On Slaying Dragons

The myth that unites Hinduism, Homer, and the Hittites

Background

Not much common culture remains. The top movies, TV shows, and albums don’t reach the same popularity as they did decades ago. Today’s youngsters don’t reference lines from popular films. You can’t bring up some currently airing show in a conversation and hope the other person knows the basic plotlines. Given this reality, it’s remarkable that some stories from thousands of years ago remain universal. I can make the following reference and we’ll all know exactly who I’m talking about. Think of a god of the sky who fights evil beasts with his thunderbolts. You probably know him by two names. One name comes from a smaller, shorter-lived civilization that stood as one of its era's most advanced and culturally powerful societies. The other name for this God of Thunder comes from a civilization to the east that lasted longer and boasted a much larger land mass at its peak. Despite this greater temporal and special impact, the smaller civilization’s name probably comes to mind first. Despite thousands of years of separation, we all have the same two names in our heads. Let’s say them together, everyone: Tarhunna and Tarhunz, the principal god of the Hittites and Luwians, respectively.

… wait, those weren’t the names you had in mind? Are there that many Gods of Thunder? Hmm… this seems worth investigating.

The Etymology of a Religion

If you’re like me, your exposure to Indo-European mythology went something like this. In your literature class, you learned about Greek mythology. You then learned that the Romans scribbled their Numina names on top of these tales. Maybe you spent a couple of days reading about Thor, Odin, Ymir, and some basic Norse mythology. Separately, your history teacher taught you about this big religion called “Hinduism.” You learned that this religion had a bunch of gods, some of them were weird colors, had lots of hands, or rode elephants… and anyway back to Europe! You probably didn’t have any context behind where these stories may have come from and what similarities they held.

You can’t blame your teacher for skimping on the Norse mythology. This ancient religion left a small written record. The Norse may have admired Baldur for his feats of bravery, but not enough to document what these feats brave feats were. As for the goddesses, you’ll find better characterization of women in a Phillip K Dick novel.

If you were a perceptive student in your high school literature class (I wasn’t) you might have noticed that both Zeus/Jupiter and Thor fought with Thunder. You can easily recognize the sculpture below as a representation of Thor:

Except, well, it isn’t Thor. This is, once again, Tarhunz, a separate hammer-wielding Thunder God.

Now let’s get to Hinduism. Meet Indra.

Even if you don’t know the first thing about Hinduism, this god might seem familiar. Granted, he is a weird color, does have lots of hands, and is riding an elephant. While two hands hold conventional weapons, his right hand holds a more peculiar piece of artillery: a thunderbolt.

You might think, ok, whatever, thunderbolts are scary, so it’s no surprise to see a bunch of gods wield them. Yet, the similarities don’t stop there.

Let’s head down to the underworld. Metaphorically, of course. You probably know that Hades/Pluto fell from Olympus to the fiery area below. He guarded the afterlife with his six-eyed and three-headed dog, Kerberos. By the way, you might want to remember the phrase “six-eyed and three-headed” for later. Up north, Odin and his pals defeated a giant known as Ymir and created the world from his body parts. Hel guards the underworld alongside her dog, potentially named Garmr or Fenrir. The Hindu Rig Veda, meanwhile, discusses a god named Yama. He, like the similarly named Ymir, was the first being to die. He guards the underworld with one or many (clarity is not the Rig Veda’s strong suit) four-eyed dogs.

Do these similarities prove anything? Can we conclude that the pre-historical Indo-European religion featured a tale about an important figure who 1) died early and 2) ended up guarding the underworld with a multi-eyed dog? Maybe, but we need to be careful when comparing religions. For example, consider a few “flood” myths: Noah’s Ark, the deluge from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Greek Deucalion myth. Does this suggest the presence of an ancient flood myth that inserted itself into three different religions? It could, though these three cultures had another thing in common: rain. Every society encounters rain, so these myths could merely reference a universal human experience. After all, it’s not just ancient people who feared floods. In August of this year, a deluge hit over a million people in Bangladesh. Here’s proof of the Las Vegas Strip hotel, the LINQ, flooding in 2024. And here’s some for the same hotel in 2023. And 2022. And 2021. And 2019. And 2018.

