SELIM05.pdf Andrew Breeze, Selim 5 (1996): 127—131 RICHARD ROLLE’S TAGILD ‘ENTANGLED’: WELSH TAGU ‘CHOKE’, TAGELL ‘SNARE’ TAGILD ‘entangled’ and tagillyng ‘entanglement’ are peculiarities of the prose of Richard Rolle (c. 1304-1349).1 OED, s. v. tagle, quotes four in stances of the forms. For tagle itself it quotes Newcastle upon Tyne, Public Libra ry, MS TH. 1678, a manuscript found ‘tumbling about in a drawer among old ma - gazines and Newcastle dirt’ by J. T. Fowler, who described it in Notes and Queries, fifth series, i (1874), 41-2.2 The manuscript contains Rolle’s English Psalter and commentary on the Canticles in a Northern dialect close to the author’s original, givin g the readings quoted in OED, ‘Na man may wit hou many vices ar pat men ar tagild with’ for Psalm 39: 16, and ‘Swa paire affec- ciouns ar ay tagild with som lufe pat drawes eame fra goddes lufe’ for Habba- kuk 3: 31. Other manuscripts (mostly Southern) here read tak ild (a scribal var- iant?) or tangild (a nasalized phonetic variant). In the light of the Celtic ety- mology argued below, the reading snaryd in the Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 467 copy of the English Psalter is of special interest. The noun tagillynge figures in the Thornton Manuscript (Lincoln, Cathe- dral Library, MS 91) text of Desyre and Delit, which speaks of how joy in Christ draws man’s thoughts from his soul ‘that he may hafe ryste in Goddes lufe, wlthowtten tagillynge of o per thynges’ (here Longleat House MS 29 has taryynge).3 Elsewhere, describing the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Rolle speaks of 1 On the dates, see N. Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge, 1991), reviewed by S. S. Hussey in Notes & Queries ccxxxviii (1993), 80-1. 2 N. R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries (Oxford, 1969-92), iii. 491-2, and cf. A Handlist of Manuscripts containing Middle English Prose in Oxford College Libraries, ed. Sarah Ogilvie-Thomson (Cambridge, 1991), 107-8, reviewed by E. G. Stanley in Notes & Queries, coxxxvii (1992), 388-9. 3 Cf. Yorkshire Writers, ed. Carl Horstmann (London, 1895-6), 1. 46, 136, 196; English Writings of Richard Rolle, ed. Hope Emily Allen (Oxford, 1931), 57; Richard Rolle, Prose and Verse, ed. Sarah Ogilvie-Thomson, EETS 293 (Oxford, 1988), reviewed by Siegfried Wenzel in Notes & Queries, ccxxxv (1990), 73-4. Richard Rolle’s Tagild, Welsh Tagu, Tagell ____________________________________________________________________ 133 Counsel as ‘doyng away of worldes rytches and of delytes and of al thynges pat man may be tagild with in thought or dede’, where the reading of two ma - nuscripts (London, British Library, MS Arundel 507 and the Thornton Manu- script) contrasts with that of Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd. v 64, which has tacit, with cit written over an erasure.1 Tagild and tagillynge are, then, amongst the many words used by Rolle which are rare or unknown in other writers.2 OED links tagle with Scots tai- gle ‘entangle, impede, hinder’, earliest attested in 1635, and the various sen- ses of tangle and entangle (quoted from the early sixteenth century on- wards). To these instances can be added another from a fifteenthcentury Scots poem, in the Bannatyne Manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Adv. 1.1.6) of c. 1568, beginning ‘O wicket wemen, wilfull and variable’, which declares women are ‘Turnit fra trewth and taiclit with treich- ery’.3 Although Rolle’s tagle almost certainly represents the ancestor form of English (en)tangle (and Scots taigle), its etymology has been a puzzle. OED comments, ‘Probably of Scandinavian origin, and cognate with Swedish dial- ect (Bornholm) taggla ‘to disarrange, bring into disorder’. Others are more cautious. Tolkien comments ‘obscure’; Onions and