Origins of Mead 1

THE ORIGINS OF MEAD ...... 1 Chapter 1 ...... 1 Chapter 2: Who Made the Mead, Men or Women? ...... 4 Chapter 3: Bees and Beekeeping ...... 9 Chapter 4: The Nature of Honey ...... 13 Chapter 5: Bees and Honey in Christianity ...... 14 Patron Saints ...... 15 Lots of Bee Lore ...... 19 Chapter 6: Bees in War ...... 21 Chapter 7: Geographical References ...... 21 Africa ...... 22 Amazon Basin ...... 22 Andaman Islands ...... 23 Celts ...... 23 China ...... 24 England ...... 24 Egypt ...... 27 Finland ...... 29 France ...... 31 Germany ...... 31 Greece ...... 32 India ...... 34 Ireland ...... 34 Mali ...... 37 Medieval Europe ...... 37 Norse ...... 37 Palestine ...... 44 Persia ...... 45 Poland ...... 45 Rome ...... 45 Russia ...... 48 Scotland...... 48 Wales...... 49 Linguistic Notes by Bill Kasselman ...... 51 Endnotes ...... 55

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THE ORIGINS OF MEAD

Chapter 1 This paper started when I went looking for the earliest examples of fermented honey beverages I could find. I began my search focused on Western Europe, of course, but it didn‘t take long before it expanded to include Africa and Asia – anything within reach of trade or other cultural influence. Sometimes all I found were myths and poetry, whose origins predate memory. Sometimes archaeologists had found and analyzed actual mead remains. Sometimes all we have are folk tales, though even those can tell us a lot about how mead was made, and how it was drunk. ―We know that two to five thousand years ago people in the Egyptian, Greek and Roman empires made honey wine. We also know that people in

England made mead as early as the Roman invasion of their land….Between 1000 and 1400 AD mead became even more famous, and both the English and the Poles made great quantities of it.

We know little about their beekeeping techniques…and even less about how they made their drink.‖1 Happily for us, this author is out of date for current archaeology, and more is being discovered and analyzed all the time.

Most of you who are reading this are particularly interested in the practices of a specific place, as close to a particular time period as possible. I have organized what I‘ve found geographically, then chronologically, so it should be easier for you to find information about your particular area of focus.

I can‘t write about mead without including a lot about beekeeping and honey gathering.

The very early meads were undoubtedly accidental, but those are lost in the mists of time.

Honey ferments pretty easily, as do all fruits and most if not all grains. It wouldn‘t have taken much for a bit of diluted honey to get sealed up long enough to ferment and taste good (more on fermentation and honey later). Because yeast is everywhere and fermentation can happen

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naturally with relative ease, my interest is not piqued by the debate that opens so many brewing books – which came first, beer or mead? I find it more interesting that mankind found fermentation and thought it good. Good enough to put quite a lot of time and effort into learning to do it well, and make it a regular part of their lives and culture.

It is clear that humans have kept or tended bees in some form for a very long time. There is a Neolithic rock painting of two people collecting honey in Pachamadhi, central India. A twelve thousand year old painting in the Cave of the Spider near Valencia, Spain, depicts a man clinging to creepers or ropes while putting one hand in a hole (the artist used a cavity in the rock wall for the hole); he is carrying a basket to take the honey with the other. Bees are flying around him.2 Similar rock paintings are found in South Africa and Zimbabwe, one showing a man dressed with feathers in the Zulu way and holding a lighted torch up to the bees, in front of what look like honeycombs.3 Ken Schramm states that ―the consensus date among anthropologists and food historians for earliest mead production is around 8000 BC.‖4 I wouldn‘t be surprised if it went further back than that – we know of about 50,000 years of human history.

The great structural anthropologist Charles Levy-Strauss makes a case of the invention of mead as a passage from ‗nature to culture‘.5 He posited the binary opposition of nature vs. culture as an indicator or marker of human behavior and development. (For Levy-Strauss, structures were mental models built after concrete realities, and could be used to predict or explain a great deal of human behavior. For example, in myths the surface structure is narrative, but the deep structure is an explication of the myth.)6

―Cave paintings of primitive stone-age men depict the collection of honey from bee colonies, and any addition of water to this would automatically produce a mixture which could

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be fermented by wild yeasts. The discovery of alcohol almost certainly occurred in this chance manner, and spread to all parts of the world.‖7 Certainly mead is an example of something that probably happened randomly at first, that mankind learned to harness and process for pleasure.

While languages can have many words for the different kinds of alcohol, speakers of language aren‘t always very careful with their terms. It is sometimes challenging to identify whether a text refers to a grape wine with honey added, or a mead (where the honey is fermented to make the alcohol content), or an ale versus a mead with grain added. I‘ve done my best to comment or clarify when using an example that is perhaps less than crystal clear. In modern

English alone, we have many remnant terms for honey water: hydromel, which may be lightly alcoholic but is sometimes used to refer to an unfermented beverage; and kinds of fermented honey water (mead). Among the latter is rhodamel (rose mead), cyser (apple mead), pyment

(grape mead), morat (mulberry mead), metheglin (spiced mead), and melomel (mead made with fruit). What mead isn‘t, is wine or beer. Its alcohol is honey-based, wine‘s is grape-based, and beer‘s is grain-based. Page 37 of the American Home Brewers Beer Judge Certification Program

Style Guidelines (BJCP) defines mead only as a honey-based beverage, though grape, grain and malt may be present. Some drinks seem to straddle the line – the BJCP describes braggots both as a malted mead and a honeyed ale on page 37, but includes it in its style chart on page 41 as a mead.

We often define cultures by their artifacts and distinctive processes. So much of what makes ethnicity interesting develops by accident, as a result of what combinations of things happen to be available at a given time. For example, resource-limited Icelanders brew liquor from lichen (brennevin), because it‘s one of the few things they have in abundance on an actively

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volcanic island-continent. I find it interesting to identify characteristic ingredients and track how these might have developed.

Chapter 2: Who Made the Mead, Men or Women?

One of my inquiries was whether mead-making could shed light on the division (or lack thereof) between men‘s and women‘s work. There might have been a ritual element, having to do with religious holidays (honoring a particular patron saint, for example) that sheds light on how people perceived honey and bees. Is brewing a ―guy‖ thing? Is it household work, which is often a woman‘s realm? Research results to date were really too spotty to make an ethnographic conclusion in most cases. At best one can track the rise of capitalism in medieval

Europe and the social changes that resulted.

According to Judith Bennett in Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women‟s Work in a

Changing World 1300-1600, women brewed and sold most of the beer made in medieval

England, but after 1350 men slowly took over the trade. Beer-brewers‘ widows produced beer for sale, but single women gave up the trade in this transition to capitalism before other married women did. On further reading, I found that Bennett‘s treatise revolves around the introduction of beer to the English diet, away from sweeter ale. Bennett doesn‘t address mead, cider, or the business of other fermented beverages. So what are we to make of this?

Individual places and times had laws governing brewing and who could produce brew for sale, but these change over time. Sometimes populations adjusted their work loads after major population shifts caused by war, migration, or plague. Brewing that perhaps had been done by one sex became a task available to the other (think Rosie the Riveter stepping in for factory work during World War II). In medieval Europe, when mass production of fermented beverages for trade/sale grew substantially with the development of population centers, the work

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load may again have shifted so that home production became distinguished from business. Of course, since civic records in many places indicate women were active in commerce then, generally as partners to their husbands or families, this social change might make little practical difference. A woman‘s role in commercial production of fermented beverage in medieval

Europe seems to be cued to familial responsibilities, and not to their own biological clocks - it mattered whether they were a member of a brewing family with a business to maintain, not whether they were of childbearing age rearing a family. Women didn‘t take time off to have children.