In other words, cultures can share myths due to common experiences rather than shared heritage. It doesn’t surprise us that both Americans and Russians wrote stories about nuclear bombs. No one thinks these stories represent retellings of a single atomic war tale. Everyone feared the nukes. After all, the bombs can destroy anyone and anything that isn’t under a wooden schoolroom desk.

On that note, this article will focus on a myth about a human battling a dragon. To repeat the point from the previous two paragraphs, the similar content from these stories doesn’t establish the existence of a single common myth. One would expect to read “guy fights big thing” in various cultures. After all, the natural world produces gigantic, terrifying, alien-looking creatures: giraffes, lions, Victor Wembanyama. The evidence of a common myth manifests when the different stories contain the same language. That’s what we’ll explore today.

Language and Culture

Even though this blog spends a lot of time exploring similarities between Indo-European languages, I haven’t discussed the implications of these similarities. Consider various Indo-European words for tooth: German Zahn, Hindi daant, Latin dent-, or Greek odont-. These cognates point to a single Proto-Indo-European word, probably with some “dnt” sound. This tells us not only a fact about the language but also the people. If there was a word for tooth back then, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European must have had teeth. Granted, this particular example is not a very interesting fact. Everyone has teeth. However, one can also find shared terms for hundred across the Indo-European language family. This indicates that the Indo-Europeans employed a base-ten counting system. Again, that’s not a huge surprise. While hardly universal, the biological reality of our ten fingers leads most people in that direction. Still, I want to emphasize that, by studying similarities in pronunciation, we discover facts about a culture from thousands of years ago that left no written record.

New readers might wonder what the Indo-European language family is. The Indo-European language family consists of nearly all languages from Europe and North India. It also includes several languages from the Near East like Kurdish, Persian, and Pashtu. All these languages descend from the single language spoken by Eurasian steppe herders around 6,000 years ago. We refer to the language of these pre-historical animal keepers as Proto-Indo-European. The Proto indicates that we have no writing for this language, meaning it was constructed through linguistic theory.

If there’s a historical record, you might wonder, how do we know who these people were or where they came from? The archeological record indicates that Anatolian farmers took over Europe before the herders arrived. Why then, would we attribute the ancient language to the second group?

The answer stems from shared etymology. Indo-European languages family contains shared words for all sorts of common things like dogs, water, and teeth. None of these terms tell us who the Indo-Europeans were. However, some other cognates suggest pastoralism rather than agrarianism: the terms for horses and wheels.

Since the history of the Indo-European languages lives in your mouth, we can proceed with English words alone. Consider the word wheel. Cognates include the Grecian word cycle and the Latinate culture. All of these stem from the Indo-European root kwel¹. Another root, wel, which refers to the rotation of wheels, arrived in words like evolution, axis, volume, and even wallet. Words like equestrian (from Latin) and hippopotamus (from ancient Greek) support the presence of a common root for horse: ekwo. If none of these sound like “horse,” it’s because our word arrived from a different root. Although linguists disagree about its origin, some suggest the Proto-Indo-European kers, meaning “run.” This root created Latinate words like car and carriage. Hence, if “horse” comes from kers, then “horse” and “car” are cognates, and I want that to be true.

Regardless of your stance on the horse-car cognate controversy, various branches of the Indo-European language family contain evidence of ancient words related to horses and wheels. Since these two terms refer to features of the animal husbandry culture, rather than the agrarian one, linguists champion the former as the originators of the Indo-European language family. Genetic evidence backs this claim. What, then, can linguistic evidence tell us about the ancient Indo-European religion?

Manu, Yemo, and Trito

In the beginning, there were two brothers: a priest named Manu and a king named Yemo. The priest created the world by sacrificing Yemo and the original (and literal) sacred cow. Both names represent a linguistic reconstruction based upon figures from later faiths. We see the name “Manu” in Sanskrit, “Manus” in Avestan, and “Mannus” in the early Germanic language. Although Wikipedia believes that the Greek “Minos” belongs on the list, the linked source does not agree. Yemo shares his name with the Norse Ymir and Hindu Yama, alongside the Avestan “Yima.” If neither “Sanskrit” nor “Manus” mean anything to you, think of Sanskrit as the Latin of North India (major languages like Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali descend from it). Avestan is sort of the Gothic of Iran, with no living ancestors. The name comes from the Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism, and language received this name since little exists outside of Zoroastrian scripture.