the 1973 edition of SOD, ‘of obscure origin’; Hoad, ‘of uncertain origin’. Yet tagle is now again de- scribed, without citation of evidence, as ‘probably of Scandinavian origin’.4 Nevertheless, the semantic difficulties in relating Rolle’s tagle to the ob- scure Bornholm dialectism taggla ‘to disarrange’ make another approach poss ible. It is argued here that ttagle (> Scots taigle) is not a Scandinavian loanword in English but a Celtic one, deriving from a Cumbric cognate of Welsh tagu ‘to choke’, tagell ‘throat; snare’; Bre ton taga ‘to choke’; Old Irish *tachtaid ‘he chokes, he strangles’. 1 Horstmann, i. 197; Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose, ed. Kenneth Sisam (Oxford, 1921), 43; Allen, 84, 116. 2 Horstmann, ii. xl n. 1. 3 Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. R. H. Robblns (Oxford, 1952), 225; Medieval English Lyrics, ed. Theodore Silverstein (London, 1971), 154. 4 J. R. R. Tolkien’s glossary to Sisam, s.v. tagyld; The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C. T. Onions (Oxford, 1966), 902; The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1973), 2242; The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. T. F. Hoad (Oxford, 1986), 482; The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Lesley Brown (Oxford, 1993), 3216. Andrew Breeze ____________________________________________________________________ 134 These cognate forms are widely represented in Celtic. In Irish our eviden- ce ranges from a ninth-century gloss in a copy of Priscian in Switzerland (no- m thachtar gl. angor ‘strangling’ in St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 904) to the present, where stáisiún craolachain a thachtadh is ‘to Jam a radio station’.1 Middle Welsh tagell is proved to derive from a British original by the Cornish place-name element *tagell ‘constriction, narrow neck’: hence it is likely the form also existed in Cumbric. The history of the Brittonic forms is as follows. The sense ‘choke, stran- gle’ is shown as original by the cognate verbs in Welsh, Breton, and Irish. The stem of tagell is characteristic of words for tools, such as Middle Welsh gwäell ‘skewer’, tröell ‘whorl’, ysgubell ‘broom’, as well as for the female of species (hwyfell ‘salmon’, iyrchell, ‘roe-deer’); personal names (Gwynnell, Mechell); and rlver-names (Crafnell, Llyinell). The same Celtic stem features in Gaulish Mosella, the river Moselle.2 A standard Welsh dictionary defines tagell as ‘gill (of fish), throat, double chin; snare’.3 But ‘double chin’ is an error. It is a misunderstanding of tagell hir in a poem by Iolo Goch (fl. 1345-1400) on a beautiful girl. Unexplained in the first critical edition of Iolo’s work, tagell was glossed ‘double chin’ (!) in the second. Johnston alters this to ‘lower part of the Jaw or chin (gtn)’, but this still wrong.4 The correct translation of tagell hir is ‘a long neck’. A short neck was not admired at this date. Muscatine notes that poets admired ‘a rather tall heroine, with smooth, white neck’; the Lancashire lass of ‘Mosti ry den by Rybbesdale’ in the Harley lyrics had ‘Swannes swyre swy pe wel ysette / A sponne lengore pen y mette’, a swan’s neck a span 1 Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, ed. Giall Ó Dónaill (Baile Atha Cliath, 1977), 1190; Joseph Vendryes, Lexique étymologique de l’irlandais ancien: Lettres T-U (Paris, 1978), T 4-5. 2 John Morris -Jones, A Welsh Grammar (Oxford, 1913), 233; R. J. Thomas, Enwau Afonydd a Nentydd Cymru (Caerdydd, 1938), 92; Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru (Caerdydd, 1950-), 1209. 3 Y Geiriadur Mawr, ed. H. M. Evans & W. O. Thomas, 5th edn (Llandysul, 1971), 403. 