According to Kelly‘s translations and analysis of Irish farming law from the seventh and eighth century ACE in Ireland, both sexes might have been involved in brewing, though one text

(the Bethu Brigte) has a detailed description of the man brewing beer to celebrate Easter.

There are many Norse artifacts showing a woman with a drinking vessel (including an earspoon from grave 50 in Birka). It certainly seems clear that in Norse cultures, the woman served the mead. The Juellinge (Denmark) grave of an apparently wealthy woman, now on display at the National Museum of Copenhagen, dates to about the first century ACE:

‖She got a good supply of food and drink with her in the grave: Among other

things a whole sheep, and also a bucket, in which parched residues showed that it

had been filled with a drink brewed on barley and cranberries or cowberries - a

kind of mixture between beer and fruitwine. In the bucket lay an imported roman

scope, but in the hand of the woman was lying the sieve belonging to the scope -

as she would hold it when she was pouring the drink for guests. Such sets of

scopes and sieves were a firm part of a roman drinking-apparel, and were used to

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clear vine or beer while serving. The woman also had horns and glasses in the

grave, so she was amply equipped to welcome guests.‖ 8

Enright mentions that the cauldron held ―a fermented liquid made from barley and fruit.‖ 9

There are literary indications that women, and noble women at that, performed a deep form of hospitality by serving mead to honor their guests in order of precedence, and that precedence could adapt on occasion to honor a recent feat of special bravery or honor. The

Exeter Book‘s Maxims I indicates the practice existed in Anglo Saxon Britain, circa 1000 AD.

This poem is nice for the modern woman, because it depicts the woman as a partner and foil to her husband.

Guð sceal in eorle, ... War-spirit shall be in the earl

wig geweaxan, ond wif geþeon his courage increase. And his wife shall

85 flourish

leof mid hyre leodum, leohtmod loved by her people, light-hearted she should

wesan, be,

rune healdan, rumheort beon she should keep secrets, be generous

mearum ond maþmum, with mares and mighty treasures. At mead-

meodorædenne drinking

for gesiðmægen symle æghwær before the band of warriors she shall serve

eodor æþelinga ærest gegretan, the sumbel,

90 To the protector of princes approach earliest, forman fulle to frean hond Place the first full in the lord's hand ricene geræcan, ond him ræd witan As the ruler reaches out. And she must know

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boldagendum bæm ætsomne. what advice to give him

As joint master and mistress of the house

together.

In Beowulf lines 620-64110, Hrothgar‘s queen greets Beowulf‘s arrival:

Through the hall then went the Helmings' Lady, 620 Ymbeode þa ides Helminga to younger and older everywhere duguþe ond geogoþe dæl æghwylcne, carried the cup, till come the moment sincfato sealde, oþþæt sæl alamp when the ring-graced queen, the royal-hearted, þæt hio Beowulfe, beaghroden cwen to Beowulf bore the beaker of mead. mode geþungen, medoful ætbær;

She greeted the Geats' lord, God she thanked, 625 grette Geata leod, gode þancode in wisdom's words, that her will was granted, wisfæst wordum þæs ðe hire se willa

gelamp that at last on a hero her hope could lean þæt heo on ænigne eorl gelyfde for comfort in terrors. The cup he took, fyrena frofre. He þæt ful geþeah, hardy-in-war, from Wealhtheow's hand, wælreow wiga, æt Wealhþeon, and answer uttered the eager-for-combat. 630 ond þa gyddode guþe gefysed;

Beowulf spake, bairn of Ecgtheow:_ Beowulf maþelode, bearn Ecgþeowes:

"This was my thought, when my thanes and I "Ic þæt hogode, þa ic on holm gestah, bent to the ocean and entered our boat, sæbat gesæt mid minra secga gedriht, that I would work the will of your people þæt ic anunga eowra leoda fully, or fighting fall in death, 635 willan geworhte oþðe on wæl crunge,

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in fiend's gripe fast. I am firm to do feondgrapum fæst. Ic gefremman sceal an earl's brave deed, or end the days eorlic ellen, oþðe endedæg of this life of mine in the mead-hall here." on þisse meoduhealle minne gebidan."

Well these words to the woman seemed, ðam wife þa word wel licodon,

Beowulf's battle-boast. Bright with gold 640 gilpcwide Geates; eode goldhroden the stately dame by her spouse sat down. freolicu folccwen to hire frean sittan.

This shows Wealhtheow, Hegelac‘s Queen, serving a cup of mead to the warriors in some unspecified of order (possibly just the order they happened to be sitting near her), and when it‘s Beowulf‘s turn it gives him the chance to make an oath or boast to everyone in the hall. There follows ―wassail and words of power‖ until it is time for bed.

It is interesting to note that the hero Beowulf‘s name means ‗bee-wolf.‘ That was a synonym, an Anglo-Saxon kenning for ‗bear.‘ (Kasselman, website)

I‘ll discuss the sumbel, a ritual involving rounds of toasting, in the Norse section.

In Ethiopia, the national alcoholic beverage is t‘ej (pronounced t‘edge), which is a mead flavored with the leaves and sometimes bark of the gesho, a species of buckthorn. Gesho imparts the pleasant bitterness distinctive to t‘ej. It is very reminiscent of hops. T‘ej is made by women, and the recipes are passed down within a family. I am told the recipes are jealously guarded.

Modern Ethiopia is the world‘s fifth largest beeswax exporter, according to Business

Organizations and Access to Markets (BOAM).

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Chapter 3: Bees and Beekeeping

Bees are known to be truly eugenic, or ‗truly social‘, because the same members can nurture young, defend the hive or look after the well-being of their community. Worker bees divide their labor by age, though there does seem to be individual predisposition to some tasks.

About three days after emergence, sterile female workers clean the hive, preparing comb for eggs or removing dead or dying bees from the hive. They then become part of the nursing contingent, caring for grubs. After another week or so a worker begins to secrete beeswax; two or three weeks after emergence the worker bee is ready to emerge and gather nectar and pollen in astonishing quantities and guard the hive from intruders. (Pollen is a bee‘s only protein nourishment. It can take up to three hundred clover flowers to make up a single bee-load of pollen; ten bee-loads are needed to raise a bee from egg to adulthood.)

Despite this busy list of tasks, bees spend up to 70% of their time hanging around their hive, resting. A queen bee, who is a specially fed and nurtured worker, ensures she is the only

Queen of her hive when she cuts her way out of her pupation chamber. She immediately seeks out and kills her royal sisters.

Male honey bees are drones, and there are only 200-300 of them in a hive, compared to perhaps 30,000 workers. They are larger than worker bees but much smaller than the queen.

They take longer to develop than a worker or a queen – twenty-four days, or about three days longer than a worker or about a week longer than a queen. They cannot feed themselves, and must be nursed by worker bees the same as any legless, helpless grub. About a week after their emergence, drones will begin making forays out of the hive, slowly increasing their range to up to two miles from the hive. They are seeking a virgin queen on her one and only mating flight.

In their first, early forays male drones may follow any other flying thing, a bird, or other insects.

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When a mating queen flies, a swarm of a hundred drone bees or more will follow. It is sometimes called a comet swarm after its characteristic shape. The queen will mate with half a dozen or more males on her one and only flight, which may take several forays before she returns to the hive. Mating kills the drones; they literally explode inside her. The queen can store their semen for up to seven years, and will spend the rest of her life producing up to a million eggs from her one mating flight. The drones‘ home colony will maintain them through the summer in case something happens to the queen and another flight is needed, but at the end of warm weather the drones are driven out of the hive to starve.

The queen bee secretes pheromones that suppress the sexual development of worker bees.