Our featured myth, however, does not include Manu or Yemo. Instead, this one centers on a third character: Trito. We meet him by the name Trita Aptya in Sanskrit and Thraetaona Athwya in Avestan. In both versions, our hero defeats an indigenous three-headed and six-eyed dragon. This triumph rewards the hero in the form of livestock, water, or women. The defeated beast is referred to as an ahi in Sanskrit and the azi in Avestan, both translating to “serpent.” We see a word with the same etymology in Latin (anguis), Greek (oyis), Lithuanian (angis), and even English (eel).

That leaves us with a basic outline: the hero defeats the three-headed serpent and earns a reward. The phonetic similarities between Avestan and Sanskrit shouldn’t surprise us too much, given their geographic closeness. What’s more surprising is that we find certain phonetic similarities everywhere else.

Enter the Dragon

Before heading into the body of this article, I’ll establish some background info and ground rules. Most of the research from this post comes from Calvert Watkins’ How to Kill A Dragon. This rich and informative book takes a fascinating topic and transmits it into an inscrutable document that most people wouldn’t dare to touch. It’s the exact sort of thing I wish the academic world would disincentive. I’m not sure why anyone considers it valuable to create works like this, but that’s a topic for another article.

Second, this article features a ton of different languages. Both Dragon and related sources follow similar linguistic conventions. The authors transcribe Greek sources using the Greek alphabet, while all other languages get the “Roman alphabet + diacritics” treatment. I will not grant any special treatment to the Greeks. If it’s okay to transcribe Hittite cuneiform and Indic scripts with the standard twenty-six characters, I don’t see why The Iliad needs to look like a math exam. I’ll make my best effort when converting Greek letters into their Roman equivalents. For example, I hold the radical belief that, if you squint hard enough, the Greek Kappa looks something like the English letter “K.” Many authors disagree with my understandably deranged viewpoint and choose to write these Greek words with a “C.” I will stick with “K.”

As for the other languages, Simplify remains an anti-diacritic blog. I don’t know what Romanized Hittite diacritics mean and neither do you. I don’t even like English spelling conventions, so I won’t provide the official Romanization of every other language.

The Myth

In the previous section, we focused on the easternmost reach of the Indo-European family: Iran and India. For this one, let’s head west, to Ireland. Here, a researcher named D.A. Binchy translated a 16th-century text called Saga of Fergus rnac Leti. This text is no Iliad or Rig Veda. It contains only the barest outline of a story and would remain incomprehensible without the greater Indo-European context. The manuscript doesn’t seem to serve a religious or spiritual purpose. It exists in a legal context, regarding the ownership of land.

The narrative begins with a rivalry over a local throne. One rival sought the protection of Fergus, a nearby king. This protection was violated, and Fergus sought revenge against the violator. His quest for vengeance leads him to track down and fight an underwater creature known as the muirdris (again, only the barest outline of a story here.) The sight of this monster disfigures his face, and the king returns to the land unaware of this. After his servant taunts him for the facial rearrangement, Fergus murders the servant and returns to the sea. There, the warrior kills the muirdris and returns from the sea with its head in his hand. He boasts of his accomplishment and dies.

Readers familiar with Greek mythology will notice parallels with a different story. First, the narrative begins with one of Greek mythology’s most common motifs: a violation of hospitality. Afterward, the myth sounds (or, perhaps, watered-up) version of Perseus and Medusa. The Hellenic account specifies that the antagonist turns her victims to stone, rather than speaking of some vague disfigurement. Unlike Fergus, Perseus avoids the tragic fate with the help of Hermes, and the Greek hero lives to deploy the severed head against his enemies.

What might explain the key similarities and differences between those two stories? These tales may stem from some pre-historic Indo-European folklore. Maybe the Irish version represents a more “originalist” account of the story (with the names and locations updated), while Perseus’ journey represents a retelling dressed up by bards and poets. No one will ever know.

While it’s hard to confirm similarities between stories, linguists and laypeople can recognize cognates. The Celtic tale contains this line:

di guin Echach belbuidi

roughly translating to the “slaying of Eochu (the monster) of the yellow lips.” Fergus, Eochu, and Leti don’t appear anywhere else in the Indo-European oeuvre. The verb “guin,” on the other hand shows up almost everywhere.

