Etymology:Fossil poetry

One can be made uncomfortable by metathesis. This figure of speech involves the shifting of letters about in a word as for instance the unexpected substitution of the letter ‘h’ for ‘f’ in some Spanish words. The Latin filius, a son, for example, gives us the French fils and the Portuguese filho, but the Spaniards go over to an ‘h’ and produce hijo. There is another metathesis in that word too: the ‘j’ has been substituted for an ‘l’ and makes the word alien to its original. A gentleman in Spanish is an ‘hidalgo’, but the word makes no etymological sense until we realise its meaning (‘son of somebody’) is there all right: ‘hijo de algo’, which is really, ‘filio de algo’. This situation is not made easier for non-hispanophones by the fact that the Spanish ‘h’ remains unpronounced and the ‘j’ is pronounced like a rough ‘h’. Thus ‘hijo’=’eekho. ‘Filius’ to ‘Hijo'(eekho) in a few centuries.

The queasiness of metathesis may come back when we look at pilgrims and notice that they are ‘peregines’ or ‘pelerins’ where some letters appear to have been moved around, added and subtracted. The first of these comes from the Latin, ‘peregrinus’- a foreigner and gives us a ‘peregrine’ hawk in modern English, strangely a bird that is non-migratory. The second is from the French-‘pelerine’- ‘a pilgrim ‘ right enough, but the word appears in English only as a now-forgotten garment, a sort of cape called a ‘pelerine’. There is no overt mention of foreigners or pilgrims in either of these direct adoptions into English, but they are there hiding metathetically in ‘pilgrim’.

A pilgrim has to be a foreigner, a stranger, because he or she is on a journey and it would not make much sense to call your neighbour a pilgrim. They may have been one or may be going to be one, but they are not if they are the noisy neighbour next door. When you see pilgrims they are on their way somewhere as anyone near the Camino de Santiago in south-west France or Northern Spain can attest. Through the warmer months pilgrims from every corner of the world can be seen making their way along the trail to Santiago de Compostella. There they will visit the Cathedral and pick up a cockle shell from the beach and return home, some on foot. They are not altogether clear why they have done it but they know they should be there.

The number of pilgrims visiting Mecca during the ‘Haj’ is now in excess of two million. Very few go on foot to Mecca preferring to catch a plane to Saudi Arabia instead. The point is that the pilgrim is a foreigner not a native of Mecca or Compostella. They come from ‘beyond the fields’ -per agri- changed by metathesis to ‘pereger’, a ‘traveller’ and thus a ‘foreigner’. This sort of development is obvious in French where ‘pays’ can mean ‘country’ (‘La France est un grand pays’), part of a country (‘Les Pays de la Loire’) or ‘countryside’ as in ‘un beau pays’ or of course ‘paysage’.

Foreigners come from outside the home. The crucial monosyllable in their appellation is the ‘for’ which is a Latin root that gives us, ‘foris’, a door, ‘forum’ a public place,a place outside the door. ‘Forensis’ is an adjective, meaning ‘belonging to the public place’ and also a noun,meaning a foreigner. Allied to that is ‘foras’, used by the Romans when they meant ‘Get out!’. In Spain when you are compelled to exit from somewhere after anti-social behaviour your exit is accompanied by shouts of, ‘Fuera’ or should these events occur in Portugal it would be,’Fora’, much closer to the Latin.

Foreigners are not always welcome. ‘Migrants’ or ‘immigrants’ have not always had the best reception over the centuries. presumably because kin-related altruism has a sharp side to it as well as a soft one: if you are not kin we are not going to be altruistic to you. However pilgrims carry something protective about them, something admirable; they are good ‘foreigners’, an exception to the rule of hostility to the stranger. First of all they are going to go on elsewhere or, if you are an inhabitant of Mecca or Santiago de Compostella, they are going to spend some money and then go home. Either way you are soon rid of them. Then there is the purpose of their travelling. It is not to do business or worse engage in Tourism. Nor do they have hostile intentions; nobody ever thought of calling the Vikings ‘pilgrims’. The pilgrims are innocent strangers.

