47 



Guis, the mistletoe, was Latinized by the Romans into Viscum. 

 I is iodha, the yew tree. The name appears under different 

 forms as: luhar and iur. The Celts seem to have recognized 

 the relationship of the yew to the juniper, which fact is dis- 

 closed in the names given to these plants: lubar is the yew and 

 iiihar beinne or iubar creige, the yew of the hill-top or crag, i. e., 

 the juniper. Both plants have the same range and practically 

 the same habitat, although the yew prefers the beech and oak 

 forests. The word iodha also means grief, and since the yew 

 was generally planted about cemeteries, the word came to be 

 applied also to the grave. The Celtic word is still alive in Swedish 

 in the form of id or id-gran. The latter word means yew-spruce, 

 the word for spruce in Swedish being gran. The derivation of 

 gran is held to be from gron, green. Thus the spruce is first 

 supposed to have been called grone-trdd, green-tree, and later 

 on simply gran. Is this view right, or is the word gran simply 

 another form of the Celtic crann? Crann iodha may have been 

 another name for the yew. An inversion of the elements into 

 id-gran in Swedish is very plausible, if not ascertainable, for 

 in the old Swedish the adjectives followed the modified noun as 

 in Irish and the Romance languages, instead of preceding the 

 noun as in English. 



The juniper was also known as jubhar talaimh, or the yew of 

 the ploughed land. The word talamh (genitive talaimh) is of 

 interest to us since it is of Hebrew origin and was probably 

 incorporated in the Celtic tongue by that colony of Celts which 

 had emigrated to Miletus, the descendants of which later went 

 to Ireland. 



L in Celtic is litis and stood for the mountain ash {Sorbus 

 aucuparia). The English name rowan-tree is derived from the 

 Old Norse language. In Swedish it is ronn. 



There are a great number of plant names beginning with L. 

 These are made up of the words lus and lusan, meaning herb 

 and little herb, respectively, plus a modifying adjective. Thus 

 we have: Lus-mor, plant big, i. e., foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) ; 

 also applied to the common mullein ( Verbascum thapsus) ; 

 lusan-bhall, flower of the walls, pellitory {Parietaria) ; lusan-baine, 

 milkwort (Polygala) ; lus na miol mor, flower of the whale (Malva 

 sylvestris) ; lusan airige, noble flower, daffodil ; crom lus, bent 

 flower, poppy; lus na-fola, blood plant, shepherd's purse; lus- 

 na-h-ordhche, nightshade, belladonna. 



