On querns and millstones

Have you ever seen a quern? If you have not, Wikipedia has an informative page about this apparatus. Yet there is a hitch about the definition of quern. For instance, Wikipedia discusses various quern-stones, and indeed, pictures of all kinds of stones appear in the article. But stones don’t do anything without being set in motion. That is why quern could, apparently, refer to both a millstone and a hand mill for grinding grain.

The word quern goes back to the hoariest antiquity. It was known in all the Old Germanic languages, including fourth-century Gothic. From Gothic a sizable part of the New Testament has come down to us, and in Mark IX: 42 (RV), the English text has the following: “…it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck…” The same admonition appears in Mt 18: 6 and Luke XVII: 2. The Gothic Bible was translated from Greek. The medieval Greek word for “millstone,” múlo onikós, means “donkey (mule)-mill.” Bishop Wulfila, the translator of the Gothic Bible, used the compound asilu qairnus (that is, asilu-kwairnus; ai has the value of English short e). Asilus is immediately recognizable from Modern German Esel “donkey.” Its origin will not interest us here. We should only note that qairnus ~ kwairnus is almost the same word as Modern English quern and that both Greek and Gothic (which translated the Greek compound bit by bit) needed an animal name, and this fact returns us to the statement that stones have to be set in motion, to be able to grind grain, and to my initial question: “Have you ever seen a quern?”

A quern, used in some countries as late as the beginning of the twentieth century, was a construction that had to be rotated. The Internet provides illustrations from the MILLS ARCHIVE, and there, among others, I found an image of a woman rotating a handle manually and making the stones work. Eduard Daniel Clarke wrote in his book Travels in the Holy Land (1817, 167-68): “Looking into the court yard [sic] belonging to the house, we beheld two women grinding at the mill, in a manner most forcibly illustrating the saying of our Saviour (Matt. XXIV, 41 [“Two women grinding at the mill…” The same text can be found in Luke XVII: 35]. The two women seated on the ground opposite to each other held between them two round flat stones, such as are seen in Lapland, and such as in Scotland are called querns. In the centre of the upper stone was a cavity for pouring in the corn, and by the side of this an upright wooden handle for moving the stone. As the operation began, one of the women with her right hand pushed this handle to the woman opposite, who again sent it to her companion, thus communicating a rotary and very rapid motion to the upper stone, their left hands being all the time employed in supplying fresh corn as fast as the bran and flour escaped from the sides of the machine.” (Corn here of course means “grain.”) I found this quotation in The East Anglian…, vol. 1, 1861, p. 111.

But very often, an animal was tied to the platform and moved around and around. In pre-revolutionary Russia, such an animal was the horse, and the appliance was called kruporushka (stress on the second ru; “grain-grinder”). The Greek text refers to the mule. Wulfila substituted donkey for it. Medieval translators of the Bible were highly qualified men, fluent in Greek (medieval Greek) and Hebrew. They stayed in contact and discussed the best variants. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Old English verse has esel-cweorn, the same “calque” from Greek. (A calque is a word-for-word or morpheme-for-morpheme translation. It is also called loan translation.)

Not only is the primitive quern one of the most ancient inventions in the history of civilization, even the old word is the same all over the place. The differences among the Germanic cognates are due only to phonetics (the same noun but pronounced according to the norm of each individual dialect). Old English cweorn has been cited above. Compare Old Icelandic kvern, Old Frisian quern, and so forth. Our question is predictable: What is the origin of this word? Slavic (for example, Russian zhyornov), Baltic, Celtic, and perhaps Sanskrit used the word that seems to go back to some form like gwernā-.

At this point, the etymologist stops, unless the word under discussion is obviously sound–imitative or at least sound–symbolic. Did the stones go gwern-gwern (as it were), which suggested to people the word imitating the sound they made? Corn (that is, “grain”) and kernel, related to it, resemble quern (by chance?), and so does English churn “butter-making machine,” from Old English cyrin, a word of obscure origin, but not improbably related to kernel. I have found only one passing reference to the proximity between quern and churn. In the same volume of East Anglian (see above), p. 112, R. C. Charnock compared them. Charnock was a good folklorist but the author of numerous fanciful etymologies. Yet in this case, he may have guessed well.

Long ago (in 1909), Francis A. Wood, a serious etymologist, suggested that gwer-, the Indo-European root of quern, meant both “crush,” “crushed,” and, by extension, “soft, mild.” Wood also cited Latin mola “millstone, grindstone.” Indeed, mill and mild are related. At first sight, the idea that the words designating a crushing machine and softness are related looks bizarre. Yet the logic underlying it is clear: first force, then submission! Old Icelandic kvern, a cognate or English quern, has been compared (and quite justifiably so) with Icelandic kvirr ~ kyrr “quiet, friendly.” Another traditional view connects the roots of quern and grave (English grave is of course a borrowing: compare Latin gravis). It would be tempting to have the same idea underlying the origin of both quern and mill. Wood’s suggestion, which has hardly ever been discussed, does not seem to be too bold. Yet the problem is not only to reconstruct an ancient root and guess what it meant but also (and mainly!) to understand why it meant what it did. To repeat: Was the root of quern “crush(ed)” sound-imitative? Perhaps, but we will never know for sure.

Here then is a short summary of the above notes. Quern is an extremely old word, going back to the Indo-European antiquity. With the expected phonetic differences, it has been recorded from Scandinavian to India. The ancient root of this word seems to have referred to a forceful movement and the “peaceful” result of using the force of the rotating millstone. The root (approximately, gwer-) may have been sound-imitative. This hypothesis is not unlikely. When we deal with words like grumble or creak, the connection between the word and the thing is obvious. With quern, we need an intermediate link, which today we are unable to supply. However, if quern is related to churn, the sound-imitative origin of quern begins to look rather persuasive.

PS. 1. My thanks to our reader for the comment on the Persian word for “lips.” 2. Re the comment on whale. Whale might be a borrowing from Greek. As indicated in the post, this idea occurred to etymologists long ago. But both words may be related and go back to the same ancient source.

_{Featured image by Pawel Marynowski via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0}