You say catafalque, I say catafalco – or grave or tomb

Oh, what a mongrel language is ours!

TV coverage of Her Late Majesty’s funeral cortège and the Accession of the new King has focused attention on funereal language in general. And in particular, a word we rarely get to hear or read, catafalque, has intrigued people. I was on Radio Leeds this morning talking about this very subject, so I thought I would update this post, originally written at the time of the death of Her Majesty’s husband, Prince Philip, in 2001.

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That set me thinking about where other language of funerals comes from. It’s perhaps surprising how many of the words listed and discussed below are loanwords. Of catafalque, bier, hearse, coffin, funeral, grieve, mourn, bury, widow(er), grave and tomb, only bier, mourn, bury, widow(er) and grave are Germanic, i.e. inherited from Old English.

Interestingly, both coffin and hearse are included in the first and second English ‘hard words’ dictionaries, which suggests they were novel and strange to most people at that time (the early seventeenth century),

catafalque: Webster’s defines it as ‘a wooden framework, usually draped, on which the body in a coffin lies in state during an elaborate funeral’.

The important point is ‘during an elaborate funeral’. You (no disrespect intended!) and I are unlikely to lie on one in death. Except that, so I am told by a friend who is a vicar, in crematoriums the platform on which the coffin sits and which then disappears through the curtains is a catafalque. And in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, there is a catafalque which descends into the vault below. On it, I presume, Her Majesty’s coffin will rest.

Catafalque is a word English purloined from French catafalque in the mid-seventeenth century. Following a not uncommon itinerary for ‘English’ words, French catafalque had in turn been borrowed from Italian catafalco, the origins of which are obscure though some link the cata– part to Greek kata. I understand some have been pronouncing the –falque like the first part of falcon. It is pronounced with the a of cat (ˈkætəˌfælk) and strong stress on the first syllable.

The word’s variants in French produced modern French échafaud, which is the origin of English scaffold. Catafalques might be more than mere platforms to rest the coffin on, but rather funerary monuments. After all, Prince Philip’s catafalque was raised a few feet above floor level and draped in purple.

John Evelyn’s three references to it in his diaries all mention it in relation to royalty or the nobility, which suggests an imposing construction of some kind, not a simple surface. He uses the French spelling twice and the Italian catafalco when in Rome, where he calls the catafalco for the Queen of Spain ‘most stately’. He must have known his catafalques when he saw one, for he saw three – in Brussels, Beauvais and Rome.

bier – Added because that is what you and I would call the movable platform on which a coffin might rest, wouldn’t we? The Collins Dictionary defines it as ‘a platform or stand on which a corpse or a coffin containing a corpse rests before burial’.

That last bit is crucial. A corpse, not a coffin, might be carried on a bier, for instance in a Hindu funeral when the body is taken to be cremated.

This word is from the Germanic bedrock of English vocabulary, or, in the standard wording of the OED for such cases, after the rubric ‘origin’, ‘a word inherited from Germanic’. In Old English it was bǽr, and the –ie– spelling seems to have been influenced by French. It is related to the verb to bear, which makes sense.

hearse – the Duke’s was a specially adapted Land Rover. Humbler folk will make do with whatever the undertaker provides – as long as it’s black, presumably. Unlike bier, though, hearse has an almost exotic origin and a torturous development to reach its current meaning of the vehicle which transports the coffin.

First, where it comes from. According to the OED, it was originally spelled herse, from Anglo-Norman French herce ‘harrow, frame’, from Latin hirpex, hirpicis, ‘a kind of large rake’, from Oscan hirpus ‘wolf’ (with reference to the teeth).

Oscan? An extinct Italic language related to Latin. Apparently, some of the street signs in Pompeii are in Oscan.

This image from the Luttrell Psalter shows what a medieval harrow might have looked like and hence how the design might have carried over into the hearse as defined below.

As regards how its meaning developed according to the OED, read on. The bracketed dates refer to the earliest written citations in the OED.

a) First it was ‘an elaborate framework designed to carry a large number of tapers and other decorations placed over the coffin of a notable person as it lay in the church’.

Known in Latin in this sense since the thirteenth century [1291], it is recorded by Marvell in the seventeenth:

And starrs, like tapers, burn’d upon his herse.

a1678   A. Marvell Wks. III. 510 

In two of his three references to catafalques mentioned earlier, Evelyn has ‘hearse, or catafalque’ and ‘catafalque, or hearse’, which suggests they were synonyms for him.

b) Then [1552] hearse became a permanent framework of iron ‘or other metal, fixed over a tomb to support rich coverings or palls, often adapted to carry lighted tapers’.

c) Next [c.1575] hearse could refer to ‘A temple-shaped structure of wood used in royal and noble funerals, after the earlier kind [a above] went out of use. It was decorated with banners, heraldic devices, and lighted candles; and it was customary for friends to pin short poems or epitaphs upon it’.

