I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip.
Shakespeare: Othello
This week I’ve been in the Netherlands, the lowest of the Low Countries, with over quarter of its total land mass below sea level, unsurprising when you consider that most of these low-lying areas have been reclaimed from the sea. Of course, the names Netherlands and Low Countries mean one and the same thing. Nether derives from Old English niþera ‘lower, under’, from a Proto-Germanic root *niþeraz, a comparative form of Proto-Indo-European *ni- ‘below, down’, which has spawned words for ‘low’ in a host of different languages, e.g. Russian низкий (nizkij), Hindi नीच (nīc) and also, via a few phonological leaps, Latin īnferus, the source of Dante’s Inferno, a hellishly low netherworld, indeed. The -ther of nether was originally a comparative suffix which contrasted two or more things in a spatial sense. While this ending stopped being productive a thousand years ago or more, its fossilised remains are visible in some of our most common and functional words: other < Old English ōþer ‘second, other, one of two’, after < Old English æfter ‘further off, further back, later’ (literally ‘more off’ than another thing) and whether < Old English hwæðer ‘which of two’. This ‘lower’ sense of nether is echoed in its cousin beneath, in which the nether root is appended to be- ‘from all sides, all around, thoroughly’, a prefix also found in besmirch, bespatter, bedraggled, beshrivelled, befoul, bemoan and the beautiful, if obsolete, betwattle ‘completely confuse’ – befuddle or bewilder, in fact.
The term Netherlands comes from Middle Dutch nederlant ‘lowland’, applied to the regions bordering the North Sea, specifically around the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta, but also at various times in history covering parts of northern France, Belgium, Luxembourg and northern Germany. This became Nederland (singular), the usual Modern Dutch name for the country, though officially it is Koninkrijk der Nederlanden (plural) ‘Kingdom of the Netherlands’, a name stemming from the modern-day country’s origins after it gained independence from France following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. The term Low Countries was coined by the Dukes of Burgundy who distinguished between the two separate parts of their realm with the terms les pays de par deçà ‘the lands over here’ for the Low Countries and les pays de par delà ‘the lands over there’ for their original homelands, the Duchy of Burgundy and Franche Comté (the Free County of Burgundy), in what is now eastern France. Les pays de par deçà became Pays d’Embas ‘lands down here’ when Charles of Austria was Lord of the Habsburg Netherlands (1506-1555). (Charles was to become Duke of Burgundy, King of Spain, Archduke of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the course of an eventful life that also saw him convene every schoolchild’s favourite deliberative assembly, the Diet of Worms (1521), which ended up condemning Martin Luther as a heretic.) Pays d’Embas evolved further to Pays d’en Bas and finally Pays-Bas ‘Low Countries’, the Modern French name for the Netherlands.
While nether has been replaced by lower in most contexts, it lives on in the concept of nether regions for ‘genitals and backside’, which dates back to the Middle Ages and beyond. For example, Robin, the drunken narrator of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, gleefully recounts that Absolon, the lovestruck parish clerk, succeeds only in kissing the ‘nether eye’ of the object of his affections, the ‘propre and sweete and likerous’ (attractive, sweet and flirtatious) carpenter’s wife, Alisoun, who is the female protagonist of the tale. Alisoun tricks the luckless Absolon into kissing ‘hir naked ers’, which she offers through her bedroom window, a cruel joke set up for the amusement of her lover, Nicholas, who has previously managed to win Alisoun’s heart with the rudimentary tactic of grabbing her ‘by the queynte’ and then professing his ardour until she relents. Very different times, or then again, perhaps not, Donald. Six hundred years after Chaucer, not only is Nicholas’s primitive manner of ‘courtship’ paralleled in the entitled actions of the President of the USA, but nether eye has also resurfaced, taken up by the characters of the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory and reformulated as nether yaya. And on that quaint note, we’ll move swiftly on.
Nether also survives in a host of English place-names, often in villages where it is the counterpart of a neighbouring village on higher ground called Over. These twin settlements include Over Worton and Nether Worton, Oxfordshire (Worton < Old English ōra ‘ridge, edge’ + tūn ‘farmstead, estate, enclosure’), Over Silton and Nether Silton, North Yorkshire (Silton < Old English scelf ‘shelf’ or the Old Norse personal name Scylfa + tūn), Over Compton and Nether Compton, Dorset (Compton < Old English cumb ‘narrow valley, combe’ + tūn) and Over Stowey and Nether Stowey, Somerset (Stowey < Old English stan ‘stone’ + weg ‘way, road’, indicating that these villages were by a paved road, in this case, probably the herepath ‘military road’ thought to have been constructed on the orders of King Alfred the Great to connect hill forts and coastal lookout posts and allow Alfred’s armies to move quickly to forestall Viking raids). One of the most famous Nethers is the brilliantly-named Nether Wallop, which is joined by not just one, but two sister settlements, Over Wallop and Middle Wallop, in Hampshire (Wallop < Old English waelle ‘spring, fountain, well’ + hop ‘leap’, the name presumed to mean ‘valley of the springing water’). The 5th-century Battle of Guoloph between the forces of the rival Brittonic kings Ambrosius Aurelianus and Vortigern is thought to have taken place here following the Roman withdrawal from Britain in 410. Nether Wallop is also the fictional village of St Mary Mead in the BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels, Dane Cottage in Five Bells Lane used as Miss Marple’s home Danemead. Last but not least, nether is alive and kicking in the bestselling video game Minecraft, where The Nether is a lava-filled hell-like dimension, populated by demonic beings such as the Nether Dragon, the Netherbrick Golem, Nether Zombies and piglins – me neither, but as you can see, I’ve just conclusively proven I’m down with the kids.