One theory about why bees swarm says that the hive gets too large for the queen‘s pheromones to suppress them effectively. Workers then begin to cultivate new queens, and the old queen and about half the workers will swarm to a new home. If the old queen proves inadequate or somehow defective (as with age), a new queen will supercede her.11

According to Charles-Edwards and Kelly, the earliest evidence of beekeeping in manmade structures dates from about 2400 BC, as a relief in the Sun Temple at Abu Ghorah,

Egypt.12 It shows honey being transferred from hives to large storage vessels. There are

Neolithic cave paintings of gathering honey in several countries, including the above-mentioned rock-painting in Spain dating to 6000 BC (though it is not clear they are domesticated hives).13

There are references to beekeeping in Hittite laws dating to about 1300 BC.14

Although tree stumps and clay pots have been used as beehives around the world, in

Western Europe, the most popular hive was a conical basket called a skep - derived from the

Anglo Saxon "Skeppa" which means basket. Bill Kasselman attributes this word as brought into

English by Viking invaders. Skeppa was a Viking word for basket or bushel. By 1100 CE, in

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early Middle English, ‗skep‘ meant a beehive made of woven wicker baskets (with a coating of cloome or daub), or long straw coiled and stitched with blackberry briar. This is very likely the structure that has given us our modern common visual representation of a beehive. The straw skep is said to have started with tribes west of the Elbe in Germany. The earliest existing remains may have come from possibly a twelfth century skep found in 1980 during an excavation at

Coppergate, York15, the Anglo-Norse town of Jorvik.

Unlike modern removable-frame hives, skeps were set up so that the comb hung vertically, making it very difficult to examine the brood or remove the honey without destroying the comb. To harvest it all, first the beekeeper would cut out the combs containing only honey, then would remove the comb containing brood and finally any remaining odds and ends of wax.

Comb was placed in a cloth bag and allowed to drain to extract the honey. More honey of lesser quality was removed by wringing out the bag. Finally, the crushed refuse of the combs, the raided skep, and the cloth bag could be steeped or gently heated in water to dissolve out the last of the honey. Once this liquid was strained, it was used as the basis for the production of mead.16

In researching Mediterranean trade before the fourth century ACE, I have not yet found any indication that honey was shipped for trade. Perhaps as early as the fourth century BCE, olive oil, olives, and wine were transported, especially from North Africa and the Middle East to

Europe and Britain, but we have no indication about honey17. That would suggest that, in at least most locations in Europe and the Mediterranean basin, only locally produced honey was available through at least the sixth century.

There appear to have been honey-producing bees nearly everywhere in the world.

Archaeologists are finding concrete examples in more and more parts of the world. Honey was thought unavailable in North America, but now we know it was common in Florida, the southern

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parts of the U.S., and Mexico18 due to the Mexican honey wasp (brachygastra mellifica) and the stingless bee (Melipoma beecheii). The honeybees we know in the U.S. today were imported by

European colonists.

In my experience thus far, it seems that different varieties of bees can produce different flavors of honey independent of the factors generated by the kind of flower they feed on. We don‘t have much research into honey‘s chemistry – the esteemed Dr. J.W. White Jr. spent much of his career at the US Department of Agriculture studying honey as one of America‘s agricultural products, but his work is the best source of chemical analysis I‘ve seen. His team produced Bulletin 1261 in 1980, the most comprehensive study of the chemical structure of honey I know of, but of course it focuses on modern American commercial enterprises and modern American honeybees. When I recently got a few quarts of killer bee honey, the difference was startling. I doubt it can be accounted for by the mesquite and yucca and other flowers they fed on. It may be significant to the historically-minded mead maker when native been species changed, died out, or dominated another species of bee. For example, bumblebees are ubiquitous, but produce very small amounts of honey, probably not enough to be worth harvesting. If there was another kind of bee present with the bumblebee, as there often is, it may have produced enough honey to be worth gathering. In Ireland, the historically native honeybee was probably the ―British Brown bee”, apis mellifera mellifera var. lehzeni, which largely died off from the Isle of Wight disease in 1909-1910. It was replaced in Britain and Ireland by imported Italian and other varieties of bee. Does this significantly change the flavor of their mead and other honey products? Can we ever know?

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Chapter 4: The Nature of Honey “One of the characteristics that sets honey apart from all other sweetening agents

is the presence of enzymes. These conceivably arise from the bee, pollen, nectar,

or even yeasts or micro-organisms in the honey. Those most prominent are added

by the bee during the conversion of nectar to honey. Enzymes are complex protein

materials that under mild conditions bring about chemical changes, which may be

very difficult to accomplish in a chemical laboratory without their aid. The

changes that enzymes bring about throughout nature are essential to life...An

ancient use for honey was in medicine as a dressing for wounds and

inflammations…Some years ago this idea was examined by adding a common

pathogenic bacteria to honey. All the bacteria died within a few hours or days…‖ 19

Honey is liquid in the comb and can be drained out, but it will granulate within a month once it‘s removed from the comb. Modern American consumers expect their honey to be clear and liquid. And so it is filtered, and treated with heat to dissolve ―seed‖ crystals, and kept carefully to prevent the development of these ―seeds‖ to keep it liquid for up to six months.

Since heat can damage the color and flavor, but can dissolve crystallization, it should be applied indirectly, by hot water or air, rather than direct flame or high temperature electrical heat.

USDA‘s Dr. White sheds a little light on what conditions must exist for honey to ferment:

―The yeasts responsible for fermentation occur naturally in honey, in that

they can germinate and grow at much higher sugar concentrations than other

yeasts…even so there are upper limits of sugar concentration beyond which these

yeasts will not grow….Honey with less than 17.1 percent water will not ferment

in a year, irrespective of the yeast count…Above 19 percent water, honey can be

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expected to ferment even with only one spore per gram of honey, a level so low as

to be very rare.‖ 20

According to the American Sugar Alliance, modern commercial honey is about 17% water, a pretty fair holding rate. Of course, to produce alcohol we mix honey with water; make it a little wetter so it will ferment.

Honey is not yet artificially reproducible.

Because bees are essentially monocultural by preference, meaning they will gather nectar from a particular stand or field of flowers until no more can be had, the observant beekeeper really can identify what source the honey comes from, and can manipulate modern drawered skeps to separate the honey produced out of one field from the honey produced out of another. It is reasonable to label honey according to what kind of nectar the bees were primarily storing;

‗wildflower‘ of course means the beekeeper isn‘t sure where his bees have been.

The Roman writer Apicius gives recipes for making bad honey into a saleable article by mixing it 1:2 with good honey. He recommends testing honey by immersing elencampane in it and then lighting it; he says if the honey is good the elencampane will burn brightly.21 Both honey and mead appear in herbal guides, primarily as ways of making concoctions palatable to swallow. Other than honey‘s time-honored role as a throat soother, relatively few claims seem to be made for honey as an herbal cure.

Chapter 5: Bees and Honey in Christianity It is often difficult to date the anecdotes concerning honey-related customs from around the world, as references are rarely very specific. In the case of Christian lore, events are usually associated with particular saints, so we at least have a ballpark time when to date the claim that a certain event took place. I have included here lore with such dating information as I have been

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able to glean, and have avoided information that is obviously modern. I believe there is much more bee and honey lore in the Christian Church than I‘ve included here, but I‘ve tried to capture the most prominent sources of bee and honey symbolism in Christianity.

Patron Saints According to the Patron Saint Index published by the Catholic Church, there are three

Catholic patron saints of bees and bee-related things (http://www.catholic- forum.com/saints/saintm9k.htm). St. Ambrose of Milan, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Modomnoc

(Dominick) are all listed as patron saints of beekeepers, bees, candlemakers, chandlers, wax melters, and wax refiners.

- Ambrose, also known as the Honey Tongued Doctor. Born in southern Gaul in

340AD, Ambrose died in Milan in 397AD, and is the patron saint of bee keepers. He is sometimes represented by a beehive or bees.