What then of the view of the peasant working the fields in classical antiquity or the Middle Ages, seeing across the land, figures walking towards the village , people he does not recognise and who do not see him as they pass, on to Naples and the Cumaean Sybil;to Hales in England where Christ’s blood is kept in a phial; to the Ka’aba in Mecca; to The cathedral of Santiago de Compostella where the bones of St James are interred. Far from being autochthonous and rooted, the pilgrims pass over the earth, coming from beyond the fields to go beyond them elsewhere.

Although the pilgrim is freer and less constrained by the burdens of the everyday than the rest of us, conversely his undertaking is ‘arduous’. That word, which now means simply ‘very difficult and probably rather painful’ and is a near synonym of ‘laborious’, had as its main meaning when it was first borrowed into English from Latin an explicit element of height-‘high, steep and difficult to climb’-which is how Steele in the 18th century uses it: “To forgive is the most arduous pitch human nature can arrive at”. We are aware that ‘pitch’, is part of the lexical field of mountaineering and also used for the angle of the roof, among other meanings. Ever upwards then, as well as onwards for the pilgrim.

Talking of roofs: the French for the slates with which roofs are often covered is ‘ardoise’, a word first found in the vernacular Late Latin of Northern France: “Ardesia” which comes from a Gaulish root “ardu’ meaning ‘high’ and gives us the range of hills called the Ardennes. By coincidence these hills were full of slate quarries which might make us wonder about the etymology here. In any event the ‘arduous’ is uphill work, and is this the essence of a pilgrimage?

Most of us have wondered why we would go on such a journey, why so many people seem keen to set out, but then like the Hajis choosing the ‘Umra’, some pilgrims prefer to take it a bit easier. You might ask if that invalidates the gesture?

There have been several readings of the Crusades over the course of Western historiography, but they can easily be seen as pilgrimages. The trip to Compostella was amazingly popular in the Medieval Age but those who could afford it went to Jerusalem instead. The Crusades were a sort of super-pilgrimage, arduous enough and besides the fighting were not that different from other pilgrimages.

Like pilgrimage, crusade had a spiritual dimension, involved travel and hardship, had a definite goal from which the pilgrim hoped to return a better person. It was however, undertaken in large groups, which was not necessary for an ordinary pilgrimage, though one does tend to see Chaucer’s pilgrims as a group of tourists, one engaged in a sort of slow bus-tour of Kent.

There is a common use of ‘pilgrimage’ which ignores the hardships, as when we say, ‘i went on a pilgrimage to Hardy’s cottage in Dorset’. Here there is not much suggestion of difficulty but more of an idea to pay homage or pay tribute to a great writer. A pilgrimage to the Lake District actually implies something more like a search for Wordsworthian experience and wisdom than an arduous undertaking, and that in spite of the hills (and slates) of Cumbria.

But don’t people say that we are all ‘on a journey’? Is this not ‘life’s journey?’ The New-Age cliche, heir to centuries of Christian metaphor about the stony path of life and other such Bunyanesque suggestions , seems almost inescapable even though we are not, in fact, going anywhere merely by being alive, which means that pilgrimage may be too literal minded. Are we not also, and contradictorily, supposed to be stopping, pausing in the mad rush of our lives to recharge our spiritual batteries? In which case why would we go off on an arduous pilgrimage?Surely we hope by pausing from time to time , by stopping, by reflecting, to see something a little more significant than the mere result of our getting and spending, more than the life we are normally engaged in?(Wordsworth again).

Horace did not advocate such undertakings: “They change the skies not their souls who run across the sea”.

Any pilgrim will answer that it is paradoxically when moving pointlessly that one has the best chance of standing still. The emptiness sought by the mystic may be hard to achieve,almost impossible to find in the rush of everyday life. So he sets out across the alien field towards the horizon, towards an edge, to another place, to some beyond that has to stand in for the ultimate Beyond, which is of course, beyond us.

Perhaps, on the long roads that the pilgrim walks, though they are roads which cover only a small part of the distance between us and the universe, the chatter may be silenced more easily at home. The pilgrim will probably decide, for example, to go even beyond Compostella (Field of Stars) and complete his journey at Finisterre, a promontory some kilometres furthur on. This is ‘Finis Terrae’, the end of the earth and we approach it with much symbolism but in the full knowledge that of course, it is not the end at all. Beyond is America but beyond a symbolic America stands the unfound and we can only be silent on the peaks of Darien.