I photographed snow-drops pushing up through icy snow and thought, What is the word for this hardiness?
I photographed icicles clinging to a moss- and lichen-licked rock face and thought, What is the word for icy magnification that both blurs and sharpens?
Nothing matches what Macfarlane has gathered from his research.
Read it yourself: you will not be sorry.
Làirig – ‘a pass in the
mountains’ (Gaelic). Photograph: Rosamund Macfarlane
The
Word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on Rewilding Our Language of Landscape
by Robert Macfarlane
Friday 27 February 201506.30 EST
Last modified on Friday 27 February 201506.52 EST – The Guardian
Last modified on Friday 27 February 201506.52 EST – The Guardian
Eight years ago,
in the coastal township of Shawbost on the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis, I
was given an extraordinary document. It was entitled “Some Lewis Moorland
Terms: A Peat Glossary”, and it listed Gaelic words and phrases for aspects of
the tawny moorland that fills Lewis’s interior. Reading the glossary, I was
amazed by the compressive elegance of its lexis, and its capacity for fine
discrimination: a caochan, for instance, is “a slender moor-stream
obscured by vegetation such that it is virtually hidden from sight”, while afeadan is
“a small stream running from a moorland loch”, and a fèith is
“a fine vein-like watercourse running through peat, often dry in the summer”.
Other terms were striking for their visual poetry: rionnach maoim means
“the shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright
and windy day”; èit refers to “the practice of placing quartz
stones in streams so that they sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon
to them in the late summer and autumn”, and teine biorach is
“the flame or will-o’-the-wisp that runs on top of heather when the moor burns
during the summer”.
The “Peat
Glossary” set my head a-whirr with wonder-words. It ran to several pages and
more than 120 terms – and as that modest “Some” in its title acknowledged, it
was incomplete. “There’s so much language to be added to it,” one of its
compilers, Anne Campbell, told me. “It represents only three villages’ worth of
words. I have a friend from South Uist who said her grandmother would add
dozens to it. Every village in the upper islands would have its different
phrases to contribute.” I thought of Norman MacCaig’s great Hebridean poem “By
the Graveyard, Luskentyre”, where he imagines creating a dictionary out of the
language of Donnie, a lobster fisherman from the Isle of Harris. It would be an
impossible book, MacCaig concluded:
A volume
thick as the height of the Clisham,
A volume big
as the whole of Harris,
A volume
beyond the wit of scholars.
The same
summer I was on Lewis, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionarywas published.
A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning
nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries
it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions
included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip,cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe,nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow.
The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity,chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3
player and voice-mail. As I had been entranced by the
language preserved in the prose‑poem of the “Peat Glossary”, so I was dismayed
by the language that had fallen (been pushed) from the dictionary. For blackberry,
read Blackberry.
Cladach stony beach
❦
I have long
been fascinated by the relations of language and landscape – by the power of
strong style and single words to shape our senses of place. And it has become a
habit, while travelling in Britain and Ireland, to note down place words as I
encounter them: terms for particular aspects of terrain, elements, light and
creaturely life, or resonant place names. I’ve scribbled these words in the
backs of notebooks, or jotted them down on scraps of paper. Usually, I’ve
gleaned them singly from conversations, maps or books. Now and then I’ve hit
buried treasure in the form of vernacular word-lists or remarkable people –
troves that have held gleaming handfuls of coinages, like the Lewisian “Peat
Glossary”.
Not long
after returning from Lewis, and spurred on by the Oxford deletions, I resolved
to put my word-collecting on a more active footing, and to build up my own
glossaries of place words. It seemed to me then that although we have fabulous
compendia of flora, fauna and insects (Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannicaand Mark
Cocker’s Birds Britannica chief among them), we
lack a Terra Britannica, as it were: a gathering of terms for the
land and its weathers – terms used by crofters, fishermen, farmers, sailors,
scientists, miners, climbers, soldiers, shepherds, poets, walkers and
unrecorded others for whom particularised ways of describing place have been
vital to everyday practice and perception. It seemed, too, that it might be
worth assembling some of this terrifically fine-grained vocabulary – and
releasing it back into imaginative circulation, as a way to rewild our
language. I wanted to answer Norman MacCaig’s entreaty in his Luskentyre poem:
“Scholars, I plead with you, / Where are your dictionaries of the wind … ?”
