“Rynt, you witch!” quoth Bess Lockit to her mother.
Rynt, according to Skeat, is the original Cumberland word for “aroint,” i.e., “aroint thee, get thee gone.” Icelandic ryma—“to make room, to clear the way”—given, however, only as a guess. It seems to have been specially applied to witches.
“ ‘Aroint thee, witch!’ the rump-fed ronyon cried.”
(“Macbeth”).
Halliwell gives the word as rynt, and devotes a column to it, without coming to any satisfactory conclusion. I think it is simply the old word rynt or wrynt, another form of writhe, meaning to twist or strangle, as if one should say, “Be thou strangled!” which was indeed a frequent malediction. Halliwell himself gives “wreint” as meaning “awry,” and “wreith destordre”—“to wring or wreith” (“Hollyband’s Dictionarie,” 1593). The commonest curse of English gypsies at the present day is “Beng tasser tute!” “May the devil strangle you”—literally twist, which is an exact translation of wrinthe or rynt.
“The gode man to hys cage can goo
And wrythed the pye’s neck yn to.”
(“MS. Cantab.” ap. H.)
Rynt may mean twist away, i.e., begone, as they say in America, “he wriggled away.”
They that burn you for a witch lose all their coals.