These next lines refer to a ‘marble’ hearse, but I wonder if it conceivably could have been wood painted to look like marble, a trick sometimes used in the interiors of grander houses.

Vnder this Marble Hearse Lyes the subiect of all Verse.

1623   W. Browne Epit. C’tess Pembroke in W. Camden Remaines 340 

The OED citations for that meaning include this, which reflects the definition’s statement about pinning verses being pinned to the hearse:

Shall I to pin upon thy Herse, devise Eternal Praises; or weep Elegies?

1659   T. Pecke Parnassi Puerperium 119  

d) Hearse could also mean a light framework of wood over the body to support the pall at funerals [1566]; the funeral pall itself [1530]; and even a bier or coffin, as in Julius Caesar, when a ‘plebeian’ tells others to stand back from Caesar’s body:

Stand from the Hearse, stand from the Body.

a1616   W. Shakespeare Julius Caesar (1623) iii. ii. 163  

e) Finally, by 1650 it is first recorded in the OED being used for the vehicle transporting the coffin.

Given all those different meanings the OED records, it looks as if its meaning was hazy for quite some time.

• Evelyn uses it as synonymous with catafalque;
• in his French primer of 1530, Palsgrave gives it two meanings; and
• Bullokar includes it in his dictionary of hard words of 1616, the English Expositor, so he clearly felt it was in need of explanation for some people:
  
  Hearse, a buriall coffin couered with blacke.

coffin – This is another word English owes to French, but its ancestry is Greek. It came from Old French cofin, coffin, ‘little basket, case’, which comes from Latin cophinus (later cofinus), which in turn comes from Greek κόϕινος ‘basket’. (Coffer also comes from this source.)

In Middle English it was spelled cofine, coffyne and many variants, including some with ph, cophyn.

a) When first recorded in English, in Wycliffite sermons (1380) and the Bible (1382), it translated the Latin cofinus of the Vulgate:

et occiderunt septuaginta viros et posuerunt capita eorum in cofinis

Thei…slewen the seventy men, and putten the hevedis of hem in cofynes

2 Kings x. 7

In this meaning it could even refer to the receptacle Moses lay in in the bulrushes, as in one of the first Latin-English dictionaries:

Tibin a baskette or coffyn made of wickers or bulle rushes, or barke of a tree: suche one was Moyses put into.

1538 T. Elyot The Dictionary of syr Thomas Elyot

b) Coffin could also mean ‘a chest, case, casket or box’ (from 1330 onwards)

Here’s one of ivory:
A Cophyn of Evore.
c1425   Wyntoun Cron. viii. viii. 19  

c) Only in 1525 is coffin first recorded (by the OED) in its current meaning. Cawdrey included it in his Table Alphabeticall of 1604:

Cophin, basket, or chest for a dead body to be put in.

People must have buried their dead in containers before they called them coffins. In Old English the word was cist, cest, cyst and variants, which itself is from Greek and is the ancestor of our ‘chest’. It appears in Chaucer with that meaning:

He is now deed, and nayled in his chest.
c1386   G. Chaucer Clerk’s Prol. 29  

funeral – This is another ultimately Latin word borrowed via French. Or, to be precise, as the OED shows it, from both French and Latin. For the noun referring to the ceremony, the origin is Middle French funerales (Modern French funérailles) AND post-classical Latin funeralia, the neuter plural of the adjective funeralis, derived from Latin fūnus, fūneris.

In early use in English it was often in the plural, imitating the Latin, and its earliest citation refers to funeral expenses rather than the ceremony itself, as in this extract from a will:

After that my funerales and dethe be paied.
1496   Will of George Celey (P.R.O.: PROB. 11/11) f. 68^v  

to grieve – A primordial emotion and another loanword. Again from French and through it from Latin.

In Middle English in the sense ‘to harm, oppress’ as greve and variants: from Old French grever ‘burden, encumber’, based on popular Latin *grevāre from gravāre, ‘to load, weigh down, oppress’ from gravis ‘heavy, grave’.

Of its fourteen OED sense categories, a full eight are marked as obsolete, including its first cited use to mean, as per French and Latin, ‘to press heavily upon, to burden’:

Nimeþ ye hede þet youre herten ne by ygreued ne y-charged of glotounie ne of dronkehede.
1340   Ayenbite (1866) 260  

[Take heed that your hearts be not oppressed nor burdened with gluttony or drunkenness.]

