Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 10.djvu/348

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [11 s. x. OCT. 31, mi

has au (6), and not aw, and it indicates the terra MSrinorum. Bain-aib is the land of Bain or Ban, near the Jura and Geneva. Burgund-aib is unquestionably Burgundy. Anth-aib is the land of AnJ>. The O.E. equivalent of this is And : cf. the personal names And-hun, -red, and -scoh. Its High German equivalent is Ant, and we get that in the name of Ant-is, an " emperor " of Constantinople, i.e., of the " Greeks." Anth- aib the country of Anth, the ruler of the " Graeci " : *Chroici : " Creace " lay be- tween Maurin-ga, the land of the M6rini, and Burgundy, just as the " Civitas Trever- orum " did. The " Emperor " Antis flou- rished in the third quarter of the fourth century. He was celebrated in saga, and according to ' Wolfdieterich ' he was the third ancestor of Ermenric and the fourth ancestor of Theodric ; v. Grimm, ' Die Deutsche Heldensage,' 1829, p. 230. These are the contemporaries of Widsith (c. 450), namely, Eormenric of the Gotas and his nephew Theodric of the Franks. It is time the uncritical identification of the latter with Theodoric of Ravenna (f526) was abandoned.

III. In oldest High German the G of Low Latin Qrec- became K, and the e was retained. In the eighth century this e was ousted by ea, and in the ninthea appeared concurrently with ia. By about 850 the normal spelling had become ie, and the resultant " Kriech- " maintained itself right on, ward through the Middle High German period until the learned adaptation Oriech- displaced it. The consonantal shifting in Grec- > *Krech- > *Kreach- > " Kriachi " is quite regular.

Thus far all is in order. In ' Widsith,' however, and in Alfred's ' Orosius,' Creac- appears. Now an O.E. Creac- and an O.H.G. *Kreach- would appear to be the same, and investigators who believe that the O.E. Creacum equates Greeds are com- mitted to the proposition indicated. But " the odd form ea " in " Creacum " is ed, a long diphthong which is exclusively Old English, and it is quite impossible for O.E. ed, Germanic au, to equate O.H.G. ea > ia, older e. King Alfred made use of this stem to render Grose-, and we must ask whence he derived it. I do not hesitate to say that he drew it from ' Widsith,' and that the half line " Casere weold Creacum " was rendered by him and John the Old Saxon as if it read: " se casaer weold Grecum " ("Caesar rexit Grsecos "). Abbot John no doubt knew that the High German form in his day was " Kriachi," and he and King Alfred

assumed that O.E. Creac- and H.G. Kriach- r or Kreach-, were identical.

According to Asser, King Alfred was a close and earnest student of English lays,, and a great lover of them. He learnt them by heart, and often caused them to be- recited before him, and I know of no reason for supposing that the Traveller's Lay of ' Widsith ' and the other poems in the proto- type of the Exeter Book were unknown to the West Saxon king. I believe it to be to- his collaboration with Abbot John the Old Saxon that the currency acquired by the erroneous form casere, and also the pro- found error about the meaning of O.E. " Creacum," are to be attributed.

ALFRED ANSCOMBE.

SIB THOMAS BROWNE AND HIS

BOOKS. (See ante, p. 32 J.)

I HAVE searched carefully through t he- catalogue for any literature dealing with the story of the famous golden tooth, which created so much interest in Germany and elsewhere at the close of the fifteenth century. Browne refers to the story in the ' Vulgar Errors,' book iv. chap. vi., a and seems to- have studied the subject pretty closely. He had a full account of the tooth in the ' Vitse. Germanorum Medicorum,' b but his note is very meagre, and some account of it may not be out of place. The proud possessor of the famous tooth was a boy aged 10 years, living in the neighbourhood of Schweidnitz ; the tooth was the last on the left side of the lower jaw. Jacob Horstius, a doctor at- Helmstadt, heard of it, and wrote a tract in. which he sought to show that the appearance of the tooth was due to the fact that on the. day of the boy's birth (22 Dec., 1586) the sun was in conjunction with Saturn in, the- Sign of the Ram, and that the heat engen- dered by this extraordinary conjunction had fused the bony substance into gold. Hor- stius regarded the appearance of the tooth as a sign that the Golden Age was at hand, and that the Turks would be driven out of Europe. A controversy at once ensued, and learned men inspected the tooth and wrote a number of tracts " de aureo dente." "

a Wilkin, iii. 27.

b ' Melch. Adami Vitse Gerraanor. Medicorum,* Heidelb., 1620. ' Vita Ingoldstetter,' p. 450.

c The titles of live tracts are given in ' N. & Q. r 6 S. xii. 329. To these add Duncan Liddell, ' Dfr Aureo Dente,' Hamburg, 1628, 8vo. See also Sprengel, ' Gesch. der Medizin,' 3 Auflage, Halle* 1827, iii. 403-6.