What are these wee beasties adorning this 11th-century Old English manuscript? Not bulls-with-fringe legs, but spiders! I love that the artist makes their bodies more like mammalian monsters — but if you count their legs, you do see that at least the artist got the number correct. In Old English, many kinds of crawling things — from bugs to snakes to dragons — fell into an overarching category of the “wyrm.” The particular sort of _wyrm_ known as spiders, have a really interesting etymology. In Latin, a spider is an _aranea_ (Spanish araña), which gave the cognate _renge_ in Old English. However, a much funner rendition of “spider” in Old English is “gange-wæfre” which literally translates “walker-weaver.” Putting two words together in a combination to suggest a different thing is a type of word-riddle known as a _kenning_. Modern English preserves another related kenning, which is our word “grasshopper,” stemming from _gæes-hoppa_.
Old English had another fun word for spider, which was “attor-coppa,” which, broken down, literally means “poison-top” or “poison vessel.” Eventually, “coppa” could be a stand-in for “spider,” and we still have the word “cobweb” as a reminder. And, one final word for spider in Old English is “lobbe,” which I have here just to complete the set.
In case you were wondering, spiders come up in Old English texts mostly in one of two contexts — in medical texts, where remedies for spider-bites are given, and in Biblical exposition and translations of the Psalms, where the apparent fragility of spiders and their webs get compared to human weakness.
Source(s): Every bit of this information comes from Hana Videen’s work. See _The Deor Third: An Old English Bestiary_, chapter two, Princeton UP, 2024. Also, follow @oldenglishwordhord. Image is British Library, Cotton Vitellius C III, fol. 23 v.
