Bagels, bows and bracelets

They shot the ball well early. What comes out of the microwave hot doesn't always stay hot. I know, because I eat bagels in the morning. 

Shaquille O’Neal

Thanks Shaq. Basketball’s loss is philosophy’s gain. From basketball hoops to bagels to rings this is going to be a very winding post and even more meandering than usual. And with the first tenuous segue ticked, we’re off!

Germanic overlords set great store by rewarding their loyal followers with rings, torques or armlets for valiant service in battle. When retainers returned from the battlefield, they would hand over the spoils of victory to their lord, and looted metal was often melted down or refashioned into jewellery and then redistributed, along with other booty, according to how well each retainer was deemed to have fought. Hence, the lord is often referred to as the beaggiefa ‘ring-giver’ in Old English heroic literature and the importance of the beag ‘ring’ is hard to overstate. Hrothgar, the chieftain of the hall of Heorot in Beowulf, beagas dælde, sinc æt symle ‘shared rings, treasure at banquet’, his queen, Wealhtheow, is described as beaghroden ‘ring-graced’ and the monster Grendel has amassed a beahhorde ’ring hoard’. These gifts had a ceremonial function both as a symbol of the lord’s largesse and as ostentatious symbols of the warrior’s own honour. In fact, the Old English noun beag meant not just ‘ring, circular piece of jewellery’ but also ‘crown’. This can be seen in King Alfred’s translation of Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care, in which þyrnenne beag  is used for the ‘crown of thorns’ placed on Christ’s head.  The mark of nobility that was bestowed when granting a retainer a beag may even have been the origin of coronets worn by the monarch’s most favoured retainers in Germanic nations. To this day, different coronets of rank exist among the British peerage, according to the bearer’s position in the hierarchy: Duke, Marquess, Earl, Viscount, Baron etc. The coronets get more elaborate the higher the rank of the wearer, much as having a large number of valuable, intricately-decorated armlets, collars and rings would have marked out the most distinguished warriors in the Old English period.

Compound forms often made beag more precise, so Old English had wuldorbeag, ‘crown’, literally ‘glory ring’, earmbeag ‘armlet’ and sweorbeag ‘collar’, literally ‘neck ring’, amongst others. A descendant form bee ‘ring, torque, bracelet’ was passed down into Modern English, though it is now largely obsolete except in a specific nautical sense as a kind of hoop used to secure a mast on a ship, and in a few placenames. One of these is the village of St Bees, on the Cumbrian coast. The local saint of this village is St Bega, but opinion is divided as to whether she was a real historical personage or simply the personification of a local cult based on her bracelet. According to the traditional legend, Bega was a 9th-century Irish princess who had been promised as bride to the son of the king of Norway at the time when Vikings were first settling Ireland. Bega clearly wasn’t too keen, as she preferred to flee across the Irish Sea in a flimsy boat and live in a desolate spot on the Cumbrian coast instead. There she stayed for many years as an anchoress – a hermit living a pious life devoted to God. However, it just as likely that Old English halgan beage ‘holy bracelet’ was translated into Latin as sancta bega and what had been a pagan relic was reinterpreted as St Bega. Certainly, the bracelet of St Bega was venerated as a holy relic and was an object of pilgrimage in the Norman priory in St Bees up until the sixteenth century. The stained-glass window in the priory church vestry depicts Bega arriving from Ireland, complete with a blingtastic bracelet marked with a cross.

Beag is descended from Proto-Germanic *baugaz ‘bend, bow, bracelet, circle’ and Proto-Indo-European *bheug- ‘bend, curve, bow down’. *Baugaz- gave Germanic languages cognates of OE beag in Old Norse baugr and Old High German boug both meaning ‘ring’ and ‘armlet’. The closeness of these forms also illustrates the high level of mutual intelligibility that still remained between the Germanic languages in the first millennium CE. The Yiddish diminutive בייגל‎ (beygl) ‘ringlet’ comes from German boug and was used to describe the bread rolls made by Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Poland from the early 1600s – bagels. They were quick to catch on. By 1610 the Community Regulations of Krakow, Poland, proclaimed that bagels were to be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth, presumably supplied by a hapless husband who doesn’t know where to put himself and is surplus to requirements. According to the Internet (so it must be true), there is a Romanian expression umblă câinii cu covrigi în coadă ‘dogs walk with bagels on their tails’, which means ‘the streets are paved with gold’ – maybe the Romanian version of Dick Whittington sets out for Bucharest to see this enticing sight and becomes Lord Mayor of the city three times. Bagel has also entered tennis jargon as a verb meaning ‘win a set by six games to love’, because the shape of the bagel resembles a big, fat zero. Tennis has form in this mealymouthed aversion to calling a spade a spade when a player fails to win any points –  love in tennis scoring is an English corruption of French l’œuf, the egg in question also representing a zero.

Proto-Indo-European *bheug is also responsible for a number of words for ‘bend’, such as Old English bugan, Old Norse bjuga, German biegen and Sanskrit भुजति  (bhujati), as well as bendy derivatives which have been passed down to modern languages. These include English bow (as in bow and scrape), which has cognates in Dutch buigen, German beugan and Swedish böja, bow ‘front of a ship’ and also bow (as in bow and arrow), which has its counterparts in German Bogen, Dutch boog and Irish bogha (borrowed from Old Norse bogi). Elbow is a compound word made up of ell ‘forearm’ and bow. An ell was a unit of length which originally corresponded to the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger (essentially, the length of the ulna, the Latin cognate of ell), but was standardised to very different measurements in different countries. For instance, an English ell was 1¼ yards long, which is in Mr Tickle country, whereas a Flemish ell was ¾ yard, so 18 inches shorter – you’d assume this difference isn’t indicative of the relative stumpiness of Belgian forearms. Other *bheug descendants include akimbo ‘with hands on hips and elbows at a pointy angle to form a pair of arches’, bight, which as well as ‘bay’ was used in Middle English for ‘armpit’ and, er ‘legpit’ – the crook of the back of the legs, and even buxom, which has had an evolutionary journey from meaning ‘easy to bend’ in the sense of ‘pliable’, ‘compliant’ or ‘flexible’ to ‘lively, jolly’ and then ‘attractively plump’ or ‘big-breasted’. And on that joyous note, I’ll bow out!