Dwarf and its past

First, my thanks to those who wrote kind words about my most recent essays. Especially welcome was the comment that sounded approximately so: “I understand almost nothing in his posts but always enjoy them.” It has always been my aim not only to provide my readers, listeners, and students with information but also to be a source of pure, unmitigated joy. Also, last time, we could not find a better image of Fafnir for the heading, but Sigurth killed the dragon from the pit in which he (Sigurth) had hid himself. And of course, only a very silly man would attack a fire-breathing dragon naked.

And now to business. Someone who will take the trouble to follow the history of etymological research may come to the conclusion that as time goes by, we know less and less about the origin of some words. The earliest dictionary of English etymology, by John Minsheu, was published in 1617. The latest Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic by Guus Kroonen appeared in 2013, that is, roughly four centuries later. Both authors offered their suggestions on the origin of the word dwarf, and both, I am afraid, were wrong. Two years before Kroonen, Elmar Seebold, the reviser of Kluge’s German etymological dictionary (more about Kluge will be said below), summarized his opinion in the familiar terse sentence: “Origin unknown.” James A. H. Murray, the first editor of the OED, did offer a suggestion about dwarf. By contrast, the revised OED online gives a long entry on the word but refrains from conclusions. The revisers seem to be on the right path. Yet they treads it cautiously, perhaps because every statement in the OED is taken by the uninitiated as the ultimate truth and parroted. Better safe than sorry. But I can risk making a mistake and later apologize for it.

In my opinion, Friedrich Kluge discovered the origin of dwarf in 1883. Yet he soon gave up his hypothesis. I unearthed and defended it in a 2002 publication and later in An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction (2008). Neither work can be found online, and nowadays, what does not appear on the Internet does not exist. Therefore, I am planning to advertise a few of my old suggestions in this blog and make them known to those who are ready to go beyond the information in Etymoline.

Dwarf is a Common Germanic word. It does not occur in the fourth-century Gothic Gospel, but in all probability, the Goths knew it, and it sounded as dwezgs in their language. Since generations of researchers have looked for the cognates of dwarf in what I believe was a wrong direction, they found nothing worth salvaging. To know the origin of a word, we, quite obviously, should know what the word means. It seemed obvious to many that the sought-for basic meaning is “something/somebody short (small).” This approach resulted in numerous fanciful hypotheses.

It so happens that all we know about the ancient Germanic dwarfs comes from Scandinavian sources. Dwarfs loom large in Old Norse myths and nowhere else until we encounter them in folklore, such as the Grimms’ tales. The age of such tales is impossible to determine: some may be echoes of ancient myths, others are probably late. The Old Scandinavian sources are not enlightening when it comes to the origin of dwarfs: dwarfs are said to have emerged like maggots from the flesh of the proto-giant. Why maggots? Because there were so many of them? Giants, whom the god Thor killed like flies, were also numerous, but relatively few of their names have been recorded, while a full catalog of Old Norse dwarfs contains, I think, 165 items! Most entries are just names, because their bearers don’t appear in any stories. Yet a few are famous. The most surprising thing is that all dwarfs are male, though a word for “female dwarf” existed.

A few facts are certain. Dwarfs were not small. Therefore, all attempts to find a clue to the origin of dwarf by looking for some related word meaning “little, short, tiny; midget” are doomed to failure. But a seemingly more appealing approach also ended up in a blind alley. Old Norse dwarfs were artisans and forged treasures for the gods. Yet words for this activity also fail to provide a convincing etymology of dwarf. And here I am coming to the culmination of my story.

The fourth sound of the old word dwerg– is r. Old Germanic r could go back to two sources: old r and old z from s. The change of z to r is called rhotacism (from the name of the Greek letter rho, that is, ρ), and the process seems to have occurred in the seventh or eighth century. A look at modern forms does not reveal the source of r, but compare English was and were. The forms are related, and r in were goes back z, from s. Or compare raise and rear. They are twins: raise is related to rear and to rise. Both mean “to make rise” (we raise our young and rear them). It is puzzling why raise does not have r at the end.

In 1883, Friedrich Kluge suggested that r in dverg– is the product of rhotacism and that the ancient root had been dwezg-, from dwesk-. Everything immediately became clear. The root dwes– appears in words like Dutch dwaas “foolish” and many others. The ancient dwerg– was once dwesg, an evil creature that made people insane, “dwaas,” and dizzy (the words are related). Elves had arrows and also gave human beings trouble (elf-shot means “lumbago”), while the gods made human beings giddy or “enthusiastic,” that is, “possessed” (the Greek for “god” is theós). The oldest myths advised people to stay away from the gods! Incidentally, dwarfs in folklore are also evil. How dwarfs became artisans and why they lacked female partners need not concern us here too much. In any case, they were not invented by the human imagination as midgets. Perhaps when, with time, they were associated with treasures and riches and when dverg– began to rhyme with berg “mountain,” popular imagination resettled them into the bowels of the earth, where space is at a premium. Then they began to be visualized as small (mere guesswork).

Most unfortunately, as early as in the second edition of his dictionary, Kluge gave up his idea, and it was forgotten. I pride myself on resurrecting it and hope that it will be accepted by those who care about such things. Therefore, when I read in the authoritative 2013 Germanic comparative dictionary: “I assume that the word was derived from the strong verb dwergan-, attested as Middle High German zwergen ‘to squeeze, press.’ The meaning ‘pillar’ and ‘staff’ in Nordic are believed by some to refer to the pagan belief that dwarfs carried the firmament,” I feel surprised and even saddened: zwergen, a rare and isolated verb, must have meant: “To be oppressed (as though) by dwarfs”: the German for “dwarf” is Zwerg. Show some enthusiasm for the medieval mentality and think of dwaas, dizzy, giddy, and elf-shot.

When all is said and done, four centuries of research have not been wasted, but the path to truth is never straight and narrow. The important thing is not to lose it.

_{Featured image: photo by jimmy desplanques on Unsplash.}