- Bernard (1090AD-1153AD) was also known as the Mellifluous Doctor of the Church.

He is sometimes depicted as a Cistercian with a beehive or swarm of bees nearby.

- Modomnock, Domnock, or Dominick,who died around 550AD, is also a patron saint of bees. He was a member of the Irish O'Neill clan, and a beekeeper while a novice. When he returned to Ireland, it is said a swarm of his bees followed his ship.

According to Stair & Stair, the Patron Saint of Bees is St. Gosnata, who lived in

Ballyvourney, Country Cork, Ireland. They report that St. Gosnata was the first to use bees in wartime by placing skeps on the walls and inside castle walls so as to deter invaders (we have earlier historical anecdotes; see Bees in War,below). I could only find the one source that referenced this story, and was unable to find St. Gosnata in the Catholic Forum

(http://saints.sqpn.com/saintg.htm). More‘s the pity, I was unable to date St. Gosnata.

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Some saints (particularly the Irish ones) seem partial to a drop of mead. ―St. Findian, who lived on bread and water all week, used to eat salmon and drink mead on Sundays (a precedent if anyone asks what is the best wine to serve with salmon). That great Irish saint, St

Brigitte, went one step further and merits consideration as the patron saint of amateur winemakers. Once when the Bishop of Leinster visited her they ran out of drink, and St Brigitte took a great vat of water and turned it into mead, thereby emulating Christ‘s miracle at Cana.‖.22

This is consistent with the legends I know of St. Brigid/Brigit/Bridh/Brigitte (421 or 422 to 525

ACE), of whom I have heard tales of abundance – stopping to milk a poor farmer‘s cow, causing the milk to flow in such quantity that the nearby stream flows with milk instead of water. It is possible that Brigid is a transmogrification of Brigantia, early Irish goddess of fertility and abundance23.

I wasn‘t sure whether mead would register on the Catholic Church‘s radar, but both mead and beer do indeed appear. In some cases it appears to be a matter of our best historical record

(St. Edward the Martyr, below). In some cases mead is specifically referenced in texts that we still have, or have copies of. The ascetic movement in the Church definitely refers to mead as something pleasurable, a sign of the life of senses.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, there are oratorical references to bees as early as the fourth century ACE or even earlier; the example of an industrious and prudent creature are not a modern invention. In St. Gregory‘s oration on the death of St. Basil in 379 ACE, ―When sufficiently trained at home, as he ought to fall short in no form of excellence, and not be surpassed by the busy bee, which gathers what is most useful from every flower‖24. St.

Augustine‘s On the Morals of the Manicheans25 seems to indicate that mead was a special pleasure. Of course, the great ascetic was not in favor of sensual pleasures:

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― 29. Suppose, what is quite possible, that there is one so frugal and

sparing in his diet, that, instead of gratifying his appetite or his palate, he refrains

from eating twice in one day, and at supper takes a little cabbage moistened and

seasoned with lard, just enough to keep down hunger; and quenches his thirst,

from regard to his health, with two or three draughts of pure wine; and this is his

regular diet: whereas another of different habits never takes flesh or wine, but

makes an agreeable repast at two o'clock on rare and foreign vegetables, varied

with a number of courses, and well sprinkled with pepper, and sups in the same

style towards night; and drinks honey-vinegar, mead, raisin-wine, and the juices

of various fruits, no bad imitation of wine, and even surpassing it in sweetness;

and drinks not for thirst but for pleasure; and makes this provision for himself

daily, and feasts in this sumptuous style, not because he requires it, but only

gratifying his taste;— which of these two do you regard as living most

abstemiously in food and drink?‖

St. Edward the Martyr (approx. 962-979 ACE), then King of England, was

stabbed in the bowels while drinking a cup of mead at the gate of Corfe Castle

where his mother Queen Elfrida lived. Elfrida is held accountable, since she was

in favor of his half-brother Ethelred ascending the throne in Edward‘s stead.26

St. Enda founded an ascetic monastic community on the isle of Aran Mor,

―They could grow no fruit in these storm-swept islands; they drank neither wine

nor mead, and they had no flesh meat, except perhaps a little for the sick.‖

Mead even features on the Catholic Encyclopedia‘s pages on the rite of baptism:

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―On the other hand, it is never allowable to baptize with an

invalid liquid. There is a response of Pope Gregory IX to the

Archbishop of Trondhjem in Norway where beer (or mead) had

been employed for baptism. The pontiff says: ‗Since according to

the Gospel teaching, a man must be born again of water and the

Holy Ghost, those are not to be considered validly baptized who

have been baptized with beer (cervisia)‘. It is true that a statement

declaring wine to be valid matter of baptism is attributed to Pope

Stephen II, but the document is void of all authority.‖27

The British Beekeeper‘s Association tells of more patron saints, though I wasn‘t able to cross-reference much of it with the Catholic Church; of course they may not be referring to

Catholic saints.

―St. Gregory is responsible for opening the flowers on 12th March - a few

weeks later on the 21st of March, St. Benedict summons the bees to search for

nectar. St. Ambrose, 4th Bishop of Milan, is the patron saint of beekeepers. In the

Ukraine, the patron saint of beekeepers is St. Sossima, who brought bees from

Egypt… According to legend, St. Bartholomew was martyred by being flayed

alive and because of this fate he became the patron saint of tanners. In many parts

of Britain, the apostle was also patron saint of beekeepers, probably because his

feast day, 24th August, coincided with the gathering of the honey crop. Indeed,

until the 1950s, the village of Gulval in Cornwall celebrated St. Bartholomew‘s

Day with a ceremony for Blessing the Mead, while the annual St. Bartholomew‘s

Fair in London was famous for its honey-coated apples. St. Dominic started

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beekeeping in Wales and, when he returned to Ireland, gave his hives to St. David

- the bees followed him to Ireland! Another Irish saint St. Gobnat changed a

colony of bees into an army to drive away a local marauding chieftain.‖ 28

I haven‘t taken a survey of honey references from the Bible, but I expect there are many.

A representative example is from Judges 14:8-20, in which Samson gathers honey from the carcass of a lion, of which he eats some and takes some to his parents. He used the experience as part of a riddle. He made a bet with his companions to solve it by the end of a seven-day feast: ―Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.‖

Lots of Bee Lore The British Beekeepers Association, founded 1874, has some charming if undated

Christian lore on their webpage29:

―Christian tradition contains numerous legends involving bees. According

to legend, the bee was blessed on leaving the Garden of Eden with the title „the

handmaid of the Lord‟. In another story, Christ made bees and the Devil, trying to

compete, made wasps. In a French legend, the drops of water falling from the

hands of Christ, washing in the River Jordan, became bees - Christ ordered them

to stay and work for mankind. A Breton legend tells of the tears of the crucified

Christ turning into bees and flying away to bring sweetness into the world. A

Polish story tells how Jesus took the maggots from a wound in St. Paul‘s head,

put them in a tree and they became bees…‖

In another anecdote that I have seen reported in several sources, in the UK bees were believed to be the souls of the dead returning to earth or on their way to the next world. This

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probably led to the frequently reported of “telling the bees” when the owner died. ―If the bees were not asked to stay with their new master or mistress, it was believed that they would die or abscond.‖

―Childhood, people say, is the time when nobody dies. Something went

from mine the day I saw Uncle Sam at the hives and heard him say, ‗Bees, your

master‘s dead. I am your master now‘. With that he knocked on each hive, and

from within came a stir and commotion. ‗They know‘, said my uncle, and we

went indoors to send for the relations and find some strips of mourning for the

hives.‖30

Biblical Christianity does not explicitly forbid alcohol. I have to wonder whether the writer of the following passage was a connoisseur, referring to the ―legs‖ on the sides of a glass of alcohol ―when it moveth itself aright.‖

