SELIM05.pdf Andrew Breeze, Selim 5 (1996): 119—121 A CELTIC ETYMOLOGY FOR OLD ENGLISH CLAEDUR ’CLAPPER’ CLAEDUR is a rare word. It occurs only in the oldest English glossaries, where it figures as claedur (Épinal), cledur (Erfurt), and cleadur (Corpus).1 Glossing crepacula ‘clapper’, it is itself glossed as a ‘board (tabula) by which birds are frightened away from cornflelds’.2 Although claedur is unrecorded elsewhere, it is paralleled by cladærstic- ca, claderstecca, cladersticca, and clederstico ‘clapper stick’, which gloss a- nate, perhaps a corrupt form of amite ‘with a rod’ (used for bird catching, but taken by the glossator as a bird -scarer).3 More dubious is a link with clidern - ne, clidrinnae. Pheifer sees these rare glosses of strepitu as possible deriva- tives of cladær-, claedur, which he translates as ‘clatter’ .4 Yet the fact is that the origins of this whole group have been unclear. Discussing the verb clatter, The Oxford English Dictionary notes that claedur, cledurt and cleadur ‘appear to be connected, but are not phonetically identical’. Holthausen in turn re lates cladur- and cleadur to clidrenn which he links 1 The Corpus Glossary, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Cambridge, 1921), 49; T. N. Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Supplement (Oxford, 1921), 127; Old English Glosses in the Épinal-Erfurt Glossary, ed. J. D. Pheifer (Oxford, 1974), 13; Henry Sweet, A Second Anglo-Saxon Reader, 2nd edn, ed. T. F. Hoad (Oxford, 1978), 20, 29; and cf. The Épinal. Erfurt, Verden and Corpus Glossaries, ed. Bernhard Bischoff and others (Copenhagen, 1988). Pheifer was the first to give the correct reading cledur for Erfurt. 2 Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (London. 1975- ), 515; Pheifer, 73. 3 Lindsay, 15; Toller, 127; Pheifer, 8, 66; Sweet, 9, 10. 4 Toller, 128; Pheifer, 49, 122; Sweet, 84. Andrew Breeze ____________________________________________________________________ 124 with Gothic klismo ‘Klingel’ (the ‘tinkling cymbal’ of I Corinthians 13: 1).1 This suggestion re ceives no support from Feist.2 Since attempts to explain claedur as Germanic are unsatisfactory, could it be from Welsh cledr or cledyr ‘stave’, which it resembles in form and mean- ing? The history of cledr supports this hypothesis. Welsh cledr, defined as ‘stave, rod, rafter, beam, post, rail’, is cognate with Middle Breton clezr ‘cross bars under a cart frame’, Modern Breton klerenn ‘latte de bois’, Mlddle Irish clithar ‘shelter, protection’.3 Cledr also occurs in early Welsh poetry as ‘pillar (of battle)’. Lines writ - ten about 800 say of prince Urien, oed cledyr cat kywlat rwyt ‘he was a prop in war, a snare of the enemy’; in an elegy of the later ninth century, a Powys princess declares her brother was cledyr kat callon argoetwis ‘the support in battle, the heart of the men of Argoed’.4 In another context, early Welsh laws in the thirteenth-century Black Book of Chirk value every pole, rod, and rail ( k elederen) of a house at ‘a legal penny’.5 Another rail or support, the breast bone. is called cledyr y dwy vron ‘stave of the breast’ in the twelfth-century tale of Peredur.6 Dafydd ap Gwilym (d. 1349?) calls his sword coethaf cledren adaf ‘the hand’s finest handle’, showing a context for cledren close to that of Old English claedur ‘clapper, bird -scarer’. Another sense of cledr comes in Dafydd’s description of a ruin, heb na chledr na chlwyd ‘without rafter or covering’.7 William Salesbury’s Welsh-English dictionary of 1547 translates kledyren as ‘a sparre’. In Modern Welsh, cledr and cledren mean ‘stave, po- le, pillar, rail’.8 1 Ferdinand Holthausen, Altenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, (Heidelberg, 1934), 50, 51. 2 Sigmund Feist, Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Gotischen , 3rd edn (Leiden, 1939), 313. 3 Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru (Caerdydd, 1950-), 493; Joseph Vendryes, Lexique etymologique de l'irlandais anclen: Lettre G (Paris, 1987), 1201. 4 Early Welsh Saga Poetry, ed. Jenny Rowland (Cambridge, 1990), 421, 478, 435, 487. 5 Geiriadur, 493. 6 Geiriadur, 493; cf. The Mabinogion, tr. Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones (London, 1949), 217. 7 Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym, ed. Thomas Parry (Caerdydd, 1952), 377, 381; J. P. Clancy, Medieval Welsh Lyrics (London, 1965), 90. 8 H. M. Evans & W. O. Thomas, Y Geiriadur Mawr, 5th edn (Llandysul, 1971), 88. A Celtic Etymology for Old English Claedur ____________________________________________________________________ 125 Cledr ‘stave’ agrees in meaning with Old English claedur ‘clapper’, that would consist of a piece of wood with hinged blocks on each side. Such clap- pers were used as both toys and bird -scarers in ancient times.1 They still sur- vive in the liturgy, replacing bells on Good Friday, as with the huge clappers or matracas ( *cladur> cladær-. This coincides with the common sense view that claedur ‘clapper’ represents the original borrowing, cladær- repre - senting a later stage, after addition of Germanic -sticca. If these arguments are correct, we can show claedur and cladær- to be of non-Germanic origin, and thus unrelated to Modern English clatter or (?) Old Englis h clidrenn. The original meaning of claedur was ‘stave (with clap- pers)’, not ‘rattling noise’. We also reveal a new Celtic loan in Old English. Claedur and cladær- thus Join trymide ‘strengthened’ (Corpus 577), sercae ‘tabard’ (Épinal-Erfurt 18), loerge ‘weaver’s beams’ (Éplnal 1), and uuannan ‘pallid’ (Épinal 576) as Welsh loans in the earliest glossaries. It is curious to see Celtic culture featuring there mainly in military terms and words for tools. 1 The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd edn, ed. N. G. L. Hammond & H. H. Scullard (Oxford, 1970), 1083. 2 John Morris -Jones, A Welsh Grammar (Oxford, 1913), 12; K. H. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh, 1953), 281-2; E. P. Hamp, The Development of Modern Welsh Syllabic Structure, The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, xvii (1956~8), 30-6, at 32-3; D. S. Evans, A Grammar of Middle Welsh (Dublin, 1964), 1. 3 Alistair Campbell, Old English Grammar (Oxford, 1959), 86. 4 Campbell, 61; Pheifer, lxiv, lxxix-lxxx. Andrew Breeze ____________________________________________________________________ 126 Andrew Breeze University of Navarre, Pamplona * † *