History in English words

by Owen Barfield

There is little doubt that the ancient inhabitants of Western Europe as a whole differed from their Aryan successors in two important customs. They buried their dead, whereas the Aryans invariably used cremation; and they were organized in systems of matriarchies. Aryan culture is patriarchal to its very foundations. We may patronize our less fortunate neighbours, but we do not “matronize” them. Yet faint memories of such strange ways seem to have lingered on among the Aryans in the widespread legend of a race of Amazons who once dwelt in the lost continent of Atlantis, the western land, and in the rumour of mighty female warriors in pre-Celtic[3] Gaul, while the name of the River Marne (Matrona) is thought to be another relic of the existence in pre-Aryan Europe of a race of men who deified their trees and streams, and hoped, when they died, to be gathered to their mothers.

With this brief glance at our forgotten predecessors, we may turn our gaze upon that region near the banks of the Dnieper whence our own ancestors first began to expand into the world. And we get a glimpse of the kind of settlements in which these pastoral people must have lived in the fact that the English word garden has grown from the same stem as the termination -grad in Petrograd, where it means ‘town’, while on the other hand the Dutch for garden is ‘tuin.’ We see their villages, family settlements springing up in an enclosure round the home of a patriarch. Households are large and cumbersome, the sons, as they grow up, bring home wives from different villages, and all live together under the roof and absolute dominion of the mother and father-in-law. Both sexes wear zones or loin-cloths, and probably in addition one simple garment of fur or of some woven material, which does not altogether hide their tattooed bodies, adorned with armlets and necklaces of animals’ teeth, or it may be of shells or amber beads. It is the business of the women in these communities, not only to remain faithful to their husbands on pain of the most appalling penalties, not only to bring up the children, to keep house, and to weave and spin, but also to till the fields and look after the bees, geese, oxen, sows, and such other animals as may have been domesticated. A hard enough life, but they have their consolations as they grow older and become respected as dames. Moreover, they have a religious cult of their own. In some cases their imaginations are rich in myth, and they are looked up to as knowing the secrets of Nature and possibly of the future itself. It is the men’s business to make war, hold councils, and hunt—possibly with horses[4] and hounds, both of which animals are at any rate known to them. The family lives on a kind of unleavened bread, milk, cheese,[5] cooked meats, vegetables, and some fruits.

There is much brutality. Widows may be expected to join their husbands in the grave, and old men are sometimes killed off to make room; nevertheless, life is not without its friendlier aspect. There is little doubt, for instance, that our Aryan ancestors knew how to get drunk. The liquor, made principally of honey, with which they sent themselves to bed, appears to have been fraught with such sweet associations that no branch of the Aryan family, however far they went upon their travels, could forget it. The Angles and Saxons brought this mead into our country, and the word occurs in Dutch, Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, German, Irish, Lithuanian, Russian, Greek (‘methu’), Sanskrit, Zend, and modern Persian. As it threads its way through this babel of tongues, ringing the changes on the meanings of ‘honey’, ‘drunkenness’, and ‘enjoyment’, the little monosyllable seems to give us a peculiarly intimate peep into the interior of an Aryan home. Yet the connection of the word bed with the Latin stem ‘fod-’ (fodio), ‘to dig’, should prevent us from forming an unduly voluptuous image of the final stages of this prehistoric pastime. If we call up before us a roof and walls of wood or wattles, bounding a dark interior crowded with human beings and possibly some cattle, lit only by a draughty hole in the roof—an arrangement which the Teutons were evidently trying to express when they afterwards dubbed it a ‘wind’s eye’ or window—we have a picture which will serve. It is a picture of our ancestors just before they began to spread out over the world, and the time is before 2000 B.C.

But the question of the houses in which they lived takes us farther back still. At some time, probably before they became acquainted with agricultural modes of livelihood, the Aryans were living a nomadic existence. Axle, nave, wheel, yoke, and a common word for ‘waggon’ have convinced people that they once moved from place to place in a kind of primitive caravan, running probably on solid wheels (for there is no common word for ‘spoke’). Now the English word cove, which in its Icelandic form means ‘hut’ and in its Greek form (‘gupē’) a subterranean dwelling such as that which was inhabited by the Cyclops, takes us back to a still older form of residence. Again, wand in English means a ‘slender rod’, but in German and Dutch it means a ‘wall’, while the weightier and more solid word timber is connected with the Greek root ‘dem-’ (demein), ‘to build’, Latin ‘domus’, ‘a house’. In these words we can perhaps see the most ancient house rising as time goes on out of a natural cave in the ground to the dignity of a sort of dug-out with wattled sides and roof—eventually to the estate of a firm, wooden hut. And so, behind the picture of our ancestors as they lived together on the spot from which they finally began to spread, we can discern another less certain picture of the very beginnings; of a race, a family perhaps, or some voluntary collection of men not tied by blood, who were together in the Stone Age somewhere in Central Asia. They increase in numbers and power, and, trekking westwards, live—for how many years or centuries we cannot tell—as a race of pastoral nomads, until somewhere in the region of the Dnieper they pass from the wandering nomad existence to some more settled life such as that which has been described.

In addition to the somewhat prosaic words from which we have attempted to derive information, it is pleasant to us to think of these ancestors of ours already uttering to one another in that remote past great and simple words like fire, night, star, thunder, and wind, which our children still learn to use as they grow up. And we must think also how during all this time the new thing, the force, the spirit which the Aryans were to bring into the world, must have been simmering within them. Strengthening their physique through the generations by stricter notions of matrimony, working by exogamy upon their blood, and through that perhaps upon some quality of brightness and sharpness in their thought, the Aryans became. And then they began to move. And the result was the Bhagavad Gita, the Parthenon frieze, the Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire—it was Buddha, Michelangelo, the plays of Shakespeare, Bach, Goethe—it was Aristotle and Bacon, the vast modern industrial civilizations of Europe and America, and the British Empire touching the Antipodes.

CHAPTER II
THE SETTLEMENT OF EUROPE

Beech. Bard. Attic. Tragedy. Authority. Delirious. Wine. Church.

It would be a great mistake to picture the Aryans setting out in some vast, organized expedition such as that of the Israelites under Moses. The study of comparative grammar suggests rather that they spread outwards from their centre in a series of little rills, each one, as it flowed, either pushing the rill in front of it a stage farther on, or flowing through it and passing beyond. During the first thousand years of this process we have very little idea of the extent to which the individual groups of these ever-widening circles—the different “races” as they were now beginning to be—were in communication with one another. After a time, however, we can discern them pretty sharply divided into two streams, a north-western and a south-eastern stream. It was the main stream which flowed north-west, and it carried along with it the ancestors of the powerful races which were afterwards to be called Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Teutons, and Celts. The settlement of the Celts in Britain and the subsequent arrival first of the Teutonic Angles and Saxons and then of the Normans, the movement of the Celts westward to Wales and Ireland, and the final streaming of their Teutonic successors right through them and across the Atlantic—all these are excellent examples of the way in which the separate rills of the north-western stream have continued ever since the first central commotion to crawl and mingle and overlap like the waves of an incoming tide.

Meanwhile the south-eastern stream flowed past the Himalayas down into India and Persia, where their descendants became the Brahmanic Hindoos and the Zoroastrian Persians of a later date.