Lent

I’m fond of Lent. I like the word as well as the season. When I was very young I didn’t know quite what it was (our family didn’t observe it), and had an idea that it must be something that was on loan, something lent. (The desire to explain an unknown word by the known started early, and has driven my whole career!)

It’s a nice word, though. What is now the adjective, Lenten, which we think of as Lent + the -en you see in wooden, was actually the original noun and the original name of the season; Lent is a fourteenth-century shortening, like maid from maiden and eve from even (as in evening).

The word is inherited from the extinct Common Germanic ancestor of English, Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages. It’s derived from the root of long, and simply means ‘the time when the days lengthen’. In all the other Germanic languages that have the word it is simply the name for Spring and has no ecclesiastical connections. Old English shared this meaning, which survived in dialect in some places. There is a Middle English lyric which has the line ‘Lenten is come with love to town’: that’s Spring, not the season of fasting.

Only English developed the ecclesiastical meaning. The other Germanic languages, the Slavonic languages (at least Russian), and Greek, all simply call the season by some variety of their word for ‘fast’. The languages derived from Latin all use words derived from the Latin quadragesima ‘forty-day fast’ (from quadraginta ‘forty’), such as French carême. The Celtic languages also use words derived from that Latin term.

English neither used the word fast, nor borrowed the Latin word. This is remarkable, but not an isolated fact. Despite being part of the world of the Western, Latin-speaking church, early English preferred home-grown equivalents for many religious terms. Perhaps the most remarkable is Easter. One might have expected that for this most central festival, English would have borrowed the Latin name Pascha, coming, through Greek, from Aramaic. But Bede says that the Old English word Eostre was actually the name of a pagan goddess whose festival was celebrated around the time of the Spring equinox. It seems extraordinary that missionaries would have permitted the application of this name to the feast. Perhaps Bede was mistaken, but certainly the word is likely to be related to the word east, and to the Indo-European root meaning ‘dawn’, represented also by Latin aurora.

Space does not permit listing other native terms replacing Latin equivalents, but it may be of interest that the usual Old English term for ‘baptism’ was fullwiht or fulluht, meaning ‘full consecration’: the formation is so ancient in English that the second element was already extinct by the time the language was first written in the eighth century.

Why did this happen? My private theory is that when the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain in the early fifth century there were many communities of Latin-speaking Christians. To begin with at least, they lived peacefully together. There was an exchange: the Latin-speaking Christians adopted the language of the settlers, and meanwhile the English-speaking settlers took on the natives’ religion. Before and while this happened the settlers may have developed English terms for the feasts and rites that they observed among the natives, which everybody then adopted. I like to imagine this, but with no more than the clues of linguistic and physical archaeology, it is impossible to be certain.