Two Words

Yes, similarities in story content don’t prove a common ancestor. Multiple societies can independently develop tales about floods and fights. Two stories about a flood indicate nothing. However, if those two stories used the same language to describe the key events of the deluge, one would expect a common ancestor. It’s much less plausible for multiple cultures to independently stumble upon the same words and wording for a similar story.

I must note that the main source of this article, How to Kill a Dragon, deploys a lot of passages like this:

Note in these Latin, Umbrian, and Vedic formulas the three rhythmic variants of the Indo-European bipartite noun phrase: asyndeton A B, conjoined A B-k"e, doubly conjoined A-k'-'e B-k*e … The phrase has every right to be considered an Indo-European formula…

I find this stuff difficult to parse, and I know most of my readers’ eyes would glaze if I sprinkled the article with this kind of writing. Suffice it to say, Dr. Watkins details a lot of similarities between Indo-European stories concerning prose, rhythm, and formulaic phrasing. I’m not a big comparative poetry guy. I like words. Luckily, the author highlights two words that guide us through the Indo-European dragon-slaying myth: gwhen and terh2.

I’ll start with gwhen. Note that gʷʰen is a more accurate transcription, but superscript can be difficult to read, especially on mobile devices. Regardless, I should explain what the superscript w and h refer to. The w indicates a secondary point of articulation at the lips. It’s sort of like saying the “gw” as one letter. We don’t have anything like this in English, but you’ll recognize similar consonants in Latinate words like quarter and quiet. While we pronounce those words as “kw,” the Romans pronounced them with that secondary point of articulation at the lips. The h, meanwhile, refers to aspiration. If you say words like “tin,” “pin,” or “kin” with a hand in front of your mouth, you’ll notice a puff of smoke hitting your palm. In English, we only bundle aspiration with unvoiced consonants (ones that don’t buzz your voice box), while Proto-Indo-European only combined them with voiced ones. The word meant something like “slay” and it appears in multiple parts of speech. Professor Watkins also argues that the term holds a “memorative” connotation, harkening back to a myth the audience already knows.

Where do we see this verb? You’ll recognize it from your good friend Fergus mac Leti. Where else do we see it? For that answer, let’s get to story time.

The Main Dragon Fights

Illuyanka, a multi-headed serpent, served as the primary nemesis of the Storm God Tarhunz. Illuyanka was an Anatolian term for “serpent” and cognate of Avestan azi and Sanskrit ahi. The giant beast defeated Tarhunz by stealing his eyes and heart. The defeated, but not dead, Tarhunz called for help. Innara, the goddess of wild animals and hunting, took this call. She prepared a feast filled with good and alcohol, knowing the beast couldn’t resist. She visited Illuyanka’s lair and attempted to lure him to the meal. Her predictions proved correct, as the serpent and his family gorged themselves at the fest. The beasts became so stuffed and drunk that they could barely move. The Anatolians took advantage, binding Illuyanka and his family with a cord. Finally, a weakened Tarhunz returned to the action and slayed the best with his thunderbolts.

Let’s check in on Greece. Zeus, defeated the Titans and buried them in the pit known as Tartarus. However, the Titans had one more trick up their sleeves. Gaia and Tartarus birthed the Typhon: a horrific, multi-headed serpent. The beast won a temporary victory over Zeus, but the serpent could not slay the Storm God. Zeus returned with powerful thunderbolts that melted large parts of the earth and set fire to the various heads of the Typhon. Zeus lashed the beast so hard that it crashed into the ground and caused Mother Earth to groaned. Finally, Zeus buries the Typhon alongside the other Titans.

Back in India, we already discussed the exploits of Mannus, Yama, and Trito. Still, it might help to fill in a few more details. For one, the Sanskrit books refer to the monster as the Vrtra, which probably meant “blocker.” The name fit, as the best impeded the free flow of some major river (potentially the Ganges). Mortals could not defeat the creature on their own. The red, multi-armed, elephant-riding Storm God from earlier in the article, Indra, smote the create with his lightning bolts. In a separate telling of this story, Indra sees his power fall amongst the gods. The architect of the Gods, Tvastr, seeks to exploit this weakness. He attacks the Storm God with a three-headed and six-eyed monster known Trisiras, though the God defeats it with lightning. Tvaster then creates the Vrtra in revenge, and this monster swallows Indra until fellow gods Visnu and Siva step in to save him.

