SELIM05.pdf Andrew Breeze, Selim 5 (1996): 122—126 OLD ENGLISH HREOL ‘REEL’: WELSH RHEOL ‘RULE’ HREOL ‘reel’ is attested in late Old English as a gloss on alihruz ‘reel’ (from XIX. xxix of St Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies) It also figures in Gerefa, a text on estate management attributed in its final form to Archbishop Wulfs tan, and linked with the Church’s lands in Worcestershire, which covered over half the county.1 Gerefa lists the word amongst necessities for making cloth: linen flax, spindle, reol, yarn -winder, and so on.2 Old English provides the forms hreol (in the supplement to Ælfric’s Glos- sary), reol, and riul. Middle English contains few instances of reel used in its literal sense, though OED quotes late examples from the Laud Troy Book and Promptorium Parvulorum. Yet the verb reel is fairly common. Langland uses it at C.IX.81 in describing poor widows who card wool, wash and patch clo - thes, scrape flax, rele (wind yarn on a reel), and peel rushes to make lights.3 The verb reel is also used figuratively in Barbour’s Bruce, the alliterative Morte Arthure, and the work of the Gawain-poet with the various meanings ‘roll; turn suddenly; sway in combat; wheel about; stagger; prance wildly, run riot’. Typical is an OED citation from Barbour, on a battle-line wavering, becoming unsteady, and giving way: ‘The king … saw thame re land to and fra’. Association of reel in these senses with Old English hreol, proposed cautiously by OEDand Gollancz, is accepted without query by Norman 1 Dorothy Bethurum, Episcopal Magnificence in the Eleventh Century, in Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. S. B. Greenfield (Eugene, Oregon, 1963), 162-170, at 168; Janet Bately, The Nature of Old English Prose, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. M. R. Godden & Michael Lapidge (Cambridge, 1991), 71-87, at 73. 2 H. R. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest (London, 1962), 113. 3 Piers Plowman, ed. D. A. Pearsall (London, 1978), 164. Andrew Breeze ____________________________________________________________________ 128 Davis.1 As we dis cuss the transla tion ‘roll’ below, it is worth noting exactly how the Gawain-poet employs this verb. He uses it six times. At Sir Gawain 229 the Green Knight ‘reled hym vp and doun’; at 304 ‘runischly his rede y ¥en he reled aboute’; at 1728 a hunted fox swerves, ‘ofte reled in a¥ayn, so Reniarde watz wyle’; at 2246 the Green Knight tells Gawain they can sway in combat as they wish, ‘Here are no renkes vs to rydde, rele as vus likez’. At Patience 147 Jonah’s ship slews round in a hurricane, ‘hit reled on roun vpon pe ro¥e ypes’; at 270 Jonah rushes down the whale’s throat: He glydes in by pe giles pur¥ glaymande glette, Relande in by a rop, a rode pat hym po¥t. Ay hele ouer hed hourlande aboute, Til he blunt in a blok as brod as a halle.2 At 229 Tolkien and Gordon, after Napier, refer nym to eyes, translating ‘rolled them up and down’, and ‘rolled’ at 304 also. But the first is challenged by Andrew and Waldron, who prefer the interpretation ‘swaggered’ of earlier editors.3 OED declines to give an etymology for hreol describing it as without cog- nate in other Germanic languages, sense and form being against a connection with Old Norse hræll ‘weaver’s beam’. This caution is not shared by Conti- nental scholars, who derive hræll from Germanic *hranhila-, hreol from *hre- hula-, both related to Old En glish hrægl, Old High German hregil ‘gewand’, Greek kerkis ‘spitzes gerät zum festschlagen des gewebes’, Lithuanian krekls ‘hemd’, and even Russian kresat ‘mit dem Feuerstahl Feuer schlagen’, Ukrainian kresnuty ‘Feuer schlagen’, and Sanskrit kresati ‘Feuer schlagen’.4 1 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Israel Gollancz, EETS os 210 (London, 1940), 169; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien & E. V. Gordon, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1967) 207. 2 Patience, ed. J. J. Anderson (Manchester, 1969), 40. 3 Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. M. R. Andrew & R. A Waldron (London, 1978), 216. 4 Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Bern, 1948-59), 618-619; Jan de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2nd edn (Leiden, 1962), 263. Old English Hreol: Welsh Rheol ____________________________________________________________________ 129 But it seems OED’s scepticism is well-founded, and that Old En glish hreol ‘reel’ is actually to be derived from Welsh rheol ‘rule’. The etymology of rheol was established long ago as being via reol yw> y>e, Jackson felt the evolution of ei from Welsh long e was not finished until the later seventh century.2 Because time would be needed for the various stages from Old Welsh *ruiol to rheol, Old English hreol, riul from Welsh rheol, ryol is likely to be a late borrowing, perhaps of the tenth century. Since hreol occurs in Gerefa, a West Midland text, and possibly re flects the influence of Welsh spin ning girls (Riddle 12 in the Exeter Book being evidence for Welsh slavewomen in Anglo -Saxon England), it can be re lated to cader ‘cradle’ and baban ‘baby’ in the AB dialect as a domestic word taken by English from the language of Welsh servants (probably wo men).3 1 F. J. Mone, Zunftordnungen einzelner Handwerker, Zeitschrift für Geschichte des Oberrheins, xv (1863), 281, cited in R. J. Forbes, Studies in Ancient Technology (Leiden, 1955-72), iv. 158, 168-70; A History of Technology, ed. C. J. Singer et al. (Oxford, 1954-8), ii. 208. 2 Jackson, 330-5, 477, 479-80. 3 E. J. Dobson, The Origins of ‘Ancrene Wisse’ (Oxford, 1976), 115. Old English Hreol: Welsh Rheol ____________________________________________________________________ 131 Such an origin influences interpretation of the Middle English verb reel. Because the stick-reel was twitched or jerked from side to side as yarn was wound on it, the original figurative sense of reel must have been ‘waver, swerve, twist round’. A sense ‘roll’ could not develop until the turning reel was known. This strengthens a case for translating ‘swagger’ at Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 229, while at 304 the sense may be that the eyes of the Green Knight darted about, rather than ‘rolled’. Yet a reading of Patience 270 shows the poet knew the later sense ‘turn, rotate’. Jonah, washed into the whale’s mouth, tumbles head over heels down its gullet, with lines 270-1 de- scrib ing the same action, as Ay ‘always’ proves. The passage reveals the Ga- wain-poet’s gift for visualizing movement or action, as with the raising of the axe at 421-6 of Sir Gawain, or the lady’s entering the bedroom at 1182-1203.1 Since relande at Patience 270 certainly means ‘rolling’, the turning reel must have reached the Cheshire Staffordshire area by the poet’s time, bringing the extended sense ‘roll, rotate’ to the verb reel. So line 270 of Patience must, somewhat unexpectedly, reflect the arrival in the Rorth-West Mid lands of me - dieval new technology and its associated textiles manufacturing revolution. Andrew Breeze University of Navarre, Pamplona * † * 1 Marie Borroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: a Stylistic and Metrical Study (New Haven, 1962), 120-9; A. C. Spearing, The Gawain Poet (Cambridge, 1970), 91-2, 231; Andrew & Waldron, 37; P. A. M. Clemoes, Action in Beowulf and Our Perception of It, in Old English Poetry: Essays in style, ed. D. G. Calder (Berkeley, 1979), 147-68, at 147-8.