Slippery as an eel, merry as a grig

My post on Yule redux (January 22, 2025) engendered two responses. One, published as a comment, states that my essays give the correspondent a lot of joy, though he does not understand much of what I say. I never thought that my writings sound like some sort of glossolalia. He also referred to me as he/she. I am a simple, unhyphenated soul, a mere he. The other was a private letter. It cited Tolkien’s Dark Elf Eöl, that is, exactly the form Alexander Hislop used as the etymon of Yule. I too noticed this amazing coincidence and even did some research, if you can call it that: I looked through a list of Old Norse mythological names in the hope of finding something similar but discovered nothing. Perhaps some of our readers know the source of Tolkien’s inspiration. He could not have produced such a strange name (with ö in the middle!) out of thin air, but how likely is it that he read Hislop’s book? Any comment will be welcome.

Today’s post is about the word eel and the eel’s kin. Specialists will find very little or nothing new in it. However, others may not realize that eel is one of the most obscure fish names in our vocabulary. Though it has been discussed multiple times, current dictionaries say only: “Ultimate origin unknown.” We know the word is old. Predictably, it does not occur in the text of the Gothic Gospel (a fourth-century text), but elsewhere in Germanic, its cognates turned up quite early, and the root of the protoform must have been āl-. It is the etymology of this āl– that remains undiscovered. (Note that ā and á designate “long a,” that is, a vowel, more or less like a in Modern English spa.)

Incidentally, as the thesaurus provided by the OED online shows, even in English, this fish has been known under several names. Some of them, for example, snig and the long-forgotten fausen, are obscure. Yet snig, with its initial sn-, may be sound-symbolic, suggestive of the fish’s writhing movement (compare sneak!). Grig rhymes with snig, and its sound-symbolic origin is, likewise, not improbable. Fausen looks foreign. In Middle English, the word meant “dwarf”! Later, it turned up with the sense “short-legged hen” and “cricket” (one is almost tempted to write gricket). Grig “young eel” surfaced only in the seventeenth century, later than prig, with which it rhymes. During its long life in English, prig could designate anyone from “thief” to “an obnoxious snob,” but to an etymologist grig and prig belong together. It almost looks as if the sound complexes prig and grig were up for grabs, and speakers endowed them with any meaning they wanted.

Why is one merry as a grig? Grig, as just noted, is, among other things, a synonym for “cricket.” One can also be as merry as a pismire (pismire “ant”). In the past, merry meant “lively, nimble; vivacious,” and we might perhaps add “antsy.” Despite the common misconception, Greek has nothing to do with grig. As we can see, a word for “eel” does not have to refer only to the well-known fish. But eel, from āl-, is neither sound-imitative nor sound symbolic. It has always meant only what it does in the modern Germanic languages and needs a respectable etymology, that is, secure cognates and a solid ancient root. Sadly, it has neither, and that is why we are left with several ingenious hypotheses but no solution.

Even though eel has always referred to the fish, Old Icelandic áll meant not only “eel” but also “a sprout,” “a deep narrow river or sea channel; gutter,” and “a narrow colored stripe along the back of a horse.” In at least one compound, áll seems to be a cognate of English awl. Even though no certainty exists that we are dealing with several senses of one word, rather than with several homonyms, we notice that all the words, glossed above, designate long or elongated objects. To repeat: are they chance homonyms of the fish name or various senses of the same word? Opinions on this score differ. In the past, the most knowledgeable scholars believed that the fish name and “stripe” are indeed two senses of the same word and that eels were called eels because they look like stripes. But nowhere outside Scandinavian do we find eel meaning “stripe.” Therefore, this attractive etymology, which seems to have been proposed as early as 1909, is, most probably, wrong.

When dealing with old words, historical linguists usually try to find some meaningful root. One such candidate was the verb eat. The eel in that reconstruction emerged as the provider of edible food, because “eater” fits the context even worse. Where were eels the main source of sustenance? This hypothesis is stillborn. Old Irish alam “fish roe” and a similar-sounding dialectal Norwegian word for “fish mucus” or something similar have also been pressed into service as possibly related to eel. Another blank shot. Yet one word has survived as a possible cognate of eel: it is English awl (which has similar cognates elsewhere in Germanic). Unfortunately, awl itself is a noun of undiscovered origin, and though several sources cite hesitatingly eel and awl in one breath, one mystery can give little help to another.

Most researchers have written off eel as a substrate word. The term substrate turns up with some regularity in this blog. It refers to the language of the native population that had occupied the land before the present-day settlers displaced it. The displacement may even be the result of a more or less peaceful amalgamation, but more often it follows conquest. For example, nothing is known about the language of the Picts. Perhaps some hopelessly opaque English words are Pictish, and that is why we cannot solve their etymology. One should be cautious in referring to a substrate, because such references answer no questions: they refer something unknown to another unknown factor. Eel has been repeatedly called a substrate word, that is, a word from an undiscovered language.

Yet eel may be an Indo-European word after all! The boldest attempt to solve the riddle goes back to a series of essays by Dr. Joshua Katz, written in the 1990s. There is a Hittite myth about the storm demon Illuyanka, or Illyuyankaš. Ankaš is “snake,” and illuya is, according to Katz, a cognate of eel. I’ll skip the details and only say that the compound ends up meaning “snake-snake.” Katz missed a point in his favor. Snake-snake is a typical tautological compound, that is, a compound, both of whose elements meant the same. Indo-European is full of such words. (See my post of June 21, 2006.) They are often place names and words dealing with the landscape (when we decipher them, we end up with sea-sea, mountain-mountain, and so forth). But there are more. Modern English pathway and sledgehammer belong to this group. Also, English slowworm seems to have meant “snake-snake,” a close counterpart of the Hittite monster. The latest dictionaries ignore Katz’s etymology, but I think he was right. The discovery of a probable Indo-European cognate of eel probably buries the idea of a substrate origin of this fish name, but we still do not know what associations the ancient sound complex evoked. “Long and winding?” What is so special in the sound group āl? Alas, it is not sound-symbolic. In any case, a slowworm is not unlike an eel, a fact that bolsters up Katz’s etymology of eel and mine of slowworm.

_{Featured image by Krüger via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}