‖The Bible…does not explicitly condemn the vine or wine, although the

author of the Book of Proverbs (23, xxxi-xxxv) warns against the effects of

drinking. ‗Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour

in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it biteth like a serpent, and

stingeth like an adder…They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick;

they have beaten me, and I felt it not.‘ However, the writer concludes: ‗When

shall I awake? I will seek it yet again.‘ What the Bible unequivocally does

deplore is the conduct of Ham in seeing his father‘s [Noah‘s drunken] nakedness

and telling the tale to his brothers; Noah himself is not condemned for drinking.‖

31

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Chapter 6: Bees in War There is no question that bees have been used, both purposely and inadvertently, to fight off marauders, protect valuables, and identify badly-stung criminals. Virgil is said to have used beehives as a safe to hide valuables from tax collectors. Honey has been poisoned and left for hungry invaders to find (see Rome, below). As mentioned above, St. Gosnata is credited with being the first saint to use bees in wartime. The stories of using bee aggression to purpose are apparently endless. Here‘s one sampling:

―Jumping to the eleventh century, Emperor Henry I's troops, commanded by

General Immo, defended their fortifications by launching a barrage of beehives at

the siege forces of Duke Geiselbert of Lorraine and sent them scurrying. King

Richard is recorded as having used hives of bees as catapult-launched bombs

against the Saracens during the Third Crusade in the twelfth century. In 1289 in

Gussing, Hungary, an Austrian invasion lead by Duke Albert was repulsed with a

fusillade of hot water, fire and bees thrown from the battlements of the city. In

1513 under the reign of Emmanuel the Fortunate, King of Portugal, a General

Baruiga was turned from Tauris in Xantiane by the Moors-- who threw hives

down on his troops from the citadel's walls.‖ 32

Chapter 7: Geographical References My goal in this section was to identify the earliest examples of meads by location in chronological order, for those of you trying to document your persona‘s local drinks. Sometimes we get hints about kinds of bees were present and what they fed on. Where I have found such hints I have included them. I‘m afraid large sections below are all quotations with citations; I‘m reporting data here.

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Africa I talk about Ethiopian t‘ej earlier in this paper. T‘ej is made from recipes handed down among the women in a family, which are jealously guarded.

In her book Mad About Mead, Pam Spence has charming, if undocumented, anecdotes such as this:

―Among the Thonga in South Africa, the woman could not eat honey for

a year following her marriage, or until the birth of her first child. If she tasted

honey prior to that time, she would, in all probability, make like the foraging

(female) bees and take flight… (p. 19) The Masai…chose one man and one

woman to make the mead. For two days prior and for the six-day duration of

active brewing, the brewers were required to refrain from sexual activity.

Breaking this vow was believed to result in the bees…flying away and the mead

spoiling.‖ 33

Junior Worldmark Encyclopedia of World Cultures reports that modern-day Masai drink mead and dance after adulthood ceremonies, and that they use large horns as drinking vessels.

(http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3435900488.html, accessed July 1, 2008)

Amazon Basin ―To turn to the legendary origin of bees themselves, in the Popul Vuh, the sacred tradition of the Maya Indians, the bee was born of the Universal Hive at the centre of the earth.

Golden to the sight, burning to the touch, like sparks of volcanoes, it was sent here to awaken man from apathy and ignorance; this is the general sense behind those rural Amazonian folk- tales which deal with honey and mead.‖ 34

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Andaman Islands

Once again, Pam Spence presents cultural anecdotes. ―Among the Andaman Islanders, for instance, ritualized eating and anointing was the solemn concluding ceremony in male puberty rites. The boys were fed sections of honeycomb by the chief while the elders rub bed them down with honey. The boys were then given individual honeycombs, which they had to eat without the use of their hands. Once this had been done, the chief anointed the boy‘s heads with honey and massaged it into their bodies. Elders took the boys away and bathed them (note the similarity here to the Coptic baptismal rites). As in other cultures, when the boys emerged, they were recognized as adults.‖35

Celts The great Celtic Hochdorf tomb dates from about 550 BCE. It is located at Eberdingen-

Hochdorf in Baden-Wurttemberg. "A the foot of the recliner was a large bronze kettle, probably made in a Greek colony in southern Italy, which was decorated with three lions. In the kettle was residue from mead, which played a large role in Celtic ritual.‖36 To the best of my knowledge, we have no data on Celtic ritual; traditions were oral and largely absorbed or eliminated by other cultural waves washing through Europe and Britain. "In one corner stood an enormous bronze cauldron with decorative cast bronze lions around the rim. Badly worn, and repaired several times, the cauldron had clearly enjoyed hearty use over a number of years. And inside, to accompany our chieftain to the Otherworld, it contained over 600 pints (350 litres) of mead. By the time the grave at Hochdorf near Stuttgart was excavated by Jörg Biel in 1978-79, the mead had become a dark, shrunken, cake-like deposit in the bottom of the cauldron."37

When the Romans invaded Britain, the dome shaped hive [skep] was of entwined willow or hazel twigs plastered inside and out with cow dung. According to one online lecture, these

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types survived in parts of Britain until the 18th century alongside straw skeps

(http://ocw.kyushu-u.ac.jp/0010/0003/lecture/1.pdf).

The [modern?] Scots have a saying that mead drinkers have as much strength as meat eaters.38 Admirers of kilt wearing, caber tossing and mead quaffing will appreciate the attitude.

China

The earliest evidence of brewing had been believed to exist in Iran, dating to about

5400BC, until Patrick McGovern headed a team looking at fermented beverages in pre-historic

China. The oldest known Chinese texts are from the Shang dynasty period (1200 BC to 1046

BC), and they mention three types of alcoholic drinks. Archaeologists thought that even older bronze vessels and pottery resembled those used for the Shang dynasty drinks, and might indicate that fermented drinks were developed even earlier.

Chemical tests on fragments of broken pottery showed that Chinese villagers were brewing as far back as 7000 BC, a new record. A Chinese-American team studied potsherds from the oldest portion of Jiahu, a neolithic village in Henan province. The potsherds had been radiocarbon-dated at 7000 to 6600 BC. They were from a time that featured the use of flint tools and weapons and primitive agriculture. The team found that burial sites had vessels with fermented beverages made from honey, grapes, and hawthorne fruit, and that out of 16 potsherds tested, 13 had contained the same material: "a consistently processed beverage made from rice, honey, and fruit."39

England Honey and mead are frequently referenced in medieval English writing. Can you answer this riddle?

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I am man's treasure, taken from the

woods,

Cliff-sides, hill-slopes, valleys, downs;

Ic eom weorð werum, wide funden, By day wings bear me in the buzzing

brungen of bearwum ond of burghleoþum, air,

of denum ond of dunum. Dæges mec wægun Slip me under a sheltering roof-sweet

feþre on lifte, feredon mid liste craft.

under hrofes hleo. Hæleð mec siþþan Soon a man bears me to a tub. Bathed,

baþedan in bydene. Nu ic eom bindere I am binder and scourge of men, bring

ond swingere, sona weorpe down

esne to eorþan, hwilum ealdne ceorl. The young, ravage the old, sap

Sona þæt onfindeð, se þe mec fehð ongean, strength.

ond wið mægenþisan minre genæsteð, Soon he discovers who wrestles with

þæt he hrycge sceal hrusan secan, me

gif he unrædes ær ne geswiceð, My fierce body-rush-I roll fools

strengo bistolen, strong on spræce, Flush on the ground. Robbed of

mægene binumen - nah his modes geweald, strength,

fota ne folma. Frige hwæt ic hatte, Reckless of speech, a man knows no

ðe on eorþan swa esnas binde, power

dole æfter dyntum be dæges leohte. Over hands, feet, mind. Who am I who

bind

Men on middle-earth, blinding with

rage?

