Historical Setting: An unknown time in a cold land
At every village door is a woodpile that will dwindle as the night grows colder. I watch from the woods.
I see one door with only a few random sticks where the woodpile should be and the thread of smoke from that house is thin. I choose that house to give my gift of firewood because it might be most needed there. Maybe I will find a welcome.
I knock and the door flings opened. An elderly man with a fierce eye set on me, totters, leaning on a tall-backed chair, clinging for support with one arm and pointing a steel dagger at my starving belly with his other hand. Surely, he sees I’m not a danger. I have no weapon, simply an armload of logs. But I also don’t have language. I don’t know his word for “peace,” if these people even have such a word. As best as I can, I offer it anyway.
“I come in peace.” My attempt at a calm smile is a strained response to the dagger threat. He snarls some kind of verbal answer and tightens his grip on the weapon between us. Even as the old man totters and sways, he holds his weapon steady. He shouts the one word I know of this tongue, “Thrall!” And from a dark corner heaped in rags rises a frail tattered child in a carefully stitched dress of a rich fabric, probably from another land. She was undoubtedly captured from a land familiar to me and she tells him in his language what I said, then he asks her something more. She tells me he is asking who I am and why I have come.
“Tell him I’ve come looking for peace from a war that isn’t here. I am no enemy here. I bring only logs for warmth and peace.”
I hear her searching words for this exchange. She uses the word I know for warmth from my own gaulish tribe, “heit.” Footnote: He answers probably asking if that means “thrall?”
She asks me if I am someone’s slave. “I am a free man.”
Now I have a name that he can call me, “Heit-man,” and my gift of fire logs is accepted. Behind the gift comes my strange and unknowable notion of “peace.” But I know when I am trusted, it might be considered an acceptable gift, maybe as acceptable as logs for a fire.
Dear God, strengthen my persistence in peace and in love. Amen.
Footnote: Footnote: Roland Schuhmann. 2009. Old High German vocabulary. In: Haspelmath, Martin & Tadmor, Uri (eds.)
World Loanword Database.
Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 1258entries.
(Available online at http://wold.clld.org/vocabulary/11, Accessed on 2024-04-17.)
(Continues Tuesday, December 24, 2024)
Lazarus Ink 