I can mention a few other stories. A three-headed beast named Azi Dakaka meets a mortal fate in early Iranian mythology. Thor fights the Joermungandr during the Ragnarok. Armenians once honored Vahagn for his dragon-slaying, though the details of these exploits remain limited.

Most of these tales use a derivative of the Indo-European gwhen. Notice a similar term, guin, from Ireland. The Indian iterations deploy the root han-, while we see something like jan- (that first consonant taking a “y” sound) in Iran. The Greek version uses a Greek root that I will roughly transcribe as phontes.

One might struggle to see how each version derives from the same word. For -han, the aspiration outweighed the other parts of the consonant. If that seems like a stretch, consider that the English green and the Latin herb both stem from the Proto-Indo-European ghreh1, a term that probably had something to do with the growth of plants. If you’re wondering what h1 means… we’ll get to that. As for the -jan, that’s a case of palatalization. You’ve probably noticed that we like our “uh” vowels in English. Even though the second “e” in elephant once contained a more interesting sound, we’ve degraded it to “uh” status. Linguists refer to this “uh”, the most frequent vowel in English, as a schwa. Why do we love our “uhs?” Laziness. We articulate the schwa in the center of the mouth, so it requires the least tongue movement of any sound. Likewise, we prefer to articulate consonants at the hard palate (the top and center of the mouth.) That’s why the English word yellow starts at the palate, while the German and Dutch cognates (gruen and groente) begin at the back of the mouth. The original Germanic term was gelwaz. The Germans and Dutch kept the leading consonant in the same spot, while we moved it to the middle.

That leaves us with the Greek version of gwhen. Why would it begin with a “ph?” To start, you’re probably pronouncing the “ph” wrong. There is no such monster known as the Tyfon. Nor was there any goddess named Afrodite. While this transcription takes the “f” sound in modern English, the ancient Greeks pronounced the letter phi as an aspirated “p.” Again, aspirations involve that puff you can feel on your hand. If you want to master some authentic Ancient Greek pronunciation, you’re in good luck: we always aspirate the “p” in modern English. Likewise, the ancient Greeks pronounced the theta as an aspirated “t,” not as the “th” sounds we find in words like “this” or “thing.” How, then, could “gwh” become “ph?” The “gw” involves a primary point of articulation at the back of the mouth and a secondary point at the lips. Thus, the Greeks skipped the first step and kept the articulation at the lips. A similar process explains how Proto-Indo-European kwetwer (compare to Latin quarter) became the English “four”. We kept only the second half, moving this consonant to the front of the mouth².

Fine, you might think, various myths use the same word for “slay.” Couldn’t that just be the normal word for killing something? Well, no. In Ancient Greek, we see the banal kteina verb (meaning “kill”) in other contexts. The Iliad, for example, features numerous gwhen-less deaths. The story only references a single dragon slaying, when the Trojan Glaukos explains his common lineal hospitality with the Achaean Diomedes. Here, Glaukos uses the phontes verb. This is a good example of the word’s memorative connotation: the Trojan warrior aims to prompt Diomedes’ memory regarding the two combatants common history. The ancestor in question is Bellerphone (no “f” sound!), who defeated the Khimaira before foolishly (and fatally) attempting to scale Mount Olympus.

Greek Mythology contains quite a bit of big-monster slaying: Zeus and the Typhon, Jason and the Argonauts, Artemis and the Python, Cadmus and the dragon teeth, the hunt for the Kalydonian boar, and the labors of Herakles. Watkins refers to Herakles as the “formulaic,” hero, meaning that Greeks inserted the demigod extant stories. That might explain why his defeat of the Geryon most closely matches the original Indo-European Trito myth. Perhaps there was an old hero with a name like Trito until the Greeks swapped him out for their favored champion. Not only does the tale contain the gwhen verb, but it also features a three-headed adversary, and, like the Indian version, it ends with the liberation of cattle. Other tales contain a bit less common ground with the rest of Indo-European mythology. We see the gwhen root in memorative retellings of the quest for the Golden Fleece and the hunt for the Kalydonian boar. While the story of Artemis and Python uses the more generic “kill” word, the term Python itself shares its ancestry with Iran’s Ahi Budhnya.