Ammil – a Devon term for the
thin film of ice that lacquers all leaves, twigs and grass blades when a freeze
follows a partial thaw. Photograph: John Macfarlane
In the seven
years after first reading the “Peat Glossary”, I sought out the users, keepers
and makers of place words. In the Norfolk Fens – introduced by the photographer
Justin Partyka – I met Eric Wortley, a 98-year-old farmer who had worked his
family farm throughout his long life, who had been twice to the East Anglian
coast, once to Norwich and never to London, and whose speech was thick with
Fenland dialect terms. I came to know the cartographer, artist and writer Tim
Robinson, who has spent 40 years documenting the terrain of the west of
Ireland: a region where, as he puts it, “the landscape … speaks Irish”.
Robinson’s belief in the importance of “the language we breathe” as part of
“our frontage onto the natural world” has been inspiring to me, as has his
commitment to recording subtleties of usage and history in Irish place names,
before they are lost forever: Scrios Buaile na bhFeadog, “the open
tract of the pasture of the lapwings”; Eiscir, “a ridge of glacial
deposits marking the course of a river that flowed under the ice of the last
glaciation”.
❦
I turned also
to the archive, seeking place words as they were preserved in glossaries and
dictionaries, gathered on the web, or embedded in the literature of earlier
decades and centuries. WS Graham wrote in a 1977 poem of “Floating across the
frozen tundra / of the lexicon and the dictionary”, but I find lexicons to be
more tropical jungle than tundra, gloriously ornate in their tendrilled
outgrowths and complex root systems. I met, too, with great generosity from
correspondents around the UK, who were ready to share “their” place words. Over
the years, and especially over the last two years, thousands of place terms
reached me. They came by letter, email and telephone, scribbled on postcards or
yellowed prewar foolscap, transcribed from cassette recordings of Suffolk
longshoremen made half a century ago, or taken from hand-sketched maps of
Highland hill country and island coastlines. I began to comprehend something of
the awesome range and vigour of place words as they have existed in the
numerous languages and dialects of these islands.
Some of the
terms I collected mingle oddness and familiarity in the manner that Freud calls
uncanny: peculiar in their particularity, but recognisable in that they name
something conceivable, if not instantly locatable. Ammil is a
Devon term for the thin film of ice that lacquers all leaves, twigs and grass
blades when a freeze follows a partial thaw, and that in sunlight can cause a
whole landscape to glitter. It is thought to derive from the Old English ammel,
meaning “enamel”, and is an exquisitely exact word for a fugitive phenomenon I
have several times seen, but never before named. Shetlandic has a word, pirr,
meaning “a light breath of wind, such as will make a cat’s paw on the water”.
On Exmoor, zwer is the onomatopoeic term for “the sound made
by a covey of partridges taking flight”. Smeuse is an English
dialect noun for “the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of
a small animal”; now I know the word smeuse, I notice these signs of creaturely
commute more often.
I became
fascinated by those scalpel-sharp words that are untranslatable without
remainder. The need for precise discrimination of this kind has occurred most
often where landscape is the venue of work. The Icelandic novelist Jón Kalman
Stefánsson writes of fishermen speaking “coddish” far out into the North
Atlantic; the miners working the Great Northern Coalfield in England’s
north-east developed a sub-dialect known as “Pitmatical” or “yakka”, so dense
it proved incomprehensible to Victorian parliamentary commissioners seeking to
improve conditions in the mines in the 1840s. The name “Pitmatical” was
originally chosen to echo “mathematical”, and thereby emphasise the skill and
precision of the colliers. Such super-specific argots are born of hard, long
labour on land and at sea. The terms they contain allow us glimpses through
other eyes, permit brief access to distant lifeworlds and habits of perception.
In another of his Hebridean poems, MacCaig commended the “seagull voice” of his
Gaelic Aunt Julia, so rooted in the terrain of Harris that she came to think with and
speak in its birds and climate.
I also
relished synonyms – especially those that bring new energy to familiar
entities. The variant English terms for icicle – aquabob (Kent), clinkerbell anddaggler (Hampshire), cancervell (Exmoor), ickle (Yorkshire), tankle (Durham)
andshuckle (Cumbria) – form a tinkling poem of their own. In
Northamptonshire and East Anglia “to thaw” is to ungive. The beauty
of this variant surely has to do with the paradox of thaw figured as restraint
or retention, and the wintry notion that cold, frost and snow might themselves
be a form of gift – an addition to the landscape that will in time be
subtracted by warmth.
