“Of the value of this work there can be no doubt. We do not venture to express any opinion on the question whether, or to what extent, farm and field names are of service to the English archæologist; but with regard to their importance to the Welsh archæologist there can be no two opinions. The fact that the Welsh place-names are being rapidly replaced by English names, so that the local lore which is often enshrined in the former is in danger of being lost, was in itself a sufficient reason for the undertaking. The results have more than justified our decision. There is hardly a parish, certainly not one of the ancient parishes, of the principality, where the schedule of field names has not yielded some valuable results. Scores of small but in some cases important antiquities would have passed unrecorded, had it not been for the clue to their presence given by the place-name which was to be found only in the schedule to the Tithe Survey.”
In Cornwall almost every parish is named after some saintly apostle, and many of these saints are alleged to have travelled far and wide in the world founding towns and villages. It is almost a physical impossibility that this was literally true, and it becomes manifestly incredible on consideration of the miracles recorded in the lives of the travellers. As already suggested the greater probability is that the lives of the saints enshrine almost intact the traditions of pre-Christian divinities. Of the popular and most familiar St. Patrick, Borlase (W. C.), writes: “Of the reality of the existence of this Patrick, son of Calporn, we feel not the shadow of a doubt. But he was not the only Patrick, and as time went on traditions of one other Patrick at least came to be commingled with his own. We have before us the names of ten other contemporary Patricks, all ecclesiastics, and spread over Wales, Ireland, France, Spain, and Italy. The name appears to be that of a grade or order in the Church rather than a proper name in the usual sense. Thus Palladius is called also Patrick in the ‘Book of Armagh’ and the Patrick (whichever he may have been) is represented as styling Declan ‘the Patrick of the Desii,’ and Ailbhe ‘the Patrick of Munster’. When Patrick sojourned in a cave in an island in the Tyrrhene Sea he found three other Patricks there.” Precisely: and there is little doubt that our London Battersea or Patrixeye was originally an ea or island where the patricks or padres of St. Peter’s at Westminster once congregated.
The arguments applied to St. Patrick apply equally to, say, St. Columba, or the Holy Dove, and similarly to St. Colman, a name also meaning Dove. In Ireland alone there are 200 dedications to St. Colman, and evidence will be brought forward that the archetype of all the St. Colmans and all the St. Columbas and all the Patricks was Peter the Pater, who was symbolised by petra, the stone or rock.
The so-called Ossianic poems of Gaeldom, although of “a remarkably heathenish character,” preserve the manners of and opinions of what the authorities describe as “a semi-barbarous people who were endowed with strong imagination, high courage, childlike tenderness, and gentle chivalry for women,”[48] and that the ancients were tinctured through and through with mysticism and imagination, finding tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything, is a fact which can be denied. When our words were framed and our ancient places, hills, and rivers named, I am persuaded that the world was in its imaginative childhood, and hence that traces of that state of mind may reasonably be anticipated. It is remarkable that the skulls found in the first or oldest Troy exhibit the most intellectual characteristics,[49] and in many quarters seemingly the remoter the times the purer was the theology whether in Phrygia, Egypt, India, Persia, or Great Britain. Among the Cretans “religion entered at every turn” of their social system; in Egypt even the very games and dances had a religious significance, and the evidence of folklore testifies to the same effect in Britain. It was one among the many grievances of the pessimistic Gildas that the British were “slaves to the shadows of things to come,” and this usually overlooked aspect of their character must, I think, be recognised in relation to their place-names. To a large degree the mystical element still persists in Brittany, where even to-day, in the words of Baring-Gould:—At a Pardon one sees and marvels at the wondrous faces of this remarkable people: the pure, sweet, and modest countenances of the girls, and those not less striking of the old folk. “It is,” says Durtal, “the soul which is everything in these people, and their physiognomy is modelled by it. There are holy brightnesses in their eyes, on their lips, those doors to the borders of which the soul alone can come, from which it looks forth and all but shows itself. Goodness, kindness, as well as a cloistral spirituality, stream from their faces.”[50]
What is still true of Brittany was once equally true of Britain, and although the individuality of the Gael has now largely been submerged by prosaic Anglo-Saxondom, the poetic temperament of the chivalrous and dreamy Celt was essentially a frame of mind that cared only for the heroic, the romantic, and the beautiful.
The science of etymology as practised to-day is unfortunately blind to this poetic element which was, and to some extent still is, an innate characteristic of “uncivilised” and unsophisticated peoples. Archbishop Trench, one of the original planners and promoters of The New English Dictionary, was not overstating when he wrote: “Let us then acknowledge man a born poet.... Despite his utmost efforts, were he mad enough to employ them, he could not succeed in exhausting his language of the poetical element which is inherent in it, in stripping it of blossom, flower, and fruit, and leaving it nothing but a bare and naked stem. He may fancy for a moment that he has succeeded in doing this, but it will only need for him to become a little better philologer to go a little deeper into the study of the words which he is using, and he will discover that he is as remote from this consummation as ever.”
Nevertheless, current etymology has achieved this inanity, and has so completely dismissed the animate or poetic element from its considerations that one may seek vainly the columns of Skeat and Murray for any hint or suggestion that language and imagination ever had anything in common. According to modern teaching language is a mere cluster of barbaric yawps: “No mystic bond linked word and thought together; utility and convenience alone joined them”.[51]
Words, nevertheless, were originally born not from grammarians but amid the common people, and pace Mr. Clodd they enshrine in many instances the mysticism and the superstitions of the peasantry. How can one account, for instance, for the Greek word psyche, meaning butterfly, and also soul, except by the knowledge that butterflies were regarded by the ancients as creatures into which the soul was metamorphosised? According to Grimm, the German name for stork means literally child-, or soul-bringer; hence the belief that the advent of infants was presided over by this bird. But why “hence”? and why put the cart before the horse? If one may judge from innumerable parallels of word-equivocation the legends arose not from the accident of similar words, nor from “misprision of terms,” or from any other “disease of language,” but the creatures were named because of the attendant legend. It is common knowledge that in Egypt the animal sacred to a divinity was often designated by the name of that deity; similarly in Europe the bee, a symbol of the goddess Mylitta, was called a mylitta, and a bull, the symbol of the god Thor, was named a thor. We speak to-day of an Adonis, because Adonis was a fabulously lovely youth, and parallel examples may be found on almost every hand. Irish mythology tells of a certain golden-haired hero named Bress, which means beautiful, whence we are further told that every beautiful thing in Ireland whether plain, fortress, or ale, or torch, or woman, or man, was compared with him, so that men said of them “That is a Bress”. Elsewhere and herein I have endeavoured to prove that this principle was of worldwide application, and that it is an etymological key which will open the meaning of many words still in common use. It is a correlative fact that the names of specific deities such as Horus, Hathor, Nina, Bel, etc., developed in course of time into generic terms for any Lord or God.