Oak Words Part 1: Oak Fairies, The Green Man & Oak Words of the World at Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day

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This is Part 1 of 3 parts of Oak Word Lore.

Parts 2 and 3 available by links at the end of this column.

For the upcoming Halloween of 2007, we offer an old English spook saying. So runs an ancient English rhyme where the "fairy folks"referred to are oakmen, malignant sprites of the wood, somewhat like the nastier Teutonic trolls. Oakmen were trickster dwarves who wore red toadstool caps or, if the caps got wet, they donned the tops of acorns as hats. Those who know the dark forest say that oakmen spring up whenever a cut oak stump sprouts sucker shoots. Of course there is a tamer version of oakmen for kiddielit, as depicted below.

Nimble wee oakmen hop to their chores in this reductionist drawing for a children's book. They have lost their magic and dark power and look like achondroplastic hobbits with a touch of hydrocephalus.

Oakmen tempted those who walked too far into the dark woods at night with food made to look like ordinary food but actually whipped up by the oakmen from toxic fungi. The naïve walkers through the forest ate the fairy food, all unsuspecting, and went completely insane.

However the wanderer through bosky thickets and ghastly groves could appease the oakmen by helping them to bury acorns in the dark of the moon.

A much more benign woodland sprite is the acorn fairy.

True Origin of the Oakmen & Their Story

Great Britain’s oakmen may be the folk memory of a pre-Celtic magic-mushroom cult, giving an hallucinogenic twist to the phrase “a trip in the woods.” The evocative anthropological story detail is the false food made from mushrooms, suggesting that ingestion of some kind of prepared fungi had powerful and even frightening mental consequences. For more lurid detail on these ancient mushroom cults, read The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East, published 1970, written by John Marco Allegro. Although born-again religious book-reviewers of the world did their best to disparage Allegro's brilliant research, there remain, amidst the dross of his admittedly perfervid text, many nuggets of etymological and sociological lore. Professional Roman Catholic and Christian functionaries of the 1970s, taking time off from their onerous schedule of buggering altar boys and aboriginal children attening religious schools, did not like to even imagine that their religion might have its origins in fetid ancient corners where a slew of Sumerian dope addicts wolfed down hallucinogenic mushrooms in between worshipping gods shaped like giant fish.

The Green Man

A more widespread, northern European, oak creature is The Green Man, a kind of northern Pan, a spirit of fertility for fields and barnyards and human beds and wedding nights. The Green Man is often depicted as a tree spirit, his forest eyes peering through a facial cloak of oak leaves, glimpsed briefly after his fleet feet rustle dried leaves. This potent herald of fecundity surges up from spermy earth, anoints those nearby with his green benison and assures all living things of teeming seed and mellow fruit and harvest plenty. Then he vanishes, vacuumed down into chthonic loam as silently as he appeared. In some parts of the English countryside he is known as Jack-o’-the-Woods. The Green Man below is a gargoyle carved around 1240 C.E. for the Le Mans Cathedral in France.

Oak Word Lore

The genus to which oak trees belong is: Quercus < quercus Latin, oak. This arboreal genus is capacious, including more than 450 species of shrub-to-tree-size species, important now for lumber and, once-upon-a-wine-bottle, as commercial cork to stopper flasks and bottles, cork being taken from the bark of Spanish Oak, Quercus suber. Oaks were formerly important for tannic acid extracted from oak galls and for the cash crop of edible acorns.

The tree family: Fagaceae, the beech family that includes oaks, beeches, and some of the chestnuts < fagus Latin, beech, akin to phegos, phagos Greek, edible oak < phagein Greek, to eat, referring to the edible acorns

French: chêne < chaisne Old French < *cassanus Early Latin-Gallic form of a lost Celtic word for ‘oak tree’

Word Lore of Oak, Acorn, & Cork

I have included here and in the next two parts of this study a most extensive comparative etymology because the oak tree words are ancient and tenacious and have so many reflexes in modern languages that I think you will find their linguistic diversity and word history as fascinating as I do.

