In free fall, being also a story of and about love

This is a story of the adjective free, and the story is complicated. Let me begin from afar. English has the verb liberate, whose root goes back to līber, the Latin for “free.” This fact deserves our attention here because of an unexpected meaning of the plural noun līberī “children.” The word has nothing to do with liber “book,” whose origin is veiled in obscurity but from which we have library (it will be seen that liber “book,” unlike līber “free,” had a short vowel in the root). Līberī was a legal term, unlike puer and infāns (both meant “child”; for comparison’s sake, think of English puerile and infant/infantile). It was not used in the singular and consequently, could not be applied to one child. The unexpected connection between “children” and “freedom” seems to go back to the distinction between free (one’s own, “genuine”) children and the children born to the same father by a slave.

The second situation (slaves’ children) is known quite well from the history not only of Greece and Rome but also from medieval Europe, especially from Icelandic sagas. Such children, even if they were their parents’ favorites, were still unfree. “Free” has always been a legal term. In the past, it seems to have referred to those who enjoyed support and legal defense. Hence its connection with children (as in Latin). To repeat: the free were family members, the Old English frēobearn (“free bairns”), as opposed to slaves. The free were of course the offspring of free parents and therefore entitled to the privileges attached to legitimate birth. They had to be taken care of and protected. The phrase free life, occurring in an Old English poem, must also have meant “protected life.”

We should now look at the origin of the word free. The oldest recorded Germanic root of this word occurs, as so often, in the fourth-century Gothic Bible: it was freis (rhyming with English fees), from the more ancient frijaz. Multiple ties between freedom and kinship come to light at once. Both Old and Modern Icelandic frændi, a word containing the root of free, means not “friend” but only “relative.” Frændi, as well as Modern English friend and German Freund “friend,” looks like the present particle of a verb, related to Gothic frijon, Old English frēogan, and others, which is traditionally glossed as “to love.”

Caution is required when we approach the idea of love, because love, like many other words designating abstract concepts, has a long history. In our story, we should better ignore lovers and stay with relatives, as suggested by frændi. In the past, even more than today, relatives were the mainstay of an individual’s life. One’s safety and success depended on the support of the family (clan). Romantic love, instilled in us by poetry (“I cannot give you what men call love….”—Shelley), was alien to the oldest societies. No doubt, people had the same feelings we have, but the social context was different, and therefore they verbalized their attitudes in a different way. The Gothic verb frijon is surrounded by the words meaning “reconcile” and “take care of.” One of the Old Germanic goddesses was called Frija-Frigg (Friday commemorates her). Some dictionaries gloss her name as “the loved one,” but the older opinion that she was “the protecting one,” “the one guarding family members,” may be more to the point. Deities were not loved: they were “adored” and in return granted favors to their worshipers.

One of the most memorable Gothic words is freihals “free neck; freedom.” Its closest cognates occurred all over the Germanic speaking world and have been interpreted as “neck, unhampered by chains” or (less convincingly) as “one having legal protection and accordingly no requirement to bow his neck before a property owner.” Once again, we notice that the word free was a sober legal term that from an etymological point of view had nothing to do with love. Dictionaries no longer compare free with Greek prāús “gentle,” and this is good. By contrast, Slavic words beginning with p- and meaning “pleasant” do belong here. (Non-Germanic p corresponds to Germanic f by the so-called First Consonant Shift, often mentioned in this blog: compare English father and Latin pater.)

The Germanic forms are also close to those in some Celtic languages. The Celts had a well-developed legal terminology, and it has been suggested that the speakers of Germanic borrowed some of it. Whether we are indeed dealing with a loanword or a cognate cannot be decided, but the similarity confirms the idea of free being a legal term and having nothing to do with love.   

Gothic frijon did mean “to love,” but only insofar as it translates a verb from the New Testament, which tells us little in regard to Germanic. We observe that even in such late texts as Icelandic, ást (often in the plural), traditionally glossed as “love,” rarely, if at all, had the connotations, invoked by our word love. And its Gothic cognate ansts meant “thanks; grace; favor,” very much like Modern German Gunst (g- is a remnant of an old prefix).

By way of conclusion, I may add that since among the Germanic-speaking people free was a legal term, known to us only from comparatively late texts, it must have owed a great deal to its Latin counterpart, namely, liber (regardless of whether we should also reckon with the influence from the Celts). A legal term is the product of abstraction and should be understood in its context. In our research, we deal with both “words” and “things.” Above, many concepts have been invoked. The main one is free. A free person was not a slave. Freedom presupposed mixing and mingling with other free members of the community. People didn’t have to “love” their relatives, but they were supposed to be loyal to them. One’s great debt was to one’s children. Hence Latin līberī. Pagan deities took care of married couples. Here, too, no one was made to “love” one’s spouse, though being in love never hurt anyone.

Most words we use today do not mean (or at least do not mean exactly) what they meant in the past. One of them is “love.” Also, words broaden and narrow their meanings. Today, free is an all-encompassing word. Birds are free to fly, animals are free to roam (see the previous post), and we are free to do what we want. It certainly was not so even fifteen hundred years ago. Perhaps one even had to learn a word for this concept from a neighboring tribe. Initially, I also wanted to discuss the etymology of the verb fall. But though this ancient verb occurs in practically the same form all over the Germanic-speaking world, nothing (nothing at all!) has been discovered about its etymology. People fall from grace and fall in love without knowing the origin of the verb. This is what I call a major accident. Feel free to offer your hypotheses.

_{Featured image: Homer, Alaska, United States – Bald Eagle in mid-air flight over Homer Spit Kenai Peninsula. Photo by Ragamuffin Brian. CC-BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr.}