Image credit: Ivan-Tsarevich and Zhar-bird, 1896 by Yelena Polenova. Several parallels come to mind: jackdaw, Jenny wren, magpie ( mag + pie), and a few others from English and French.įirebird: not a fire bringer but the very embodiment of fire. Although not very common, this suffix does occur every now and then, as in piggin “a small pail,” hoggin “a small drinking vessel,” and dialectal buggin “louse,” to mention a few, while dobbin “horse” is a diminutive of Dob ( Dobbin must be familiar to many from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, in which Dobbin of Ours is an important character if you don’t remember who he was, reread Chapter V: it will make your day). Now, Robin is a nickname for Robert, and -in a so-called diminutive suffix. First, that the bird name must be identical with the proper name Robin. However, it has baffled generations of etymologists. Robin, which appeared in English texts in the middle of the sixteenth century, looks deceptively transparent. By way of consolation, Wren has a perfectly transparent origin: it means Women’s Royal Naval Service. Unlike other troglodytes, wrens do not dwell in caves they only tend to forage in dark crevices. Yet, if you want to enlarge your everyday stock of words, I may remind you that the wren is a dentirostral passerine bird of the genus Troglodytes. Etymologists’ conjectures are rather uninspiring. The word has two probable cognates, but their existence provides little help. I am sorry to say that wren is almost hopelessly obscure, even though it already occurred in Old English. However, neither the wren nor, most probably, the robin got their names from their color.
#Jenny wren bird archive
Image credit: Image from page 65 of “Vanity fair” (1900) by Internet Archive Book Images. In one fell swoop, Shakespeare’s coinage, has become proverbial (the obsolete adjective fell, related to felon, means “fierce, cruel” the Romance root fel– is of undiscovered origin).Ī diminutive suffix does not make a person small or useless. And later, Macduff, on learning that his wife and children have been murdered, develops the same avian metaphor: “All my pretty ones? / Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? / What? all my pretty chickens and their dam? At one fell swoop?” (IV, 3, 215-18). The association between the two birds is old, for Shakespeare makes Lady Macbeth say in Macduff’s castle: “…the poor wren,/ The most diminutive of birds, will fight- / Her young ones in her nest-against the owl” (IV, 2: 9-11).
![jenny wren bird jenny wren bird](https://img-aws.ehowcdn.com/877x500p/cpi.studiod.com/www_ehow_com/i.ehow.com/images/a06/ij/cp/do-build-jenny-wren-house_-800x800.jpg)
CC BY 2.0 via Flickr / JENNY WREN by milo bostock. Image credit (top to bottom): THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW by Neal Fowler. Here are our main characters: a wren and a robin. From a Welsh legend we learn that every day the robin carries a drop of water to quench the flame of the infernal pit and, and it is this flame that scorched its feathers.
![jenny wren bird jenny wren bird](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a9/c3/15/a9c31544ecc8ff16e7c2054cdf9b6b82.jpg)
That is why the owl, despised and hunted by all the other birds, has been hiding in the daytime. The other birds gave each a feather to replace the lost one, and only the owl refused to do so. The wren from Normandy volunteered to be the bearer of the heavenly fire but got its feathers burned off in accomplishing the task.
![jenny wren bird jenny wren bird](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/70/2d/8a/702d8a5e01633205307ced35aa84c05f.jpg)
Both birds are said to have performed heroic deeds.
#Jenny wren bird Patch
It has been suggested that perhaps the rare Regulus ignicapilla, fire-crested wren, gave rise to this folklore, but that bird’s patch is bronze rather than red. Strangely, some such tales also revolve around the wren. The color of its plumage is “explained” in numerous etiological tales about fire bringing.
![jenny wren bird jenny wren bird](https://live.staticflickr.com/4111/4843173770_5d0d4210bb_b.jpg)
But the rite is probably much older and has nothing to do with the Vikings, as shown by the date: the day after Christmas ushers in the New Year, while the wren, for some reason, became the symbol of the old one. (I have read that now the killing is no longer practiced.) According to the best-known version, the ceremony goes back to a battle between the Irish and the Vikings, in which the Irish were prevented from surprising their enemy by a wren: it tapped upon the drum or the shield of the Scandinavian warrior (just picking up crumbs and meaning no harm) and woke him up. Stephen’s Day (December 26 a public holiday) people chased, captured, and killed the wren wherever it could be found, in commemoration of St. This association with God (note also: the wren is Our Lady’s hen) did not prevent some people in England from chasing and killing the tiny and perfectly innocuous creature. In Wales, the wren is also considered sacred. In Surrey(a county bordering London), and not only there, people used to say: “The robin and the wren are God’s cock and hen” (as though the wren were the female of the robin, but then the wren is indeed Jenny). For some reason, in oral tradition, the robin is often connected with the wren. Last week ( January 9, 2019), our hero was Robin Hood, and I promised to write something about the bird robin.