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In October’s Word of the Month Kathleen Morris takes us on a fascinating journey through the history and development of the word ‘ghyll’, showing that the original spelling was ‘gill’. The spelling of the word in Nicholson’s own writings, particularly in his poetry, makes its own journey through time, and Kathleen links this development to Nicholson’s increasing interest in, and knowledge of, the links between Cumbria and Norway.
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October 2015
'ghyll' n by Kathleen Morris 
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ghyll (n)
This is not a word found only in dialect dictionaries or specialist works; nevertheless it is fair to treat it as a dialect word because of its geographical distribution. It is included in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which gives two meanings, both derived from Old Norse ‘gil’ (a glen). The OED’s first definition is ‘a deep, usually wooded, ravine’; the second, ‘a narrow mountain torrent’. Dictionaries also indicate that there are two acceptable spellings – ‘gill’ or ‘ghyll’, and both are defined as being of northern usage.
Why should this be?
In terms of usage of the word, the answer is there in its origin. It is used in those areas where the Norse settled over a thousand years ago. It is not that the landscape feature described by the word does not exist in other parts of the country, but simply that it is one of those words which, referring to the sort of feature which local people would use among themselves, survived into modern English. In other parts of Britain a similar feature has other names such as glen, clough, or chine. In most cases elsewhere the word refers only to the first of the two meanings of ghyll (‘ravine'), because few other parts of the country have valleys as steep as the Lake District, so a mountain torrent elsewhere is generally out of the question.
In terms of spelling, the answer is more recent and perhaps odder. The original spelling was ‘gill’. Larger dictionaries will make this clear, but in any case you only have to look at the surname Gill to work this out. Nobody calls themself Ghyll, although there are around 45,000 Gills, and the surname is still largely a northern one. Early maps also show gill as the name of landscape features, but not ghyll.
The origin of the more recent spelling was Wordsworth. It appears in one of his earliest poems, ‘Evening Walk’. The poem was first published in 1793, but the spelling used then was ‘gill’. It was not until an edition published in the 1820s that it read
‘Then, while I wandered where the huddling rill
Brightens with water-breaks the hollow ghyll
As by enchantment, …’
I derive this piece of information from works of literary criticism, since first editions of Wordsworth are scarce on my bookshelves.
This is not a word found only in dialect dictionaries or specialist works; nevertheless it is fair to treat it as a dialect word because of its geographical distribution. It is included in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which gives two meanings, both derived from Old Norse ‘gil’ (a glen). The OED’s first definition is ‘a deep, usually wooded, ravine’; the second, ‘a narrow mountain torrent’. Dictionaries also indicate that there are two acceptable spellings – ‘gill’ or ‘ghyll’, and both are defined as being of northern usage.
Why should this be?
In terms of usage of the word, the answer is there in its origin. It is used in those areas where the Norse settled over a thousand years ago. It is not that the landscape feature described by the word does not exist in other parts of the country, but simply that it is one of those words which, referring to the sort of feature which local people would use among themselves, survived into modern English. In other parts of Britain a similar feature has other names such as glen, clough, or chine. In most cases elsewhere the word refers only to the first of the two meanings of ghyll (‘ravine'), because few other parts of the country have valleys as steep as the Lake District, so a mountain torrent elsewhere is generally out of the question.
In terms of spelling, the answer is more recent and perhaps odder. The original spelling was ‘gill’. Larger dictionaries will make this clear, but in any case you only have to look at the surname Gill to work this out. Nobody calls themself Ghyll, although there are around 45,000 Gills, and the surname is still largely a northern one. Early maps also show gill as the name of landscape features, but not ghyll.
The origin of the more recent spelling was Wordsworth. It appears in one of his earliest poems, ‘Evening Walk’. The poem was first published in 1793, but the spelling used then was ‘gill’. It was not until an edition published in the 1820s that it read
‘Then, while I wandered where the huddling rill
Brightens with water-breaks the hollow ghyll
As by enchantment, …’
I derive this piece of information from works of literary criticism, since first editions of Wordsworth are scarce on my bookshelves.
Haweswater looking towards High Street. photo: CL
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So we know that ‘ghyll’ is a fairly recent innovation as a spelling, but we don’t know why. Despite the libraries devoted to Wordsworth studies, there seems to be no definitive answer – was it Wordsworth or his publisher, for instance, who made the change? Suggested reasons include wanting to create a gothic, faux-antique atmosphere, rather like Ye Olde Englishe Tea Shoppe. More plausible to me is the suggestion that literary audiences in London did not understand the pronunciation of ‘gill’ with a hard initial g. The only gills they knew of were the ones on fish, and this clearly did not make sense in the poem. Otherwise, they would pronounce the word as ‘jill’, which would also make no sense to them, being a measure of liquid.
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So, out of this confusion, ‘ghyll’ was born. It hardly seems credible that a poem, even by Wordsworth, should have such a lasting effect, not only on other poets, but on the English language as a whole and the everyday language of an entire region. Place names such as Dungeon Ghyll have become established and are acknowledged to be part of the local mystique which brings in the tourists on which the region relies so heavily. Would Wordsworth have approved? Probably not.
Did Nicholson have a view on Wordsworth’s effective creation of a new dialect word? Surviving documents do not contain anything explicit about it, but we do know that he held ambivalent views on Wordsworth in general – not only on his poetry, but on his legacy and lasting influence, which hang heavily over any subsequent poet taking this part of the country as a theme.
