Now dive, sunblind

[sovay]

Today I ate a pomegranate, proofread for eight hours, and made shewhomust's thar cakes. That's a lot less fail than yesterday.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Hell, I missed shewhomust's thar cakes. "Thar," as I recognized, is a variant of "tharf": "necessity" or "need." Now that's a word as old as English. What's fascinating is that the word alone died out in the 14th century; but as thar cake, it goes on.

I can't replicate the first entry on the OED, which has more thorns than Sleeping Beauty's hedge, but the second is from Langland:

1362 Langl. P. Pl. A. vii. 269 A <th>erf Cake, And a lof of Benes and Bren I-Bake for my Children.

1470 Henryson Mor. Fab. ii. (Town & C. Mouse) xviii, Thraf caikis als, I trow, scho spairit nocht.

1560 Pilkington Expos. Aggeus (1562) 92 Elias, fleeing from Jezebel, founde a therfe cake baked in the asshes.

1634-5 Brereton Trav. (Chetham Soc.) 122 The entertainment we accepted..was Tharck-cakes, two eggs, and some dried fish buttered.

1691 Ray N.C. Words s.v. Bannock, Tharcakes,..cakes made of oat-meal,..and fair water, without yeast, or leaven, and so baked.

1746 Collier (Tim Bobbin) View Lanc. Dial. Wks. (1862) 57
Twur os thodd'n os o Thar-Cake.

1825 Brockett N.C. Wds., Thauf-cake.

1828 Craven Gl., Thar-cake, a heavy, unleavened cake.

1888 Sheffield Gloss. s.v., A year or two ago I noticed that a shop-keeper..advertised tharf-cake for sale... They call it parkin instead of using the old word.

1893-4 Northumbld. Gloss., Tharf-kyek, Thaaf-keahyk, Thaf-kyek, Tharth-kyek, Thaugh-cyek, Tharfy.

What also fascinates me is the link between need and All Hallows. Needfires are another custom of the dying year. The driving of cattle between two bonfires, kindled without borrowing another flame, is an old old ritual. Prynne (who wrote the best rant ever against Maypoles) despises it:

1633 Prynne 1st Pt. Histrio-m. 21 Sacrilegious fires, called Nedfire or Bonefires, with all other Heathenish Obseruations, and Ceremonies.

Nine

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. Thank you!

I can't replicate the first entry on the OED, which has more thorns than Sleeping Beauty's hedge, but the second is from Langland:

If you're running Windows, you can get thorns from Character Map (in Programs/Accessories/System Tools).

Or you can use the html code:

&_thorn_;

Remove the underscores, and you'll have a þ

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I was working from cut-and-paste, which is hopeless.

Nine

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Most welcome!

Ah, yes, cut-and-paste can be very awkward. I wish I understood why. Pasting whole chunks of html into LJ, in particular, can be very odd--I always end up having to fix it over again.