Shreep - ‘mist that is slowly
clearing’. Photograph: John Macfarlane
Many of the
glossary words are, like ungive, memorably vivid. They function as
topograms – tiny landscape poems, folded up inside verbs and nouns. I think of
the Northamptonshire dialect verb to crizzle, for instance, a verb
for the freezing of water that evokes the sound of a natural activity too slow
for human hearing to detect (“And the white frost ’gins crizzle pond and
brook”, wrote John Clare in 1821). When Gerard Manley Hopkins didn’t have a
word for a natural phenomenon, he would simply – wonderfully – make one up: shivelight,
for “the lances of sunshine that pierce the canopy of a wood”, or goldfoil for
a sky lit by lightning in “zigzag dints and creasings”. Hopkins, like Clare,
sought to forge a language that could register the participatory dramas of our
relations with nature and landscape.
Not all place
words are poetic or innocent, of course. Our familiar wordforest designates
not only a wooded region, but also an area of land set aside for hunting – as
those who have walked through the treeless “forests” of Fisherfield and Corrour
in Scotland will know. Forest – like many wood-words – is
complicatedly tangled up in political histories of access and landownership. We
inhabit a post-pastoral terrain, full of modification and compromise, and for
this reason my glossaries began to fill up with “unnatural” language: terms
from coastal sea defences (pillbox, bulwark, rock-armour),
or soft estate, the Highways Agency term for those natural habitats
that have developed along the verges of motorways and trunk roads.
❦
Some of the
words I collected are ripely rude. These islands, I now know, have scores of
terms for animal dung, most of which double up nicely as insults, fromcrottle (a
foresters’ term for “hare excrement”) to doofers (Scots for
“horse shit”), to the expressive ujller (Shetlandic for the
“unctuous filth that runs from a dunghill”) and turdstool (West
Country for “a very substantial cowpat”). A dialect name for the kestrel –
alongside such felicities as windhover and bell-hawk –
iswind-fucker. Once learned, never forgotten; it is hard now not to see
in the pose of the hovering kestrel a certain lustful quiver. I’ve often been
reminded of Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s genius
catalogue of nonce words, The Meaning of Liff(1983), in which
British place names are used as nouns for the “hundreds of common experiences,
feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognise, but for
which no words exist”. Thus “Kimmeridge (n): The light breeze which
blows through your armpit hair when you are stretched out sunbathing”; or “Glassel (n):
A seaside pebble which was shiny and interesting when wet, and which is now a
lump of rock, but which children nevertheless insist on filling their suitcases
with after a holiday”. When I mentioned to my young son that there was no word
for the shining hump of water that rises above a submerged boulder in a stream,
he suggested currentbum. Well, yes.
I organised
my growing word-hoard into nine glossaries, divided according to terrain-type:
Flatlands, Uplands, Waterlands, Coastlands, Underlands, Northlands, Edgelands,
Earthlands and Woodlands. The words came from dozens of languages, dialects,
sub-dialects and specialist vocabularies: from Unst to the Lizard, from
Pembrokeshire to Norfolk; from Norn and Old English, Anglo-Romani, Cornish,
Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, Orcadian, Shetlandic and Doric, and numerous regional
versions of English, through to Jérriais, the dialect of Norman still spoken on
the island of Jersey.
Roarie-bummlers – ‘fast-moving
storm-clouds’ (Scots). Photograph: John Macfarlane
I quickly
realised that they couldn’t and shouldn’t aspire to completion. They contained
only a debatable fraction of an impossible whole. There is no single mountain
language, but a range of mountain languages; no one coastal language, but a
fractal of coastal languages; no lone tree language, but a forest of tree
languages. So I decided to imagine them not as archives but as wunderkammers,
celebrating the visions these words opened in the mind, and their tastes on the
tongue.
❦
I am wary of
the dangers of fetishising dialect and archaism – all that mollockingand sukebinding Stella Gibbons spoofed so brilliantly in Cold
Comfort Farm (1932). Wary, too, of advocating a tyranny of
the nominal – a taxonomic need to point and name, with the intent of citing and
owning – when in fact I perceive no opposition between precision and mystery,
or between naming and not knowing. There are experiences of landscape that will
always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a distant echo.
Nature will not name itself. Granite doesn’t self-identify as igneous. Light
has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject. When I see a moon-bow
or a sundog, I usually just say “Wow!” or “Hey!” Sometimes on a mountain, I
look out across scree and corrie, srón and lairig –
and say nothing at all. But we are and always have been name-callers,
christeners. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into
our words.
Yet it is
clear that we increasingly make do with an impoverished language for landscape.
