Etymon #58
Wulfstan's wolf bond
The word's origin is Old English, a compound of two existing words. Its earliest recorded use appears in Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, a sermon by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, who wrote under the pen name the Wolf, composed around 1014 as a call to repentance at a time when Viking raids had driven King Ethelred into exile. It named a person who had a spiritual affinity with another by acting as a sponsor at a baptism.
Formed within Old English rather than borrowed from another language, it drew on a Proto-Germanic root already in the language before the Norman Conquest of 1066. The same root ran through Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old High German and Gothic, each language carrying its own form of the same idea of kinship and belonging. Robert Mannyng, a Lincolnshire monk, used the compound in Handlyng Synne around 1303, still in its original sense of a spiritual bond between families at a christening.
Behind the compound lay two older words. The first came from Proto-Germanic *guthan, from a PIE root *ghut- meaning 'that which is invoked', the being called upon in ritual and prayer. The second came from a Proto-Indo-European root *swe- meaning 'self' or 'one's own', naming those who shared the same blood. Together they named a bond between people created not by birth but by the promises made at a christening.
GODMOTHER and SIBLING share their roots with the two halves of this compound. GODMOTHER shares the first element, naming the woman who stood as spiritual sponsor at a christening and pledged to guide the child in the Christian faith. SIBLING shares the second element, the Old English word for a blood relative, reintroduced into modern English by the geneticist Karl Pearson in 1900 when he needed a word for a brother or sister of either sex.
By the fourteenth century it had begun to drift. William Langland used it in Piers Plowman around 1390 to describe a familiar friend or neighbour. By 1600 Shakespeare used it in A Midsummer Night's Dream for women friends who gathered at a birth. In 1716 Joseph Addison used it in The Freeholder, his twice-weekly periodical on politics and manners, for a person of light and trifling character who neglected serious matters for idle talk. Washington Irving, the American author of Rip Van Winkle, completed the word's journey in The Sketch Book in 1820, using it to describe the idle talk itself rather than the person who spoke it.
