Shedding light in dark places

Scholars who want to accuse others of ignorant obscurantism have long taunted them with the phrase lucus a non lucendo. This is supposed to exemplify the stupidest kind of concocted etymology, and here it is in Book XVII of Isidore’s stout old compilation: ‘A “sacred grove” (lucus) is a dense thicket of trees that lets no light come to the ground, named by way of antiphrasis because it “sheds no light” (non lucere).’

So, if Isidore was so dim, why should anyone be interested, after 1,400 years, in an English translation of his magnum opus, The Etymologies? First because we have missed something big. The Etymologies was one of the most influential books from the time of its compilation around the year 620 until into the Renaissance and beyond. His book was one of the first to be printed, with 11 editions published before 1500. The span of its career is suggested by Chaucer quoting it when it was already older than the centuries that have elapsed between Chaucer and the present day. It penetrated all Europe; fragments survive of a seventh-century manuscript written in an Irish hand at the monastery of St Gall, in what is now Switzerland.

This extraordinary mix of encyclopaedia and dictionary must be the most historically important work never to have been translated into English until this fine collaborative work. Compare another great book that few read now, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, already translated by King Alfred 1,100 years ago (and again, rather badly, by the young Elizabeth I). Even the Pseudo-Dionysius, now of minority interest but once in every mediaeval library, is available in a popular paperback English version.

Isidore was active at the time St Augustine of Canterbury was labouring to get Christianity into the heads of the barbarian English.