How does Greek mythology end up with two recognizable retellings of the ancient dragon-slaying? While Herakles’ triumph over the Geryon fits the Trito mold, the battle between Zeus and Typhon appears to be borrowed directly from Anatolia. One piece of evidence involves the Hittite verb ishimanta, which is used to describe the binding of the Illuyanka. A verb with the same etymology appears in the Greek version. This verb doesn’t appear in other attestations of this story, and the Greeks rarely used this term outside of epic poetry. However, there was some mix-up at the epic factory. The Greek term refers to lashing rather than binding. This would hardly be the first instance of a verb drifting in meaning as it transferred from one language to another. Think of the abstract ways we use “consume” in English when it just meant “eat” in Latin. Nevertheless, the verb is used in its Anatolian “binding” sense when Odysseus avoids the Sirens. In addition, the story of Zeus and the Typhon misses a plural when referencing the cord. The Hittite language lacked plurals in the instrumental case, and the Greeks copied this missing plural, even though their language used plurals in this same circumstance.

Where does that leave the other Greek dragon-slaying myths? I can see a few possibilities. Each could represent a local retelling of the same ancient myth. Or, like the Typhon story, these could have arrived from a neighboring culture. It’s also possible that these stories were merely inspired by, but not descendant from, the mainline myths. Maybe “and then there was a really big monster” was simply the ancient version of “and then they build an EVEN BIGGER Death Star.”

Other Words

The similarities don’t stop at gwhen. Vebs descending from the Proto-Indo-European terh2 appear across Europe and Asia. Before we explore the mythologies, I need to explain what’s going on with these h-with-underscore words. Since we have no Proto-Indo-European documents to read, linguists reconstruct this language by analyzing modern speech and ancient writing. Scholars compare cognates of different languages and attempt to decipher which original could have created these descendants. Some cases are easier than others. Consider the English “two,” Latin “duo,” Greek “dyo,” and Hindi “do.” We know that, early in the history of the Germanic languages, the “d” sounds were converted to “t” ones. Hence, we conclude that the original word for “two” probably began with a “d” sound, as in Greek, Latin, and Hindi. In other cases, we lack a recognizable candidate for the original sound. Linguists theorize that some of these mystery cases involve laryngeal consonants that speakers articulated in the voice box. No modern examples of these sounds exist, so academics symbolize them with the awkward h-underscore notation.

Which leads us to terh2. This verb meant something like “overcome,” connoting a temporary victory. We see this term frequently in Sanskrit, in phrases like “indrena yuja tarusema vrtram.” Phrases like these refer to Indra’s minor victories of the Vrtra, before the monster’s ultimate defeat. One can see the same word with Illuyanka’s short-term defeat of Tarhunz: “MUSilluyankas DIM-an tarhta.” We also see versions of this word in the Roman tarentum and the Greek nektar. Both words reference the ultimate temporary victory: overcoming death. Although versions of gwhen occur through Greek mythology, you won’t see this term in Herakles’ bouts with death. Even the mightiest of heroes can only earn a temporary win over this foe.

Let me discuss the last two myths mentioned in this section. I’ll st art with the Armenian hero Vahagn. Even though his exploits lacked cognates ghwen or terh2, he shares his name with an Indo-Iranian warrior god. Next is Norse Mythology. A version of ghwen in Thor’s apocalyptic battle with Jormungandr. On top of that, his hammer shares its name with the weapons of other Northern European deities. Thor wielded the Mjolnir, while we see terms like mildna in Latvia, the maladna in Belorussia, and the mellten in Welsh.

Since I’ve just spent over 2,000 words discussing two words, I’ll put other notable linguistic similarities in a bullet point format:

• We see references to the defeated enemies “lying like a reed” in Armenia, Iran, and India

• Some of Hesiod’s poetry clashes with contemporary Greek language but matches poetry found in Anatolia and India

• A “yellow cudgel” (using identical words) is repeated in Greece, India, and Iran

• Philologist Adalbert Kuhn compared healing charms in India, Anatolia, and Northern Europe. He found that many listed the same body parts with the same etymology in the same order

• Similar victory hymns appear in The Iliad and the Rig Veda

• The following phrases appear across the Indo-European world: “goods and chattel,” “impenetrable fame,” “with an eager mind”

HWAET about English?

