Normally I wouldn’t remark on my romps through etymology, but “hlafweard” is a compound of hlaf, or loaf, and weard, which means guardian (see also Ward or Warden, etc). Meaning that when you call someone a lord you are calling him an esteemed keeper of the bread.
HEY THERE BREADBOX PETER WIMSEY. LOAF GUARD PALPATINE. BREAD CLIP VETINARI.
Lady also derives from hlaf, but in this case hlafdige or bread kneader. She makes the bread, he monitors it. Women have to do all the work as usual.
Now, the reason I was looking this up was that I wanted to develop a gender-neutral analogue to lord/lady; there are analogues already out there naturally, but the Shivadh must be different and anyway I didn’t like the ones I’d seen suggested online.
Given that the origins of Lord and Lady aren’t all that strongly gendered anyway (they’re about what the person does, not what their gender is), I decided that if a woman is a bread-kneader and a man is a bread-guarder, a nonbinary person should be A BREAD EATER, which would be Hlafetan.
Thus I present to you the gender-neutral analogue to Lord or Lady: Ledan.
“I swam on beyond the otter pool, under some sort of spell. It struck me that the animal’s particular magic does not stem so much from its rarity as its invisibility. It is through their puckish, Dionysian habit of veiling themselves from view that otters come to embody the river spirits themselves. Henry Williamson knew this when he wrote his great mythic poem of Tarka the Otter. In the best traditions of spirits, the otter reveals itself through signs.”
Have I lived enough? Have I loved enough? Have I considered Right Action enough, have I come to any conclusion? Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude? Have I endured loneliness with grace?
I say this, or perhaps I’m just thinking it. Actually, I probably think too much.
Then I step out into the garden, where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man, is tending his children, the roses.
Consider this: every time you make a ‘hahahaha Welsh has no vowels’ joke, you personally owe every Welsh person £10. Most of us will accept this payment in cash, but a solid third of us are also able to receive online payments when the WiFi in the Mystical Otherworld is online, provided that you only attempt to send the payment at a very specific time whilst standing just inside the mouth of one of three designated caves.
Last summer my friend’s mom discovered hundreds of teeny tiny toad tadpoles in a puddle in her driveway. It was drying up, so she asked me about moving them to a nearby pond. I told her not to, because moving amphibians unnaturally between water bodies can spread disease.
So she filled up a watering can every morning and every evening and replenished the puddle, adding dechlorinator drops she uses for her fish tank to make sure the water was safe.
The tadpoles survived and grew up into little toads who eventually hopped out of the puddle.
I think about the tenderness and compassion of this a lot.
“It was odd. As a girl, Sophie would have shriveled with embarrassment at the way she was behaving. As an old woman, she did not mind what she did or said. She found that a great relief.”
Consider this: every time you make a ‘hahahaha Welsh has no vowels’ joke, you personally owe every Welsh person £10. Most of us will accept this payment in cash, but a solid third of us are also able to receive online payments when the WiFi in the Mystical Otherworld is online, provided that you only attempt to send the payment at a very specific time whilst standing just inside the mouth of one of three designated caves.
