Witches and witchcraft

Right after the appearance of the post on hag (March 5, 2025), I received a letter with a question about the origin of the word witch. Initially, I wanted to point to my old post for October 24, 2007, but then thought better of it, and I would like to explain my reasons, even though this untraditionally long introduction will take me too far. The column “Oxford Etymologist” (title and all) appeared for the first time on March 1, 2006, many years and many editors ago. It was part of a series of blogs, launched by Oxford University Press. (Incidentally, responding to an often-asked question, I hasten to state that the bloggers for OUP are not paid.) The format was new and had to be worked out. I suggested weekly installments, and we decided that each post would be one page long and that I would devote every fourth essay to the answers and comments, inspired by the first three. This format stayed unchanged for a long time (hence “Monthly Gleanings”). In the past eighteen years, I have not “recycled” a single essay, that is, never smuggled a slightly changed old piece as new, in the hope that the fraud would not be recognized.

The number of essays, published since 2006 and 2007, is slowly approaching 1,000. Over the years, the number of my readers has fluctuated between several hundred and more than a thousand, though “thousands” appeared only if I dared discuss some unprintable word. Along the way, there also were several innovations. One day, I wrote about something the adjective teetotal, and a letter came from Great Britian with a picture of a monument of Richard Turner (Preston, Lancashire), allegedly the first teetotaler. Much to my regret, I cannot find this post, though I have searched for it more than once. Anyway, when the letter arrived, I asked my editor (I still correspond with her every now and then, and it was she who recorded my short presentations about etymology for OUP in New York) whether it was possible to reproduce illustrations, and it turned out to be an easy task.

With time, the present-day format became the norm: a picture in the header, and three images in the text. Few people may realize how hard and time-consuming it is to find appropriate images (some essays do not presuppose any!). Usually I suggest the ideas, and the editor spends a lot of time following my timid suggestions. Then we discuss the options, and the result is the final product, posted on Wednesday. Incidentally, later, we sometimes also added music. I remember distinctly that we once had “The Flight of a Bumblebee” (but there were others). Much to my surprise, no one expressed any feelings about this bold innovation. Today, listen to Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” and enjoy. The piece is about witches, a version of Walpurgis Night.

In comparison to 2006, my correspondence has shrunk, and the “gleanings” have almost died. At present, those who are interested in word origins can find answers online (this was impossible two decades ago) and may not need my explanations. That is why I treasure every comment and every message. (However, books on etymology sell well!) As I have mentioned more than once, my main consolation is that I am not infallible (few people are), and every time I make a mistake, I am hauled over the coals. The corrections are usually testy but moderately polite. Just once, many years ago, I received a letter telling me that my discussion of the object at hand showed such depths of ignorance that the respondent could only throw up his (or was it her? I forget) hands in despair. There was some truth in that statement, though it pertained to history, not to etymology. As regards word origins and language usage, I manage to hold my own reasonably well.

And now I can explain why I decided to write a new post on witch. My old one-page essay on this word is not only short: it is skimpy. I reread it and decided to return to this subject. Though I devoted a detailed essay on witch in An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction, that essay is technical and addresses professional linguists. Also, the OED online does not commit itself to a definitive etymology of witch, while Etymoline mentions my contribution but does not summarize it (I see no point in this format). This then is a thank you note to my correspondent interested in the origin of witch, and as an additional gift to her, I’ll reproduce one more etymology of hag (I did not mention it last week).

It will be remembered that hag is usually believed to be a stump of an old compound (thus, the oldest recorded German form is hagazussa). In the previous post, I explained my reasons for disagreeing with this reconstruction. Here is a little-known suggestion by the Swedish scholar Erik Bergkvist (1937). He combined hag-, allegedly, “wolf; a shaggy creature,” and zussa “a kind of cloth” (named after its fabric: Old English tyse did mean “coarse cloth”) and obtained the gloss “a person in wolf’s clothing,” like Old Icelandic úlfheðinn “wolf cloak,” or berserkr “berserk,” if the Icelandic word can be understood as “bearskin,” rather than “bare-skin.” The question about the origin of berserk has never been answered to everybody’s satisfaction.

Old English wicca ~ wicce “witch,” though not a compound, does go back to a form longer than the one attested in the extant texts. Bergkvist’s almost fanciful suggestion may be a mere curiosity, but it brings us to one of the central questions of etymology. In order to know the origin of the word, we have to know what the word meant. This thesis sounds trivial, even silly. But of course! Well, no. For instance, the etymology of bed is so complicated, because we are not sure what object was once called bed. Our modern beds are a rather late invention (remember the biblical phrase: “Take up thy bed and go”? What did the sick man “take up”? Another version has: “Pick up thy mat”!), though flower beds are indeed ancient. What was the earliest reference we need today, that is, who was called a witch?

The range of powers attributed to witches in the Middle Ages and later, was wide. It went all the way from divinators (that is, sorceresses) and (presumably) wise soothsayers to charlatans and evil creatures, associated with the Devil. To repeat: what powers were attributed to witches? In a memorable Old Scandinavian myth, the god Othinn makes a dead seeress rise from the grave and prophesy. Was she a witch? In any case, today, as regards etymology, neither the folklore witch on a broom nor a creature sitting on a fence (discussed in detail in the previous post) will take us too far. From Old English texts, we have rather numerous examples of how learned people translated difficult Latin words into their native language, and we know which Latin words were glossed as “witch.” The variants are suggestive, but we cannot decide how those people understood the Latin words they saw. Those also had to be interpreted. Everybody more or less knew what was meant, but the Latin glosses (that is, translations of the word) fail to solve our problem. It is amazing how many etymologies of witch have been offered. We’ll look at them next week and decide whether we have made progress since the seventeenth century. If we ignore Isaac Casaubon (1554- 1614), our earliest source goes back to 1617.

_{Featured image: Photograph by Soenke Rahn. Witch weather vane on the gable of Siemers Antik und Cafe near Finisberg (Flensburg April 2015), picture 05. CC BY SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}