4 Cywydwdau Iolo Goch ac Eraill, ed. Henry Lewis et al., 1st edn (Bangor, 1925), 3; 2nd edn (Caerdydd, 1937), 423; Gwaith Iolo Goch, ed. D. R. Johnston (Caerdydd, 1988), 323. Richard Rolle’s Tagild, Welsh Tagu, Tagell ____________________________________________________________________ 135 longer than the poet had seen before; the damsel Oiseuse in the Roman de la Rose had a neck assés gros et lons par raison (line 540).1 In Welsh, a nun described by Hywel ap Dafydd of Raglan (fl. 1450-80) had a mwnwgl hir feinwyn ‘a long, fine, white neck’.2 A passage on usury in a translation by Sion Conwy (d. 1606) of Leonard Wright’s A Summons for Sleepers (London, 1589) makes the sense of tagell clear. It says those who borrow from need no more commit sin than a woman who is raped, or a sea- farer Jettisoning cargo in a storm, or a traveller giving thieves his purse befo - re they cut his throat (torri i dagell).3 Having clarified the semantic range of Welsh tagell, we can turn to the Cornish evidence. This consists of the place-name Tintagel ‘fort of aconstric - tion’, in north Cornwall. First attested as Tlat.agol in Ge offrey of Mon- mouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1137), the later pronunciation [d Z] is explained by Norman influence (the name being best known through French romances). The tagell ‘constriction’ here is the narrow neck of land Joining this spectacular defensive site to the Cornish mainland.4 The verbal element *tak- ‘choke, strangle’ was, then, well attested in Cel- tic; tagell ‘neck, constriction’ is known in early Welsh and Cornish; and the sense tagell ‘snare’ was also known at an early date (a full account here must await completion of Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru).5 1 Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley, 1957). 18; Early Middle English Verse and Prose, ed. J. A. W. Bennett and G. V. Smithers, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1968), 114; Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris, 1974), 56. 2 Cywyddau Dafydd ap Gwilym a’i Gyfoeswyr, ed. Ifor Williams and Thomas Roberts, 2nd edn (Caerdydd, 1935), 39; Dafydd ap Gwilym, Fifty Poets, tr. H. I. Bell and David Bell (London, 1942), 138; Barddoniaeth yr Uchelwyr, ed. D. J. Bowen (Caerdydd, 1957), 85; The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse, ed. Thomas Parry (Oxford, 1962), 105; A. G. Breeze, Hywel ap Dafydd o Raglan and OBWV, Rhif 59’, Llên Cymru, xvii/1-2 (1992), 137-9, at 138. 3 Rhyddiaith Gymraez (Caerdydd, 1954-6), ii. 136, and cf. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography (London, 1959), 1115. 4 On site and name, see C. A. R. Radford, Cultural Relatlonships of the Celtic World, Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Celtic Studies (Cardiff, 1966), 3-37, at fig. 6; E. G. Bowen, Britain and the Western Seaways (London, 1972), plate 36; K. R. Dark, The Plan and Interpretation of Tintagel. Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, ix (1985), 1-17, at 2, 6; O. J. Padel, Cornish Place-Name Elements (Nottingham, 1985), 214, and his Cornish Place-Names (Penzance, 1988), 163, 195. 5 On Welsh snares, see The Chirk Codex, ed. J. G. Evans (Llanbedrog, 1909), 97; Robert Richards, Cymru’r Oesau Canol (Wrecsam, 1933), 147; Llyfr Blegywryd, ed. Andrew Breeze ____________________________________________________________________ 136 Northern Middle English tagle ‘entangle’ would develop naturally as a borrowing of *tagell from Cumbric, spoken perhaps as late as c. 1100; and Modern English (en)tangle could be seen, not as a loan from Scandinavian, but as from a previously unrecognized Celtic loanword in English.1 Andrew Breeze University of Navarre, Pamplona * † * S. J. Williams and Enoch Powell (Caerdydd, 1942), 80; The Taws of Hywel Dda, tr. G. M. Richards (Liverpool, 1954), 82. 1 On Cumbric, see K. H. Jackson, Angles and Britons in Northumbria and Cumbria, in Angles and Britons (Cardiff, 1963), 60-84.