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Fools know my dark power by

daylight.

This comes from the Exeter Book or Codex Exoniensis, a tenth century book of Anglo-Saxon poetry. This was Riddle 25. Cindy Renfrow says the following is also from the Exeter Book, but I have not been able to identify it in the text using Williamson or Krapp-Dobbie indeces.

Wherever it comes from, the answer is, of course, Mead.

―On every hand I‘m found and prized by men,

Borne from the fertile glads and castled heights

And vales and hills. Daily the wings of bees

Carried me through the air, and with deft motion

Stored me beneath the low-crowned, sheltering roof.

Then in a cask men cherished me. But now

The old churl I tangle, and trip, at last o‘erthrow

Flat on the ground. He that encounters me

And sets his will ‗gainst my subduing might

Forthwith shall visit the earth upon his back!

If from his course so ill-advised he fails

To abstain, deprived of strength, yet strong on speech,

He‘s reft of all his power o‘er hand or foot,

His mind dethroned. Now find out what I‘m called,

Who bind again the freeman to the soil

Stupid from many a fall, in broad daylight!‖

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Acton and Douglas write that Anglo-Saxon mead makers were complimented if a young woman, fed their mead during the month after her marriage (her honeymoon), gave birth to a son within a year. There are many stories about the origin of ‗honeymoon‘, most having to do with having enough mead for a month and the possible birth of children thereafter.

For all you late-period fans, John Russell‘s fifteenth century book Boke of Nurture,

‗Feast for a Franklin‘ refers to ―A drink of mead or sweet spiced wine came after the meal along with candied nuts and other ‗confits‘ and ‗wafers‘, which resembled small, thin waffles.‖39 It is interesting to note the comparison of mead to it alternative, sweet spiced wine. The mead in this case was probably quite sweet.

Egypt According to one lecturer, the earliest beekeeping in Ancient Egypt dates to about 2500

BC in the Fifth Dynasty. They used cylindrical clay hives, and beekeeping was practiced at many levels of society. (http://ocw.kyushu-u.ac.jp/0010/0003/lecture/1.pdf)

Bee-keeping is depicted in Egyptian temple reliefs as early as the 5th Dynasty (2445-

2441 BC). These show that apiculture was well established in Egypt by the middle of the Old

Kingdom. Records from at least one tomb workers' village during the New Kingdom (1550-1069

BC) indicate that the workmen there kept bees. Bee-keeping is also depicted in some 18th and

26th Dynasty tombs. Bees were certainly of great importance in providing honey, which was used both as the principal sweetener in the Egyptian diet, as a base for medicinal ointments, and in ritual. The Egyptians also collected beeswax for use as a mould-former in metal castings and also for use as a paint-varnish.

The ancient Egyptians believed that each human had ka or a double, akin to a soul, which had to be fed after death. Many related rituals seem to have included honey. For example, a

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ritual called the ―Opening of the Mouth‖ in which honey was offered, sometimes to a statue of a god or of the king or great noble; special prayers could convert it to divine essence, and the earthly honey could then be consumed by priests and grieving relatives. The Book of Am-Tuat

(the Underworld) compares the voices of souls to the hum of bees.

The four sons of Horus are shown as insects, three in the form of bees and the fourth as a praying mantis. Their heads were often carved on the canopic jars that hold the heart, liver, and intestines of the deceased.40

According to Egyptian myth, honey bees (Apis mellifera) were the tears of the sun god

Ra. Their religious significance extended to an association with the goddess Neith, whose temple in the delta town of Sais in Lower Egypt was known as per-bit - meaning 'the house of the bee'.

Honey was regarded as a symbol of resurrection and also thought to give protection against evil spirits. Small pottery flasks, which according to the hieratic inscriptions on the side originally contained honey, were found in the tomb of the boy-king, Tutankhamen.

Throughout ancient Egyptian history the bee has been strongly associated with royal titles. In Predynastic and early Dynastic times, before the union of Upper and Lower Egypt, the rulers of Lower Egypt used the title bit - meaning 'he of the bee', usually translated as 'King of

Lower Egypt' or 'King of North', whereas the rulers of Upper Egypt were called nesw - meaning

'he of the sedge', translated as 'King of Upper Egypt' or 'King of the South'. In later times, after the union of Upper and Lower Egypt, the pharaoh rulers used the title nesw-bit - meaning 'he of the sedge and the bee', which is conventionally translated as 'King of Upper and Lower Egypt' or

'King of the South and North'.41

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Finland The Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, may be more than three thousand years old. It was first compiled and published in 1835 by a country doctor named Elias Lőnnrot, who walked the country on foot to collect all the stories he could from hundreds of runesingers. Here are some mead-related texts in the Kalevala, translated by John Martin Crawford in 1888, giving us tantalizing glimpses of ancient Finnish mead.

Runo 27 Line 83

There the wayward Lemminkainen,

Curled his lip and skewed his head

As he twisted his black whiskers,

And he spoke out in his anger:

"Here the food has all been eaten,

Bride-ale drink, the doings over. so

All the ale has been apportioned,

Mead measured out among the men.

All the mugs have been collected,

Put away into their places.

Runo 27 Line 180

He drank the ale down for good luck

And the black mead for his pleasure.

Then he said to host and hostess:

"Maybe I'm no favored guest here

Since no ale is offered me,

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Not a better draught to drink

Nor by hand more generous served

Nor tendered in a bigger vessel;

Not a ram or big bull slaughtered,

Not an ox brought to the house,

Nor any splithoof to this cabin."

Now, he drinks the ale and then complains no ale was offered – but he drinks the mead for his pleasure. Does the ―black mead‖ here refer to a caramelized version of mead, perhaps made with

the addition of molasses or some inexpensive sweetener? It reminds me of a Roman recipe for mead that has you cook the honey until bubbles form that give off puffs of black smoke (heavily

caramelizing the honey before you ferment it). Here‘s a reference that shows a Finnish

awareness that honey had healing properties.

Runo 15 Line 107

Thence she put it into words, herself spoke, thus named:

"Whence now can balm be gotten, a drop of mead be brought,

With which to anoint the weakened, to heal the one come to ill,

For to bring the man to words, to break him into his songs?

"Bumblebee, our bird, king of the forest flowers!

Leave now, honey to fetch, some mead to gain,

From the pleasant Forest House, from well-ordered Tapiola,

From the bulbs of many flowers, from the hem of many a grass,

As a salve for sick ones, to make the ill things well!"

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Runo 25 Line 355

Beer of barley ceaseless flowing,

Honey-drink that was not purchased,

In the cellar flows profusely,

Beer for all, the tongues to quicken,

Mead and beer the minds to freshen.

Who is there to lead the singing,

Lead the songs of Kalevala?42

Apparently honey drinks could be purchased, but home-made was considered better or at least more hospitably given.

France Charlemagne (747-814 ACE) required all farmers to keep bees, and taxed them two thirds of their honey and one third of their beeswax. Abeillage, or bee duties, remained a duly regulated feudal right. Villagers who took a wild swarm nesting in a forest (owned by the lord of the manor) were regarded as poachers and punished under game laws. In France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were beekeeping gamekeepers called anvileors or bigres, who alone could move a swarm to the edge of the woods in hives known as bigreries or hostels aux mouches (‗houses of the insects‘).43

Germany Much of what is available about German mead pertains to the Iron Age. Because early

Germanic tribes and Norse cultures overlap a great deal, I have discussed it under Norse, below.

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Greece Water sweetened with honey is melikraton in ancient Greek. Honeyed wine was oenomelitas; mulsum seems to have included the pressings of grapes. According to Toussaint-

Samat, beer and mead were drunk as frequently as wine at Greek banquets (p. 264).

