Watch your language.

While reading up on something else, I came across the Latin word fucus, 'hornet'. I didn't study Latin in school, so the pronunciation is a toss-up for me. Hornets and bees both have stings, but aside from that, they are not so much alike.

I'm glad I don't have to struggle with the issue of pronunciation of this Latin word in front of a group of people. I remember my German teacher conjugating the verb fahren, "to go, travel or drive', for the first time in my class with all the resulting laughter at the third person singular present indicative form, much to his perennial annoyance, as it turned out. The joke is ever new and young to each freshman class but apparently aggravating to someone who has to endure it for twenty years or more.

A person can only conjecture about the comparisons and links that the human mind makes between language and culture, with a bit of heathen mythology thrown in for good measure. Although we don't always know the whys and wherefores of the things we say and do, there is usually a long and complicated tradition in language and culture, married centuries before we were even born.

In the same online Google book Gods of the Ancient Northmen, page 103, I learned that the word drittin, "dirty" referred, at least originally, to the worker bee returning to the hive laden with pollen and fragments of vegetation clinging to its body. So, the worker bees of the world are revolting peasants.

Beer and ale are made from grains, but mead is fermented from honey. In the etymological discussion from Gods of the Ancient Northmen, honey and mead and bitterness are braided together metaphorically. I guess sweet honey and bitter mead are something of an oxymoron. So, I ask you "What's good to drink and is both sweet and bitter?"

It gets complicated, but in my reading about Norse myth and Odin, I discovered that in myth Odin is able to call and question the Valkyrie and the volva, both of which classes of persons may, at times, be one and the same. These semi-spirits were manifested through a living medium called to predict the future at Norse farms.

The volva, a kind of traveling fortune teller, may have begun her session as she went into a trance to talk to Odin with a formula chant something to this effect that "She tells him that she knows where he put his eye." The pledge that Odin gives to Mimir in exchange for a drink of water is the sacrifice of his eye. Odin may have bitterly regretted this pledge, thus linking the honey mead to bitterness.

In the ensuing discussion, it seems I can't decide if the pledge is the eye or not. The pledge is like a contract where Odin wants a drink from the well containing wisdom and knowledge but has to consent to a binding agreement to give something valuable in exchange. One thing is sure, since only the volva can see Odin (wink, wink), someone has to put real rings and other valuables in her possession before she starts to prophesy. She is obviously in it for the money.


From Stephen Crane's The Black Riders:

II
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, "Is it good, friend?"

"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;

"But I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart."

I have to say that this sounds like the idiom "Eat your heart out", a phrase more bitter than sweet.