[340] Raven—old German, Hraban; modern, Rabe; Icel. Hrafn (pron. Hrabn); Anglo-Saxon, Hræfn; Dan. Ravn; and Slav. Vran—is derived (says Max Müller, “Science of Languages,” Longmans, 1862) from the Sanskrit Rn or Krn, “to cry,” whence “raucus,” and other kindred words. Like the pigeon, the genus Corvus (Corax and Cornix) crops up in all mythology, even where least expected; witness the Hierocorax of Mithras and the marvellous changes by which Apollo and Athene became crows.
[341] The very word is Norsk, “leiðar-(Anglo-Saxon, lâd) steinn,” not “lapis viæ,” but leading stone (að leiða), or lode-stone; like lode-star and lodesman, “a pilot.” It is also called Sólar-steinn, or “sun-stone.”
[342] Cleasby derives it from Kúði or Kóð, the fry of trout and salmon.
[343] Several Icelanders (see Dr W. Lauder Lindsay) have visited the rift which engulphed Katla, the murderess and suicide; a name well known by the translation of Powell and Magnússon. “G. H. C.,” before quoted, who explored it in August 1874, after being misled by the map, found on the southern face “a deep circular indentation where black volcanic sand could be seen uncovered by snow and ice.” We can now explain by the usual method the glacier which, according to Professor Steenstrŭp, was torn from its moorings in 1721 by water within or below: evidently the heated ground melted the whole of the upper calotte and caused the catastrophe. Other traces were concealed by the snow-fall which, consolidating into glacier-ice, accumulates annually twenty feet, and fourteen years have elapsed since the last eruption. The guides were surprised that “their natural foe should present phenomena of a character no more startling and tremendous. What had they expected to find? Perhaps a vast yawning gulf, over whose edge might be watched the spirit of Katla, whirling like a second Francesca di Rimini in the sulphurous depths below.” Yet Henderson could descry from Skaptafell “the aqua-igneous volcano Kötlu-giá, whose tremendously yawning crater was distinctly visible” (i. 264).
[344] In Iceland the reflection of field-ice is brightest, but yellow; new ice is grey, and drift-ice is purest white. The use of “blink” is not happy: Ross employs it in “ice-blink” to denote a cliff or barrier; others talk of land-blink, i.e., the reflection of the sky upon the earth.
[345] The English “tern” is from the Icel. Therna (Sterna hirundo).
[346] Hence “Lundy” in the Bristol Channel.
[347] Baring-Gould (pp. 418, 419) gives four kinds of skuas—Catarrhactes (great skua), Pomatorhinus, Parasiticus (Arctic skua), and Buffoni. He makes “Kjór” the Icel. name for No. 3: I heard it so applied, but the Dictionary gives “a sea-bird of the tern kind; Hill’s Sterna.” We find the family mentioned by Pigafetta, the circumnavigator (A.D. 1519-22), under the libellous name “Cagassela” or “Caca uccello,” and he himself oftentimes witnessed the practice which survives in the term Stercorarius. It is an Antarctic as well as an Arctic “pirate of the seas.”
[348] A term of daily use, derived from “að hrynja,” to flow, to stream down; its pronunciation (Hroyn) induces the facetious traveller to call it the “road to ruin,” and Henderson wrote as he spoke, Hroyn. “Gullbringu” is usually translated gold-bringing; but Cleasby, sub voc. “bringa,” derives the word differently, and makes “Gull-bringur” signify the Golden Slopes. In Sect. VII. of Introduction a third signification has been given.
[349] Hence the country word “Kaarl Cat,” for tom cat, still preserved in heraldry. The Icel. Karl is pronounced Katl or Kadl.