A place literacy is leaving us. A language in common, a language of the
commons, is declining. Nuance is evaporating from everyday usage, burned off by
capital and apathy. The substitutions made in the Oxford Junior
Dictionary – the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor
and the virtual – are a small but significant symptom of the simulated screen
life many of us live. The terrain beyond the city fringe is chiefly understood
in terms of large generic units (“field”, “hill”, “valley”, “wood”). It has
become a blandscape. We are blasé, in the sense that Georg Simmel
used that word in 1903, meaning “indifferent to the distinction between
things”.
This impoverishment
has occurred even in languages that have historically paid close attention to
place, such as Irish or Gaelic. Even the landscape lexis of the Outer Hebrides
is currently being lost. Gaelic itself is slowly withering: the number of
native speakers in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd is now around
58,000. Of those who do still speak Gaelic, many are understandably less
interested in the intricacies of toponymy. In Ireland, a similar situation
exists: Tim Robinson notes how with each
generation, more “of the place names are forgotten or becoming
incomprehensible”.
Sun-scald – ‘the eye-scorching gleam
of sunlight as it falls on river, lake or sea’ (Sussex)
Why should
this loss matter? You can’t even use crizzle as a Scrabble
word: there aren’t two “z”s in the bag (unless, of course, you use a blank). It
matters because language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we deplete our
ability to denote and figure particular aspects of our places, so our
competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with
non-human nature is correspondingly depleted. To quote the American farmer and
essayist Wendell Berry – a man who in my experience speaks the crash-tested
truth – “people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but
they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a
particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.” Or as Cocker
punchily puts it, “If acorn goes from the lexicon, the game is up for nature in
England.”
There is,
suddenly, a surging sense of the importance of preserving and plenishing a
diverse language for landscape. In January, a campaign for OUP to reinstate the
culled “nature words” was launched, drawing support from Margaret Atwood and
Michael Morpurgo: OUP has responded positively and thoughtfully. Robinson has
written recently of the need for what he calls “geophany”, meaning a language
“fit for the secular celebration of place”. This spring the photographer
Dominick Tyler is publishingUncommon Ground, which pairs 100 place words
with 100 photographs of the phenomena to which the words refer, from arête (“a
sharp-edged mountain ridge, often between two glacier-carved corries”) to zawn (a
Cornish term for a “wave-smashed chasm in a cliff”). Mabey’s forthcoming The
Cabaret of Plantsargues for “a new language” with which to accommodate the
“selfhood” of plants: “metaphor and analogy may be the best we can do, but they
will have to be toughened by an acceptance that the plant world is a parallel
life system to our own, intimately connected with it, but still existentially
different”. George Monbiot is launching a project
seeking new framings for the protection of the nature, “prompted by the
miserable, uninspiring state of the language of conservation” and
policy-making: “‘Environment’ is a term that creates no pictures in the mind,
which is why I have begun to use ‘natural world’ or ‘living planet’ instead.”
Landmarks, the book that has arisen from my own years of word work,
is a celebration and defence of land language. Its fascination is with the
mutual relations of place, word and spirit: how we landmark, and how we are
landmarked in turn. Each of the nine glossaries is matched with a chapter
exploring the work of those writers who have used words exactly and exactingly
when describing specific places. “The hardest thing of all to see is what is
really there,” observed JA Baker in The Peregrine (1967),
a book that brilliantly shows how such seeing might occur in language, written
as it is in prose that has “the quivering intensity of an arrow thudding into a
tree”. The terrain about which Baker wrote with such committing force was the
coastal Essex of saltings, spinneys, sea walls and mudflats. Compelled by the
high gold horizons of this old countryside, even as it was undergoing the
assault of big-field farming in the 1950s and 1960s, Baker developed a new
style with which to evoke its odd magnificence. His sentences are full of
neologisms: the adjectives he torqued into verbs (“The north wind brittled
icily in the pleached lattice of the hedgerows”), and the verbs he incites to
misbehaviour (“Four short-eared owls soothed out of the gorse”).
I have long
been drawn to the work of writers who – in Emerson’s phrase – seek to “pierce
rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things”. Baker is one such
writer, Robinson another, Nan Shepherd a third. Shepherd was a
word-hoarder, and her slim masterpiece The Living Mountain carries
a long glossary of Scots terms, which abounds with walking words (spangin’,
for “walking vigorously”) and weather words: smoored, for
“smothered in snow”, and the unforgettableroarie bummlers, meaning
“fast-moving storm clouds”. Roger Deakin, while writing his modern classics Waterlog and Wildwood,
gathered wood words and water words. John Muir relished the technical language
of botany (bract, bole,pistillate) but also delighted
in his own coinages.
