228 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[Sept. 22. 1855. 



Clarendon, in the reign of Charles II., both of whom were 

 under fifty when they were appointed to that high office.] 



Pictures in England. — Is there any catalogue 

 of the principal private collections of pictures in 

 England ? D. 



[The most complete catalogue of English galleries is, 

 we presume, Dr. Waagen's Treasures of Art in Great 

 Britain : being an Account of the Chief Collections of 

 Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Illuminated MSS., Sfc, 

 in 3 vols. 8to., published by Murray, 1854.] 



"old nick.' 



(Vol. xii., p. 10.) 



It has a strange sound — very strange in these 

 days of general enlightenment, of archseological 

 research and information — to hear a correspon- 

 dent of " N". & Q." declaring that " an explanation 

 of one of our household words, imported from 

 Scandinavia, appears to be far-fetched." Far- 

 fetched ! why F. might as well consider it to be 

 far-fetched, that his own personal designation 

 should have come down to him from the fathers of 

 his family. Let him learn, then, that not oite only, 

 but the vast majority of our household words had 

 their birth " deep in those frozen regions of the 

 iNorth," whence, it is not improbable, his own dis- 

 tant ancestry themselves originally sprang. Acorn, 

 oak, apple, elm, beech, ash, &c., are Scandinavian 

 appellations. So are year and month, evening and 

 morning, night and day, and the names indeed, as 

 every school-miss would be ready enough to in- 

 form him, of all the days of the week. He cannot 

 speak of house or wife, if he be in the enjoyment 

 of these blessings, o^ father or mother, of son or 

 daughter, of his bed or his bolster, of the bellows, 

 fire-shovel, or tongs, of what he eats or what he 

 drinks, of h\s flesh, bones, or blood, of scarcely any- 

 thing he has the capacity to see or discourse about, 

 without employing, in no inconsiderable extent, 

 the language of ancient Scandinavia ; frequently, 

 as in such common colloquialisms as dream, all, 

 hand, able, dwelling, breast, linen, steal, murder, at, 

 hy, dark, angel, deaf, early, fall, little, better, &c., 

 with only a very slight, if any, variation of sound 

 or orthography. The term household words itself 

 has a Scandinavian paternity. We say sen'night 

 and fortnight, because the people of the North 

 used such method of reckoning time. The prin- 

 cipal objects of their worship still live, as well in 

 the names of many of our burghs and thorps, as 

 in those of not a few of the hills and streams and 

 other natural features of our island. We have 

 Wednasbury from Woden; and the Irmingstreet, 

 which stretched from St. David's to Southampton, 

 from the world-famed idol Irminsul. And then 

 there are Baldergarth, Wodencroft, and Thorsghyll, 



No. 308.] 



and the family names of Bnlderston, Thorkettle, 

 and Thurston. That venerated name of God, 

 which, amongst the northmen of old time, with a 

 slight grammatical difference, signified both the 

 Supreme Being, and His most endearing quality, 

 has, in both senses, passed into our own, as into 

 every Teutonic language. According to Bede 

 in the seventh century, and to Burke in the 

 eighteenth, it was the goddess Eostre who origi- 

 nated our term Easter ; and from Hela or Hel, 

 the deity of the infernal regions, we have our title 

 of the place of eternal punishment itself. Those 

 inseparable personages of comic literary fame, 

 the Messrs. Huggins and Muggins, are, it seems, 

 the transmuted representatives of 0(iin's cele- 

 brated ravens, Hugin and Munin (Mind and 

 Memory) ; and if F. should unhappily ever so far 

 forget himself as to give utterance to that pre- 

 sumptuous oath, which is said to be characteristic 

 of the vulgar portions — whatever their social 

 rank — of our countrymen, he employs a phraseo- 

 logy which reached our shores by the way of the 

 Baltic and North Sea. 



But not longer to detain the readers of " N. 

 & Q." with examples of the predominant influence 

 exercised by the language of ancient Scandinavia 

 upon our existing speech, let me be permitted to 

 offer a few words in contravention of F.'s judg- 

 ment upon the generally received origin of the 

 particular household word which stands at the 

 head of this Note. 



And, in the first place, I would take the liberty of 

 asking him where nicked and cloven are described 

 as interchangeable expressions ? The terms, in 

 my view of their respective meanings, convey 

 the notion of quite a different state of things to 

 the mind. But nick, in the sense assigned to it by 

 your correspondent, is no legitimate English word 

 at all ; being merely a corrupted form of nock or 

 notch, which certainly does not apply to the equally 

 divided hoof of such animals as the goat. Grant- 

 ing, however, to F. that what he styles " the more 

 simple, and therefore, in his judgment, better ex- 

 planation of the epithet Old Nick,'' hazarded by 

 him, be correct, I do not perceive how the matter 

 is a bit mended; for "far-fetched" as he deems 

 the interpretation of Thoms and Brand to be, his 

 own is equally so. Nick, Nock, or Notch are them- 

 selves " words imported from Scandinavia," and 

 had accordingly to make the identical voyage to 

 this our Terra Britannis with Nickar or Hnickar 

 himself. 



But though, united with the familiar prefix Old, 

 the term in question be perhaps peculiar to our- 

 selves, does F. imagine tljat Nick, as a representa- 

 tive of a malevolent spiritual being, is an epithet 

 confined to our language ? The tenor of his 

 observations would lead us to conclude as much ; 

 and, if so, how egregiously mistaken he is, I now 

 venture, by the succeeding examples, to show. 