Acton and Duncan state that mead was the drink of Dionysian revels, and not drunk any other time of year in any quantity.44

On Camiros in Rhodes, the goddess Artemis was depicted on seven golden plates as having the body of a bee. Artemis Ephesia, from the cult on Ephesis, often had bees depicted on her statues.45

When the god Zeus was born, legend tells us he was hidden in a cave on Mount Dicte, on

Crete, to keep him from his father who liked to swallow his children whole. Ransome reports the cave was full of sacred bees. Growing up in hiding, Zeus was said to have been fed either by bees, or fed by nymphs (the Melissae, or bee-maidens) who gave him honey.46

―Dionysus and Pan were similarly honey-fed infants, protected by the

sacred melissae or bee priestesses. Later, human priestesses serving in the

temples to Cybele, Artemis, and Demeter were commonly known as melissae, the

Greek word for bee…‖47

―A cousin of Dionysus was called Melicertes, ‗he who mingles honey‘, by

analogy with melidraton, water mingled with honey, the first stage in

fermentation of that other intoxicating drink, mead.‖48

Melicertes is drowned when his mother went mad and jumped into the sea with him, but he is resuscitated, riding a dolphin, as the sea god Palaemon, and was associated with Dionysus, the satyrs and Sileni, as his mother was Dionysus‘ nurse. Toussaint-Samat hypothesizes (p. 22) that foaming waves suggest the foaming of mead fermenting in a vat or poured into cups, and

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that possibly sailors took amphorae of mead with them to keep their courage up at sea.

From amphora sherds found both on ship wrecks and on land, we can tell that some amphorae contained wine, because the insides of the amphorae are pitched, preserving and flavoring the wine, and some contain grape-pips. We believe that olive oil and wine were shipped in amphorae, but I have found no reference to trans-regional trade in mead or honey. On the other hand, we know surprisingly little about trade at all up through the sixth or seventh century.

―The myth of Aristaeus also shows the tenacity of a sexual taboo which

features in the beekeeping manuals of antiquity. The shepherd‘s first bees were

taken from him because he had desired a woman, and someone else‘s woman at

that; you had to abstain from carnal intercourse before trying to recover a swarm

of bees (reputed to be virgins) or to collect honey (a pure substance).‖ 49

Buhner writes, ―In the Orphic myth it is noted that Kronos was made drunk by Zeus with honey, ‗for wine was not.‘ (One of Zeus‘ names is melissaios, meaning ‗one belonging to the bees.‘)‖

Reports dating back to antiquity tell stories of using bees in wartime. Xenophon (born

430 BC) reported that the Greek soldiers who were looting villages in Turkey near Trapezus found and ate some honey from local hives. This resulted in vomiting and purging as well as a loss of the senses as they had been poisoned by the honey deliberately left out for them. (Stair &

Stair).

Plato (4th century BC) writes that ―Plenty [was] drunk with nectar [i.e., mead], for wine was not yet invented.‖50 We know the Greeks had wine at least as early as 1500 BC – but historical scholarship was a different concept altogether in Plato‘s time.

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Hippocleides was a wealthy and good-looking nobleman in mid-sixth-century-BC

Athens. Herodotus tells the story ―…Hippocleides…was severely censured by his father on his wedding night, when, having drunk too much mead, he insisted on standing on his head, stark naked, on the dining table and waving his legs in the air in tune to the flute music while he sang a merry song. For this bit of naughtiness, his father refused to let him take his bride.‖ 51

Virgil (70-19 BC), in Book IV of the Georgics, writes ―Next I come to the manna, the heavenly gift of honey…A featherweight theme, but one that can load me with fame…‖ 52

India One of the Sanskrit hymns known collectively as the Rig-Veda (1700-1100 BC) says: ‗In the wide-striding Vishnu‘s highest footsteps there is a Spring of Mead.‘ This spring, it was believed, made people very fertile, and young girls, betrothed to some intended husband, were well plied with mead so they would honour their families by giving birth to a son within a year of marriage.53

Vishnu and Indra are called Madhava, the honey-born ones, and their symbol is the bee.‖54

The Hindu Arthana Veda (twelfth to tenth centuries BC, verses 91-258) is quoted saying,

―O Asvins, lords of brightness, anoint me with the honey of the bee, that I may speak forceful speech among men!‖ 55

Ireland According to Charles-Edwards and Kelly, written Irish law dates at least to the tenth century but perhaps back at least as far as c. 637-700 ACE. It delineates beekeeping laws in great detail, in almost conversational Old Irish prose. Looking at the text linguistically we find there are only four Latin loanwords in the entire manuscript. The words used to describe bees

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and beekeeping probably pre-date the arrival of Christianity circa the 5th or 6th century. Old Irish has native words for ‗bee‘, ‗honey‘, and ‗mead‘. ‗Mid‘ or ‗miodh‘, the word for mead, is a cognate with the Welsh ‗medd‘, Cornish ‗meth‘, Breton ‗mez‘, Sanskrit ‗madhu-‗, and Greek

‗methu‘.

It is possible that honeybees were introduced to Ireland by Celtic-speaking colonists or made their own way there when there was still a land connection with the Continent. There are laws in the text that refer to swarms of bees, so we know the laws refer specifically to honeybees

(other varieties, such as bumblebees, don‘t swarm).56

The copy of the Bechbretha I have is heavily annotated, so it‘s hard to tell how long the original manuscript is. My hardbound copy, before glossary and index, is 205 pages.

These early law-tracts describe theft of bees, how to identify ownership of bees, rights of trespass for bees that feed on someone else‘s fields, injuries to humans caused by someone else‘s hives, and identifies following a swarm as work allowed on a Sunday. An honor-price is the fine paid if you damage someone else‘s property; bees have an honor-price equal to that of a large animal if they are in a faithche or ‗green‘, and half that if they are not. A man who finds a stray swarm of bees must ‗proclaim‘ them, and if he doesn‘t he must pay the fine for theft or return with restitution.

When bees swarm, they leave their hive and settle down in the branches of a nearby tree, bush, fence, or even low-growing vegetation, while scouts find them a new home. If a beekeeper‘s hive swarms and he can track it, he is allowed to try to capture the swarm while it is resting in the branches of a tree without damaging the tree. If the tree they rest on is on a neighbor‘s property, the neighbor gets a third of the honey produced by that swarm for a year. If the beekeeper cannot capture them without cutting the tree – usually this means the swarm has

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found a tree cavity to nest in – the bees are to be left there, and the bee-keeper gets a third of the honey for three years, after which the bees and all their produce belong to the landowner.

Clearly, to have such a body of specialized, recorded law on honeybees indicates that they held some economic importance in early Irish economy. Bee plagues in 950AD and 992AD were considered important enough to be recorded in the Annals of Ulster.

According to Fergus Kelly, the Corpus iuris hibernici, the 1978 manuscript study edited by the esteemed D.A. Binchy (and more than 2300 pages long!), has a reference to giving a cup filled with a certain measure of ‗mellit‘ in return for being granted a colony of bees. Kelly says mellit may be some honey-based drink distinct from mead or braggot, perhaps a hydromel, an unfermented mixture of honey and water.

Kelly goes on to say that, in the twelfth-century Aislinge Meic Con Glinne, mead is described as ‗the relish of noble stock‘. The Hill of Tara is said to have been the seat of the kings of Ireland until about the sixth century; Tara‘s banqueting hall was the Tech Midchuarda, or house of the mead-circuit. The twelfth century Irish law text Bretha Crolige, warns against using honey where there is infection of the stomach.

―…Wine in well rose sparklingly

Beer was rolling darkingly

Bragget [honeyed ale] brimmed the pond.

Lard was oozing heavily,

Merry malt moved wavily,

Through the floor beyond…‖ 57

Apparently by the twelfth century the Irish definitely knew about braggot, wine, and malt.

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Kelly writes that bee law continues into the Early Modern Irish legal commentary, c.