This may account for Nicholson’s use of both spellings of the word. As we have seen, in Five Rivers, his first published collection, he uses ‘ghyll’, not only in the example quoted but in other poems. In his next collection, Rock Face (1948), ‘ghyll’ also appears several times, for instance, in ‘The Land Under the Ice’,
‘In southern ghylls the Statesman feeds on shoots
Of alpine cresses, sapped with rain,’
But by 1981, in Sea to the West, we find that ‘The Shadow of Black Combe’ reads
‘…where a crag-fenced, shovelled away entrance
Gill cracks back
To some before-man-made cavern, …’
And, in ‘Turn on the Tap’ (The Candy Floss Tree, 1984) we see
‘A thin rill
That spills down a gill
Where salmon shoot, …’
What we seem to have here is a progression, conscious or unconscious, from ‘ghyll’ to ‘gill’; from the overtly poetical and romanticised spelling to the original, pre-romantic version which more accurately reflects the Norse origins of the word.
This perhaps reflects Nicholson’s growing interest in Norse influences on Lakeland landscapes and on his own relationship with the landscape. His trips to Norway in 1965, 1974 and 1978 could be both cause and effect here. See, for instance, the language used in ‘Fjord’, ‘Glacier’, ‘Midsummer Fires on the Sognefjord’, or ‘Cornthwaite’.
His prose works do not show the same transition from one spelling to another, although he uses both spellings. For instance, in Greater Lakeland (1969), he refers to Dungeon Gill, which must have been the original form although it has long been Ghyll in general use, and especially in tourist material. In the earlier The Lakers (1955) he lists Scandinavian words used in Lakeland place names: ‘tarn’, ‘beck’, ‘ghyll’, ‘fell’, ‘dale’. But elsewhere in the same book he refers to larches which ‘heave in great heaped tidal waves up the narrowing channels of gills and cleft.’ Difficult, then, to see preference or development here. We know he would prefer to be remembered for his poetry, so perhaps we should look to that for guidance.
It is not only in poetic language, or even in English, that the word ‘ghyll’ has been transformed and left hanging on as a reminder of times past. A look at how the Norse languages have dealt with it is also instructive. The Old Norse word, ‘gil’ is also the Old Icelandic word for the same feature. It has survived into modern Icelandic in the same form, translated by current dictionaries as ‘gorge, chasm, glen, gill, ravine’, which, taken together, sound more impressive than the average piece of Lakeland scenery.
But what about modern Norwegian, Swedish, or even Danish? ‘Gil’ is strangely absent from their vocabularies. The standard word for a valley is ‘dal’, which should not surprise us, but for any more pronounced feature of the landscape the Scandinavian languages now seem to prefer ‘ravin’, ‘klyfta’ (Swedish), or ‘halvag’ (Norwegian).
So it’s us and Icelandic, then? No, not quite. Don’t overlook the Faeroese. There are around 45,000 in the Faeroe Islands, plus a diaspora, and according to a Faeroese dictionary, they still use ‘gil’. And very versatile it is, too. The dictionary definitions are worth looking at in full: gil – (1) gully); (2) old dried out river bed; (3) small, longish, grass covered hollow; (4) (rare) small bay with rocks on both sides, or, small landing place on a rocky shore; (5) (local) stream. Presumably in Faeroese context is all, since the difference between a grassy hollow and a rocky bay seems quite extreme. But the first and last meanings tally with our use of ‘gill’ or ‘ghyll’, although if ‘stream’ is only in use in some localities it does not sound as though the word is used by very many people in this sense.
So, rather than worry about the possible pretentiousness of Wordsworth’s fancy new spelling, we should rejoice that it has given a new lease of life to a word which would once have been on every Viking’s lips, but which has now shrunk back to the fringes – to Iceland, the Faeroes, and Lakeland.
And the distinctive spelling may be gaining the word a wider public. Something which Nicholson missed - it has only come into being since his death - is the sport or pastime of 'ghyll scrambling'. This isn't to say that nobody did it years ago, just that it hadn't been formalised, given a name, and commercialised - there are several businesses which will take you out for day of getting wet and tired under close supervision if you don't feel up to organising it yourself. They all spell it 'ghyll', and I don't think any of them are being poetic. Language moves on, but we don't always know why, and we can't control how it will happen. I know Nicholson would have been interested in this development, but can’t be sure what he would have thought of it.
Kathleen Morris
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AFTERNOTE
My own Norsk-Engelsk Ordbok (Oslo, 1995) does, in fact, give an entry for ‘gil’, assigning this form to Nynorsk – the second official language of Norway, prevalent on the west coast. Nynorsk is not a dialect form of Norwegian, but a reconstructed modern Norwegian language based on words and word-forms from field studies of the Norwegian dialects by the 19th-century philologist Ivar Aasen and synthesized by him into a new and consistent language. According to the fascinating Wikipedia article, 26% of Norwegian municipalities have ‘declared Nynorsk as their official language’. The word ‘gil’ seems to have developed into ‘gjel’ in other parts of Norway. It is defined as: ‘(narrow) canyon, pass, ravine’, as is ‘gil’ itself. Certainly, as Kathleen points out in her article, the link between the English word ‘gill’ and its Norse counterparts is absolutely clear and still current. Antoinette Fawcett October 2015 |
