I was watching a video recently on the evolution of spiderwebs when I discovered something.
In The Hobbit, the dwarves are trapped by spiders, only to be saved by Bilbo with the help of his Ring and Sting, his elven blade. He distracts the spiders as he works to save the dwarves by singing,
Old fat spider spinning in a tree!
Old fat spider can’t see me!
Attercop! Attercop!
Won't you stop,
Stop your spinning and look for me?
Old Tomnoddy, all big body,
Old Tomnoddy can’t spy me!
Attercop! Attercop!
Down you drop!
You'll never catch me up your tree!
Lazy Lob and crazy Cob
are weaving webs to wind me.
I am far more sweet than other meat,
but still they cannot find me!
Here am I, naughty little fly;
you are fat and lazy.
You cannot trap me, though you try,
in your cobwebs crazy.
I assumed, wrongly as it turns out, that Tolkien had invented 'attercop' for the poem. It seems that it is actually a Middle English word, meaning 'spider' that still exists in some dialects in England:
From Middle English attercoppe, from Old English ātorcoppe (“spider”), corresponding to atter (“poison, venom”) + cop (“spider”). The latter is still to be found in the English word cobweb.
From World Wide Words
Many of us came across this word, meaning a spider, for the first and only time in the works of J R R Tolkien, and even perhaps suspected he had invented it. But his unfamiliar words were usually from ancient sources and attercop is a good example. Bilbo sang this in an episode in The Hobbit when he was distracting the spiders:Old fat spider spinning in a tree!
Old fat spider can’t see me!
Attercop! Attercop!
Won’t you stop,
Stop your spinning and look for me!
It’s still known — it appeared in the Yorkshire Post on 24 May in an article about Ian McMillan’s work to create a modern dictionary of the Yorkshire dialect. He described it as an old-fashioned word that was still spoken in North Yorkshire, which could also mean a peevish person or a moaner. Mr McMillan provided an illustrative sentence: “Tha’ won’t go in cos’ of an attercop? Tha’s an attercop thissen!”. [tha: you; thissen: yourself.]
The word is Old English, from attor, poison + cop, the head. (Cop, or coppa, was also used by itself to mean a spider, so cobweb ought really to be spelt copweb.) The name was given to spiders in the mistaken belief that they were all poisonous to humans. By the sixteenth century, it had begun to be applied to a cross-grained, ill-natured, figuratively venomous person.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are subject to deletion if they are not germane. I have no problem with a bit of colourful language, but blasphemy or depraved profanity will not be allowed. Attacks on the Catholic Faith will not be tolerated. Comments will be deleted that are republican (Yanks! Note the lower case 'r'!), attacks on the legitimacy of Pope Francis as the Vicar of Christ (I know he's a material heretic and a Protector of Perverts, and I definitely want him gone yesterday! However, he is Pope, and I pray for him every day.), the legitimacy of the House of Windsor or of the claims of the Elder Line of the House of France, or attacks on the legitimacy of any of the currently ruling Houses of Europe.