No wild animal had a more powerful influence on the exploration of Canada than the beaver. Fur-greedy Europeans in long canoes thrust into the virgin interior of the North American continent seeking beaver fur as early as the 16th century.

In the history of the Canadian fur trade, there were two kinds of beaver pelt, dry beaver and greasy beaver, usually known by their French names, castor sec and castor gras. Dry beaver or parchment beaver was pelt that had been stretched and dried. British hatmakers much preferred greasy beaver, also called coat beaver, skins from which the guard hairs had been removed. Then 5 to 8 skins were stitched together to make a beaver coat which was worn by the aboriginals and some voyageurs with the fur next to the body for a year. The fur became quite drenched with human body oils and made superb beaver felt from which the famous British hats were made. The formula for the felt was 3 greasy beaver pelts to one dry pelt.

Until the middle of the 19th century, when the silk hat replaced the beaver hat, a tall beaver hat was an essential item of fashionable dress for European and eastern American gentlemen. Hats made of beaver fur were waterproof, shiny, and held their shape. During the peak of the trade in the early 1800s, the Hudson ’s Bay Company supplied enough Canadian beaver pelts to make 600,000 beaver hats in England, and still that number fell short of consumer demand.

More than 1,000 places across Canada have the word beaver in their names. What, I wonder, is the proper noun of assembly or collective noun for place names. A flock of geese, a covey of quail, an unkindness of ravens: all are correct. I propose my new word mapclot. Herewith a mapclot of Canadian place names with beaver or castor.

The Castor River, named by explorers because of the large number of beaver dams on the stream, flows into the South Nation River near Casselman, Ontario. Beaverton, Ontario, is at the mouth of the Beaver River. Seems fitting. Similar is Beavermouth, British Columbia, also at the mouth of a Beaver River. Beaverbank, Nova Scotia, and Beaverlodge, Alberta, join the crew too. Castor, Alberta, is beaverish. Commonwealth Lake in Manitoba boasts a Beaver Island.

One place name that hides its beavery origin is La Ronge, Saskatchewan, named after Lac La Ronge. In Alan Rayburn’s excellent Dictionary of Canadian Place Names (Oxford University Press, 1997) Canada’s prime toponymist states “it may have been named either because the jagged shoreline had the appearance of having been gnawed by Kitchi Amik, the Great Beaver, or because early voyageurs discovered trees along its shoreline gnawed by beavers.” Ronger means to gnaw in French. Toponym is a fancy synonym for place name. A toponymist studies place names.

A corrective note about the origin of the animal’s name is in order, for I have seen one etymology in a cheap American dictionary written by an anonymous pseudo-lexicographer who makes up word origins when he doesn’t know or cannot discover them! This letterless sage posits an imaginary verb, to *beave, meaning ‘to work hard,’ from which our workaholic aquatic rodent was named beaver.

Of course, I have read ‘He was beavering away at the project.’ This is an apt and frequent alteration in English and many other languages in which a noun finds use as a verb; indeed such is the origin of a great many of the commonest verbs in Indo-European languages. So common is this source of new verbs that the process has a formal name in linguistics: verbification. As does its opposite, namely, turning a verb into a noun, called nominalization.I would even approve of *beave as a verb. We beaved from morn until night and still the task lay unfinished. But the etymological truth is that beaver is an animal name widespread throughout the Indo-European family of languages, for example:

Note that fibra ‘fiber, filament’ is a Latin word from a different root. Note also that fiber is pure ancient Latin. In fact, as happened frequently in the history of the Latin language, the native Latin word fiber was replaced when Romans borrowed the Greek word for beaver, kastor. Roman authors writing Classical Latin like Cicero, Pliny and Ovid used the word castor to mean beaver far more often than fiber. Our North American beaver’s scientific name is Castor canadensis.

Totemic beaver © by one of Canada 's

greatest artists, Bill Reid (1920-1998)

Read part two of this beaver topic about the origin of castor and its relationship to words like castrate and castor oil and the Latin word for army camp, castrum.

The Indo-European stem lies hidden in our modern English word beaver. All the IE words for beaver arise from a stem that was a reduplication of the IE root for brown, * bhru. When *bhru is doubled a form like *bhebhrus results, whose basic meaning was ‘brown-brown.’ The oldest IE word, babhrus, the Sanskrit word for beaver, shows this repeating. In languages both old and new, reduplication is used to intensify the root meaning. Hence a “brown-brown” animal would have been a beast whose brown colouring was particularly vivid, memorable, or useful.

This is page 1 of 2 about the word beaver.

Page 2 of Beaver & Castor

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