus, &c., but the root _tap_, in Latin _tep_ (of tepere, tepefacere), Slavonic _tepl_, _topl_ (for _tep_ or _top_), in modern Persian _tâb_. _Thymele_ refers to the hearth as the place of smoke (θύω, _thus_, _fumus_), but _familia_ denotes household from _famulus_ for _fagmulus_, the root _fag_ being equated with the Sansk. _bhaj_, _servira_. Lucan’s Hesus or Esus may fairly be compared with the Welsh _Hu_ Gadarn by legitimate process, but no letter-change can justify his connection with _Gaisos_, the spear, not the sword, Virgil’s _gæsum_, A. S. _gár_, our verb to _gore_, retained in its outer form in _gar_-fish. For _Theuthisks lege Thiudisks_, from _thiuda_, _populus_; in old high German Diutisk, Diotisk, _popularis_, _vulgaris_, the country vernacular as distinguished from the cultivated Latin; hence the word _Dutch_, _Deutsch_. With our ancestors _theód_ stood for nation generally and _getheóde_ for any speech. Our diet in the political sense is the same word, but borrowed from our German cousins, not inherited from our fathers. The modern Celtic form is the Irish _tuath_, in ancient Celtic it must have been _teuta_, _touta_, of which we actually have the adjective _toutius_ in the Gaulish inscription of Nismes. In Oscan we have it as _turta_, _tuta_, its adjective being handed down in Livy’s _meddix tuticus_, the mayor or chief magistrate of the _tuta_. In the Umbrian inscriptions it is _tota_. In Lithuanian _tauta_, the country opposed to the town, and in old Prussian _tauta_, the country generally, _en Prusiskan tautan_, _im Land zu Preussen_.’

{68} Lord Strangford observes here:—‘The original forms of Gael should be mentioned—Gaedil, Goidil: in modern Gaelic orthography Gaoidheal where the _dh_ is not realised in pronunciation. There is nothing impossible in the connection of the root of this with that of Scot, _if_ the _s_ of the latter be merely prosthetic. But the whole thing is _in nubibus_, and given as a guess only.’

{69} ‘The name of Erin,’ says Lord Strangford, ‘is treated at length in a masterly note by Whitley Stokes in the 1st series of Max Müller’s lectures (4th ed.) p. 255, where its earliest _tangible_ form is shown to have been Iverio. Pictet’s connection with Arya is quite baseless.’

{82} It is to be remembered that the above was written before the recent war between Prussia and Austria.

{84} The etymology is Monsieur Henri Martin’s, but Lord Strangford says—‘Whatever _gai_ may be, it is assuredly not Celtic. Is there any authority for this word _gair_, to laugh, or rather “laughter,” beyond O’Reilly? O’Reilly is no authority at all except in so far as tested and passed by the new school. It is hard to give up _gavisus_. But Diez, chief authority in Romanic matters, is content to accept Muratori’s reference to an old High-German _gâhi_, modern _jähe_, sharp, quick, sudden, brisk, and so to the sense of lively, animated, high in spirits.’

{85} Monsieur Henri Martin, whose chapters on the Celts, in his _Histoire de France_, are full of information and interest.

{97} The above is really a sentence taken from the _Cologne Gazette_. Lord Strangford’s comment here is as follows:—‘Modern Germanism, in a general estimate of Germanism, should not be taken, absolutely and necessarily, as the constant, whereof we are the variant. The Low-Dutch of Holland, anyhow, are indisputably as genuine Dutch as the High-Dutch of Germany Proper. But do they write sentences like this one—_informe_, _ingens_, _cui lumen ademptum_? If not, the question must be asked, not how we have come to deviate, but how the Germans have come to deviate. Our modern English prose in plain matters is often all just the same as the prose of _King Alfred_ and the _Chronicle_. Ohthere’s _North Sea Voyage_ and Wulfstan’s _Baltic Voyage_ is the sort of thing which is sent in every day, one may say, to the Geographical or Ethnological Society, in the whole style and turn of phrase and thought.’

The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the stock. But see, moreover, what I have said at p. 100.

{120} Lord Strangford’s note on this is:—‘The Irish monks whose bells and books were found in Iceland could not have contributed anything to the old Norse spirit, for they had perished before the first Norseman had set foot on the island. The form of the old Norse poetry known to us as Icelandic, from the accident of its preservation in that island alone, is surely Pan-Teutonic from old times; the ar and method of its strictly literary cultivation must have been much influenced by the contemporary Old-English national poetry, with which the Norsemen were in constant contact; and its larger, freer, and wilder spirit must have been owing to their freer and wilder life, to say nothing of their roused and warring paganism. They could never have known any Celts save when living in embryo with other Teutons.’

Very likely Lord Strangford is right, but the proposition with which he begins is at variance with what the text quoted by Zeuss alleges.

{133} Rhyme,—the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its _romantic element_,—rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes into our poetry from the Celts.

{136} Take the following attempt to render the natural magic supposed to pervade Tieck’s poetry:—‘In diesen Dichtungen herrscht eine geheimnissvolle Innigkeit, ein sonderbares Einverständniss mit der Natur, besonders mit der Pflanzen—und Steinreich. Der Leser fühlt sich da wie in einem verzauberten Walde; er hört die unterirdischen Quellen melodisch rauschen; wildfremde Wunderblumen schauen ihn an mit ihren bunten schnsüchtigen Augen; unsichtbare Lippen küssen seine Wangen mit neckender Zärtlichkeit; _hohe Pilze_, _wie goldne Glocken_, _wachsen klingend empor am Fusse der Bäume_;’ and so on. Now that stroke of the _hohe Pilze_, the great funguses, would have been impossible to the tact and delicacy of a born lover of nature like the Celt, and could only have come from a German who has _hineinstudirt_ himself into natural magic. It is a crying false note, which carries us at once out of the world of nature-magic and the breath of the woods, into the world of theatre-magic and the smell of gas and orange-peel.