Here we Come A-Wassailing

The Wassail Song has been a popular Christmas carol 

for over a century now,

but its roots had little to do with Christmas.

Tracing the history of the term "wassailing" 

leads one on a fascinating trip through British history.

photo courtesy of morguefile.com

After the Romans departed the Island,

its Celtic inhabitants were beset by Germanic and Scandinavian invaders.

By the 9th century, the Danes, who had besieged the Island

 after the Anglo-Saxons settled there,

were defeated for a time and permitted to establish permanent settlements 

along Britain's east coast in an area then known as the Danelaw.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) attributes wassail to the Danes

since there are no indications of its root words 

in Old English or Old German.

In Old Norse, there is the correlated salutation sitheil or "sit in health."

Despite the mystery of its beginnings, 

what is known of the etymology of waissal 

provides a glimpse into politeness conventions of earlier centuries. 

According to the OED, the first reference to wassail or wes heil 

comes in Geoffrey of Monmouth's story of Rowena 

in his 12th-century work Historia Regum Brittaniae.

The terms are referenced again by Wace, 

a 12th-century Norman French poet and priest of Bayeux, in his Roman de Rou.

Wace relates that the night before the Battle of  Hastings,

the loss of which plunged Britain into 300 years of French rule,

the English allegedly passed the hours before battle in drinking and revelry;

 shouts of  "weissel" and "drincheheil" echoed across the night.

photo courtesy of morguefile.com

Weissel or weisse heil was used by the English as a salutation

when drinking to one's health or good fortune. 

Weissel was said when offering the drink, 

with the appropriate response being drincheheil, 

meaning drink good health and good fortune in turn.

In language, it's common to shift the part of speech of a word,

so the directive verb weissel 

was easily converted to the noun "waissal" 

and then back again to a verb by affixing the -ing ending.

But one might ask how the affix "a" became attached to waissaling,

so that carolers sing "here we come a-wassailing,"

or for that matter, why some dialects favor verbs like 

"a-going," "a-coming," or "a-fixing."

That is an interesting story of English as well.

I'll share it in tomorrow's blog.

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