Wurr – ‘hoar-frost’
(Herefordshire). Photograph: Rosamund Macfarlane
For all of
these writers, to use language well is to use it particularly: precision of
utterance as both a form of lyricism and a species of attention. “I want my
writing to bring people not just to think of ‘trees’ as they mostly do now,”
wrote Deakin in a notebook, “but of each individual tree, and each kind of
tree”. Muir, spending his first summer working as a shepherd among the pines of
the Sierra Nevada in California, reflected in his journal that “Every tree
calls for special admiration. I have been making many sketches and regret that
I cannot draw every needle.”
Strange
events occurred in the course of the years and journeys I spent writingLandmarks –
convergences that pressed at the limits of coincidence, and tended to the
eerie. They included the discovery of a “tunnel of swords and axes” in Cumbria,
guided by a Finnish folk tale; an encounter with a peregrine in south Cambridge
on the day I went to look through Baker’s telescopes and binoculars; the
experience of walking into the pages of Shepherd’s The
Living Mountain in the Cairngorms; and the widening ripples of a
forgotten place word, found in a folder in Suffolk, left behind by a man who
had died. Strangest of all these strangenesses, though, was the revelation in
the week I finished the book, that its originating dream of a glossary of
landscape-language so vast it might encompass the world had, almost, come true.
That
revelation came as a letter sent by a scholar of languages living in Qatar, and
reading the letter made me feel as if I had stepped into a story by Borges or
Calvino. For the last 15 years, he explained, he had been working on a global
glossary of landscape terms. His name was Abdal Hamid Fitzwilliam-Hall, he had
been born in Cyrenaica, now eastern Libya, had grown up among the kopjes and
veldt of what was then Southern Rhodesia, and it was while studying Arabic, and
walking the black lava fields (harrah) and granite domes (hadbah)
of the Hejaz mountains in western Saudia Arabia, that he decided to begin
gathering place words from the Arabic dialects, before they were swept away forever.
But his task soon began to grip him with the force of an obsession, and he
moved into neighbouring Semitic and African-Eurasian languages, then to the
Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Nordic and Slavic language families, and then
backwards in time to the first Sumerian cuneiform records of c3100 BCE.
The entries
for individual words grew, some to several pages in length, as a meshwork of
cross-reference thrived between languages and usages. Topographically, he
ranged from mountain tops to city forms. Linguistically, he worked through more
than 140 languages, from Afrikaans to Zande. His hope, he said, was to show
“that the land is layered in language as surely as the rocks are layered
beneath its surface”. The work had become, he told me, so complex in its structures
and so infinitely extendable in its concerns that he did not envisage
completing it, only bringing it to a point of abandonment that might also be a
point of publication. “The project has,” he said almost embarrassedly,
“something of the fabulous about it.”
Later, he
emailed me as an attachment the section of the glossary covering those words
beginning with the letter “b”. “I hope the file size can be accommodated,” he
wrote. I double-clicked it. The document opened in Word, and I watched the page
count tick up as my computer ascertained the extent of the text. The count hit
100 pages, then 200, then 300 … it settled at last on 343 pages. All those
pages in 11-point font, just for “b”. Then I read the note preceding the first
entry (“bā(Akkadian, jungbabylonisch lex.): water”): “This
glossary is a work in progress. At the present time … it is some 3,500 pages
long and contains around 50,000 separate terms or headwords.” I sat back in my
seat, amazed and haunted by this extraordinary scholar, out there in the
desert, gathering and patterning a work of words that might keep us from
slipping off into abstract space.
So Landmarks began
with the “Peat Glossary”, and it ended with Abdal’s world-spanning magnum opus.
In between, I have realised that although place words are being lost, they are
also being created. As I travelled I met new terms as well as salvaging old
ones: a painter in the Western Isles who used landskein to
refer to the braid of blue horizon lines on a hazy day; a five-year-old girl
who concoctedhoneyfur to describe the soft seeds of grasses pinched
between fingertips. We have forgotten 10,000 words for our landscapes, but we
will make 10,000 more, given time and inclination. This is why Landmarks moves
over its course from the peat-deep word-hoard of Hebridean Gaelic, through to
the fresh-minted terms and stories of young children at play on the outskirts
of a Cambridgeshire town. And this is why I decided to leave blank the final
glossary of the book – there to hold the place-words that have yet to be
coined.
Landmarks is published by Hamish Hamilton on 5 March.
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