all the snowskin mooncakes and pu-erh could not restore festivity to what was a very subdued 中秋 this year. the haze (quite the worst in recent memory) has kept the entire country indoors, and all outdoor celebrations cancelled. i have still a lantern somewhere, a pretty fuchsia and orange bird, but one does not drag one’s 70-year-frail father on a neighbourhood walkabout, so that, as they say, was that.
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a few days ago (i had been upset about something else — the conversation was about withstanding emotional coldness and social indifference — and i had spoken of wintriness of mind being inimical to someone living on the equator) when suddenly the word wintercearig popped into my head — cearig from carian, ‘to care’, ‘to grieve’ (there are other proto-germanic cognates.) i’d learnt the word from ‘the wanderer’ during first year old english, together with modcearig (now mod is another excellent word.) cearig (adj.) is a variant on carig, the noun would be cearu (or caru). i’m too lazy to look it up (although i recently found that bosworth-toller is fully digitised and searchable online and open access! — dictionaries are dangerous books to go near — you open them and you’re glued for hours going from word to fascinating word) but i’ve a fair inkling it is the ancestor of modern english words like ‘care’ (n.) in its sense of worries and concerns, having a care in the world. wintercearig, winter-sorrowful, describes a state of mind: unhappiness akin to winter, emotional desolation. (now why hadn’t i heard the echo in wallace stevens before? — ‘one must have a mind of winter’.) my copy of anne klinck’s ‘the old english elegies’ tells me that some translators think winter here is only a metonymy for ‘year’ (in the way we might say someone has seen many winters) and so someone who is wintercearig is only feeling the grievances of old age. but i much prefer those commentators who read winter in the literal sense (anyway i always thought the beautiful part of kennings was the very simplicity and literalness of the base words, which we ought understand in their most unadorned, unextended, most banal sense, which only and only when brought together suddenly transforms the whole into poetry that blossoms in the mind.my correspondent, an american, had not known the word, and interestingly, when writing back, had mistranscribed it ‘caerig’. the -ea- sequence looks unnatural to our modern eyes, doesn’t it? but that he made that inversion at all is also interesting to me, since the aesc seems to have fallen out of modern american orthography where of course it persists in commonwealth countries like singapore and australia — haematology/hematology, paediatric/pediatric mediaeval/medieval.
aesc, i am now remembering, in the runic alphabet, in the furthorc poems, would have stood for the ash tree, one of only three trees (yew and oak being the other two — how did i know that?) i wish i had been a better anglo-saxonist when i had the chance, but as with all my lost and fading languages (hell, i don’t even write a half-decent english sentence anymore) it is much too late. perhaps in my retirement i could relearn them all.
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