The English Word Tree Originally Meant ‘Oak’

Oak was the most important of trees to speakers of our ancient mother-tongue, Indo-European. Mythology and etymology attest the primacy of oak. Many words for tree first referred only to oak. Oak was the tree. For example, the English noun tree and the adjective true and possibly other words like tar, tray, trim and trough, all derive from an IE root that meant ‘oak tree.’ Keep in mind as you watch IE roots roll down through the millennia that consonant shifts occur in dentals, that is, Indo-European initial \d\ sounds often appear in Germanic languages as initial \t\ sounds, but in Slavic languages retain the \d\. Hence English, a Germanic language, has the word tree and Russian, a Slavic language, has the word дéрево dyerevo ‘tree;’ and both evolved from the same IE root, *derwo- ‘oak.’ The guttural sounds \g\ and \k\ also interchange merrily through time.

Tree Words That Begin As Oak Words in Indo-European Languages

Basic Indo-European root forms: * der-, *dru-,*doreu-, *derwo- ‘oak’ then ‘tree’ or ‘wood’

Sanskrit: दार daru-'wood' and द्रुम druma 'tree'

Avestan: dauru piece of wood, club. Avestan is the ancient Iranian language in which Zoroaster wrote his scriptures.

Attic Greek: δρûς drys ‘oak.’ Compare dryads, the oak-nymphs of Greek myth who were tree-spirits. Other related Greek words are δóρυ doru ‘thin tree’ hence ‘spear’ and δéνδρον dendron ‘tree’ from a reduplicated form of the IE oak root, *den-drevo-. Dendrology is the scientific study of trees.

Classical Greek: ρώμη rome a very hard kind of oak < ronnumi to strengthen

Modern Greek: βαλανιδία velanidia ‘oak tree.’ This form is from belanidi Demotic Greek, acorn < βάλανος balanos Classical Greek, acorn, also the Greek word for the tip of the penis or glans, hence the modern English medical term, balanitis, inflammation of the glans of the penis.

Where The English Word Cork Originated

Quercus in Latin referred usually to the Italian oak with edible acorns, an old food tree thus sacred to the chief Roman god, Jupiter. Mast, the meat of various nut trees, was not merely pig fodder. Humans ate mast for thousands and thousands of years. Acorn nutmeat appears in the mythology of western and eastern peoples. The *quer- is akin to fir in Germanic languages, and quercus is the root of the word cork.

Cork Oak was suber in Latin, hence the modern botanical name for Cork Oak, Quercus suber, a Mediterranean oak with the happy habit of making more cork tissue after some is harvested from a living tree. But now the cork forests of Portugal and Spain are in ecological danger. The Latin suber, Cork Oak, may be cognate with suphar Greek, wrinkled skin (like bark or cork) or it may hark back to the Latin and IE root sus ‘pig’ because pigs ate the acorns.

Harvesting cork from cork oak tree in California

How Quercus Turned into Cork.

It all has to do with the history of Spain and its invasion and conquest by Arabic-speaking Moors. Most Latin words transformed directly into early Spanish, but quercus was filtered through Arabic first, then into Spanish, and then borrowed into the Germanic languages that include English.

Quercus Latin, oak > al kurk Moorish Arabic, the Cork Oak > Literary Arabic كورك cork > alcorque Spanish, at first a cork-soled sandal, then Cork Oak > kork Dutch & Low German > cork Middle English

Robur, Another Roman Oak Word

Latin robur was the Roman name for an oak that gave the hardest wood. Robur Latin, hard oak < robus Early Latin, this oak, whence the adjective robustus Latin, oaken, strong as oak < ruber Latin, red, because of the reddish heartwood of most oaks. Now in modern botany, Quercus robur is the common European oak, double-named with two Latin words for oak tree. Robur gives French rouvre, Italian rovere, and Spanish roble as in the Spanish song familiar to many “Cinco Robles” ‘Five Oaks.’ Spanish: roble oak, directly < robur Latin, oak or < *robellus Vulgar Latin, little oak.

In Italian rovere refers to the Bay Oak or Durmast, Quercus sessifolia. The tree was noble enough to be adopted as the floral emblem and surname of a well-known Italian family, della Rovere. It is familiar to modern movie fans in the title of Roberto Rossellini’s 1959 film “Il generale della Rovere.” A sixteenth century Italian condottiero and famous soldier was the Duke of Urbino from 1508 to 1538. His name was Francesco Maria I della Rovere.

Visit Part 2 (of 3) of Oak & Druid Words