The sense of ‘causing great distress to someone’ goes back to the early thirteenth century.

It’s one of the not too numerous verbs in English that can be used with an impersonal dummy ‘it’, as in ‘it grieves me to have to tell you…’ and the like, used in that construction since the first half of the thirteenth century.

In its modern sense of ‘feel intense sorrow’ it is first recorded about 1380.

to mourn – Derives from Old English murnan, which is cognate with forms in other Germanic branches and possibly related to the Indo-European base of memory. It has been used intransitively and transitively since Old English.

to bury – Also from Old English byrg(e)an, byrigan, and in use since Old English with its modern meaning ‘to deposit a corpse in the ground’.

widow(er) – An unusual word in that the masculine ending is added to the feminine rather than the other way round. Quite often I’ve seen men calling themselves widows. I have no idea whether this is a) ignorance of the existence of widower b) an unwilled participation in a trend that is effacing the difference or c) a conscious decision to be non-sexist.

Widow comes from old English widewe. It has cognates not only in West Germanic languages (e.g. German Witwe, Dutch weduwe) but in other Indo-European languages such as Avestan viδauuā, Old Prussian widdewū and Welsh gweddw. According to the OED it corresponds to an adjective reflected in Latin viduus ‘bereft of a spouse’.

That adjective has Romance descendants whose descent from it is more or less easy to spot: Spanish viuda, Italian vedova, French veuve, Romanian văduvă.

grave – From Old English græf, related to German das Grab. Grave the noun comes from the same ultimate root as the OE verb grafan, to grave, meaning

 ‘to dig’ – paralleled in German by the verb graben;

‘to engrave’;

‘to form by digging’ – Stronge diches are grauen on euery syde off it.
1535   Bible (Coverdale) Ezek. iv. 2  

and

‘to bury’ (obsolete) – They told you that I was dead too and graved in yonder kirk.
1876   J. Grant One of Six Hundred ix. 80.

Unlike the other words, grave has associated idioms: you can carry a secret/mystery etc. and certain emotions to the grave:

Harriet, a 23-st Galapagos tortoise, has died in a Queensland wildlife park at the age of 176, carrying to her grave the mystery of her origins.

They carried to their graves the horror of the mud, blood, and guts of serving on the Western Front.

a place can be as silent/quite as the grave:

The morning commute on the London Underground is silent as the grave…

Or, so I discovered yesterday thanks to a discussion on Twitter, people can be as silent as the grave, which was a novel usage to me:

Josephine County Attorney Mulkins has been as silent as the grave on this issue.

And then there is to dig your own grave and to turn in your grave.

tomb – Unlike a grave, which can just be a hold in the ground, a tomb suggests a monument of some kind. As Oxford Online defines it: ‘A monument to the memory of a dead person, erected over their burial place’.

It can also be:

‘A large vault, typically an underground one, for burying the dead’.

Tomb comes from Anglo-Norman toumbe and is paralleled in Modern French by tombe, Spanish & Portuguese tumba and Italian tomba. All derive from the post-Classical Latin tumba, which in turn derives from Greek τύμβος. Beyond that, nobody seems to be sure.

In Spanish, you can say ‘soy una tumba’ [literally ‘I am a tomb’] in the same way you can say ‘my lips are sealed’ or ‘I shan’t breathe a word.’ The same applies to Italian ‘sono una tomba.’ German uses something similar: ‘Ich schweige wie ein Grab’ or ‘Ich bin verschwiegen wie ein’ Grab’.

In line with historical verbing, to coffin, to tomb and to widow have all been created at different times.

Shakespeare used to widow in a gruesome combination with another verb:

In this City hee Hath widdowed and vnchilded many a one.

a1616   W. Shakespeare Coriolanus (1623) v. vi. 152  

To tomb (‘to place a body in a tomb’) has being going since the late thirteenth century. The OED notes its current use as ‘chiefly archaic or poetic’, suggesting also that it might be a shortening of the more normal to entomb. I am not sure whether this next quotation is striving for effect, but anyway, here is a modern citation:

A genuine nobility pulses through the ancient cathedral where the great of England are tombed, from poets to kings.

2011, National Post (Canada) (Nexis) 30 Apr. rw4  

References:
“bier, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/18783. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“bury, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/25160. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“catafalque, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/28690. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“coffin, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/35802. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“funeral, adj. and n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/75519. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“grave, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/80989. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“grieve, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/81401. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“hearse, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/85060. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“mourn, v.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/122939. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“tomb, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/203084. Accessed 21 April 2021. “widow, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/228912. Accessed 21 April 2021.

“widow, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/228912. Accessed 21 April 2021.