We’ve discussed Greek, Latin, Avestan, Sanskrit, Armenian, and even a little of Welsh, Latvian, and Irish. You may have noticed one language missing: English. Of course, I can’t tell you about some five-thousand-year-old tale in English. That’s impossible since we don’t use the word “English” to describe anything before around 500 A.D. That still leaves the possibility for re-retellings. The Greeks loved to recycle stories where a guy killed a monster, so it’s not implausible to expect one in English.

What would a true retelling look like? We’d expect the following

• A hero killing a dragon. This killing should use the gwhen root and be used in a memorative sense

• One or more temporary victories, using the terh2 root

• Descriptions of key items or events that match those of other myths

Let’s start with the most important word. What is the English version of gwhen? Grimm’s Law tells us that voiced and aspirated consonants in Proto-Indo-European correspond to voiced and unaspirated consonants in the Germanic tongues. That means the “gwh” should sound more like “gw” in English. Can you think of any English words that start with “gw?” I can’t. Recall that the “gw” involves a primary articulation at the back of the mouth (like a normal “g” sound) and a secondary articulation at the lips. As we saw in Greek, the secondary place of articulation can become the primary one. That’s exactly what occurred in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Thor’s fight with the World Serpent contains the word bana while modern English features the word “bane.”

As for terh2, we can apply Grimm’s Law more straightforwardly. A Proto-Indo-European “t” corresponds to an English “th.” Recall that the “h2” was pronounced somewhere in the voice box. All Indo-European languages abandoned these sounds, but many kept a similar sound in the throat. In Scots, this word became throch, with the “ch” sharing its pronunciation with German words like noch and auch. Although English lost these guttural sounds centuries ago, we see fossils in our spelling. The modern English descendant of terh2 is through. While the “gh” stays silent today, Old English speakers kept the glottal sound when they spelled it þurh³.

As in all Germanic mythology, the word bana occurs frequently. A few examples include:

Wearth him on Heorote to handbanan waelg est waefre (A wandering murderous sprite (Grendel's mother) slew him in Heorot.)

him Grendel wearth maerum maguthegne to mothbonan (him, the famous young retainer, Grendel slew by mouth.)

Both of these fit the “memorative” connotation of the word, as they reference a past slaying that the listeners are assumed to be familiar with.

Meanwhile, þurh appears over 20 times in Beowful. However, the term had already drifted to the prepositional form it holds today, so it’s never used as a synonym for defeat. The closest I could find was this line:

Grendel cwealdest þurh hæstne had heardum clammum forþan he to lange leode mine wanode ond wyrde (Grendel in grimmest grasp thou killedst, seeing how long these liegemen mine he ruined and ravaged)

Here we see the banal form of the verb kill in cwealdest. Avoid the temptation to interpret this word as an descendant of gwhen. According to Grimm’s Law, an unvoiced stop like “c” should correspond to a voiced (but not aspirated) stop in Proto-Indo-European. In other words, we’d expect the original word to have a “g” rather than a “gh.” That’s exactly what we see in the term’s Proto-Indo-European ancestor: gwelh.

Other terms tie to the dragon-slaying part of Beowulf to the rest of Indo-European mythology. The poem ends with the phrase ond lofgeornost (meaning “eager for glory,”) and a similar epithet appears in the Rig Veda. The Anglo-Saxon epic describes the defeated dragon as sleeping. The specific wording for this is atypical for Old English poetry but comparable to similar phrasing in Indra’s battle with Vrtra. The unknown author refers to Beowulf’s sword as a “biter.” Greeks, Anatolians, and Norsemen gave the same description their favorite weapons.

Within Germanic mythology, we see further parallels. Beowful’s companion, Sigemund, sports a name close to the Old Norse Sigmundr. Besides being a “biter,” Beowulf’s weapon is described as a haeeft-mece (“hilted sword,”) a description that occurs frequently in Norse mythology. Germanic tales contain another similarity that separates them from other branches of the Indo-European language family. Recall the words ahi and azi from India and Iran, which share the same etymology as the English word “eel.” No Germanic heroes fought eels. Instead, nemeses were wyrms. While this is the source of the Modern English “worm,” it referred to dragons in Germanic folklore.

1. The convention is to put an asterisk before words from “Proto” languages. I don’t like putting funny symbols in my writing.

2. And Grimm’s Law changed the stop to a fricative!

3. The Old English “h” often had the sound you hear in German noch.