12th-13th centuries. There is reference to who has rights to the wax in addition to small mentions of mead-brewing by farmers.

Mali ―The Bambaras of Mali regard mead…the drink of wisdom, knowledge, and truth…while the Koran condemns the consumption of fermented drinks, mead is quite kindly regarded by the very pious Muslims of Mali, though their version of Islam is very tinged with animism…‖58

Medieval Europe [Discussing how a medieval European feast was served] ―Sweetened spice wine or mead…may be served after the meal, in much the same way that we offer port or liqueurs today.‖59 I have had it pointed out that sweetened spiced wine and mead are not necessarily the same thing. I read this passage as offering two alternatives, not as indicating them as synonymous.

Norse Germanic and Norse traditions are often discussed together, and overlap a great deal.

―Scandinavian culture of the Viking Age grew out of the heritage of the Germanic Iron Age and before…‖60 Ewing here is referring to Germanic tribes that stretched across much of northern

Europe in the Iron Age, and were distinct from (and often warring with) Celts.

A common image of Vikings includes the mead-hall or feasting hall, where brawny warriors toast each other with overflowing drinking horns. The Norse did have a custom called a sumbel, involving rounds of toasting. Toasts could be used for confirming allegiances, making pledges, establishing precedence, or even, in this excerpt from the Old Norse poem Lokásenná verse 3, conjuring evil.

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Loki kvað: Inn skal ganga Ægis Loki said:

hallir í, In shall I go, into Ægir's hall,

á þat sumbl at sjá; for that sumbel I will see;

jöll ok áfu færi ek ása sonum, evil in the drink I bring to the gods,

ok blend ek þeim svá meini mjöð. with harm shall I mix their mead.

In the Song of the Niebelungs, arguably more Germanic than Norse, there are several instances of poison or enchantment being delivered in the mead served to warriors in the feast hall. Norse sagas often refer to the sumbel:

―The sumbel was a joint activity. Those participating came and sat

together, usually within a chieftain's hall. It was often referred to as a drinking

feast, where ale, beer or mead might be served in a ceremonial cup, and passed

from hand to hand around the hall. The recipient of the cup made a toast, oath, or

boast, or he might sing a song or recite a story before drinking and passing the

cup along. While referred to as a ‗feast,‘ the sumbel did not include food, but

might precede or follow a meal. A sumbel was solemn in the sense of having deep

significance and importance to the participants, but was not a grim or dour

ceremony - indeed, at Hrothgar's sumbel in Beowulf, ‗...there was laughter of the

men, noise sounded, the words were winsome.‘

However…it was considered poor form to become drunk at the sumbel.‖ 61

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The depiction of a sumbel quoted above is in lines 620-641 of Beowulf. At weddings, the toasts offered might be slightly different. In Bósa saga ok Herrauðs, ch. 12, a different order of toasts is intertwined with the narrative:

―... the memorial cup consecrated to Thórr was carried into the hall.... Next came

the toast dedicated to all the gods.... after that it was time for Óðinn's toast to be

drunk.... When Óðinn's toast had been drunk, there was only one left, the toast

dedicated to Freyja.‖62

Norse gods have many stories where one god would give some goddess a few draughts of mead to reduce her resistance, so he could enjoy her physical delights:

―Suttung‘s daughter Gunnlod was particularly prone to this form of

seduction, and indeed appeared to thrive on it, for on one occasion, when Odin

stole the mead from Suttung (not knowing how to make it himself) Gunnlod was

oversome with grief since Odin had someone else in mind at that particular time.

Later, however, she turned the tables on Odin by giving him a few draughts of

mead so he became like clay in her hands. He remarked, as he slowly went under

from the aphrodisiac qualities of mead, that it gave him the gift of poetry and of

composition…‖ 63

Finds of elaborate drinking equipment in female graves are in evidence in all pagan

Germanic societies, including that of the Vikings: "In Viking Age cemeteries, the combination of the bucket-container for distribution together with long-handled sieve and drinking horn or cup remains very common..." 64

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Old Norse representational art often shows the woman-as-cupbearer. There are a wide variety of so-called "valkyrie amulets" and runestone depictions where a richly-clad woman is shown ceremoniously bearing a drinking horn high.

From the Edda:

[Kvaser the All-Knowing was a man made as a mark of peace between

gods.] ―For long did Kvaser walk the heavens, the symbol of the peace of gods.

But there came a time when, straying far, he was taken and bound by the dwarves

who loved him not. By them he was slain, and taking three jars, they ran his

blood into them, mixing it with honey. Thus was made mead, and such was its

power that any who drank of it became skald and sage. And the dwarves kept it

jealously, sharing it only among themselves. But news of the mead came to the

giant, Suttung, and in him, great desire was born to have the mead for his won.

After long planning and coming in stealth. He stole the three vessels of dwarven

mead and hid them in the place called Hnitbojorg. And calling on his daughter,

Gundlad, he spoke to her, telling her to guard it well and let no one come near.

But the leader of the young gods, Odin, hearing what had occurred, set out to find

the mead…(Odin seduces Gundlad for three days and nights)…she offered him,

to slake his thirst, three draughts from the vessels that Suttung had bade her

watch. Taking her leave to drink once from each, Odin put his lips to the mead in

the first, then the second, and then the third….Odin, desiring to take the mead to

Asgard, had consumed it all.…and the gods, seeing Odin come, made haste to

gather vessels and place them outside [Asgard]. And coming close, Odin spewed

the mead out of him and into the jars. But so hasty was he…that three drops fell

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to earthy. And men, wandering up on the Earth, came upon them. Wondering to

themselves what this might be, they put their hands to it, and lifting it to their lips,

tasted of the mead made from Kvaser‘s blood and the honey of the bee….from it

doth all poetry and song come…songship is called…Odin‘s drink, the drink of the

Aesir, and poets are known as the bearers of the mead of Odin.‖ 65

―Perhaps we may even see the influence of popular tradition in such a minor point

as the beverages granted to the gods. Wine was of course well known among the

Norwegians of the tenth century, but it was an expensive luxury. In skaldic verse

the drink which is conferred upon Odin the gift of poetry is often termed wine.

But in it is described as a draught of precious mead…and the

mythological poems invariably describe the gods as drinking ale or mead, except

in l, where Odin‘s sole nourishment is said to be wine, while that

of the einherjar is ale. In the valkyrie offers Sigurd mead or

ale…But in the lays of the Nibelungen and Ermanaric cycles wine is plentiful, as

at the court of Jőrmunrekk…and at Atli‘s court…where all the men-at-arms drink

it. And in the skaldic poem all the einherjar, Odin‘s warriors,

drink wine, not only the god himself, as in .‖ 66

The Icelandic saga Hávamál (Words of the High) gives Odin‘s words:

Hávamál (Sayings of the High One)

Byrþi betri berrat maþr brautu at, A better burden no man can bear

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an sé manvit mikit; on the way than his mother wit: auþi betra þykkir þat í ókunnun staþ, and no worse provision can he carry with him slíkt es válaþs vera. than too deep a draught of ale.

Esa svá gott, sem gott kveþa, Less good than they say for the sons of men

öl alda sunum, is the drinking oft of ale:

þvít fæ'ra veit, es fleira drekkr, for the more they drink, the less they can think síns til geþs gumi. and keep a watch over their wits.

Óminnis hegri heitr sás of ölþrum A bird of Unmindfullness flutters over ale-feasts,

þrumir, wiling away men's wits; hann stelr geþi guma; with the feathers of that fowl I was fettered once

þess fugls fjöþrum ek fjötraþr vask in the garths of Gunnlodr below.

í garþi Gunnlaþar.

Ölr ek varþ, varþ ofrölvi Drunk was I then, I was over-drunk, at ens fróþa Fjalars; in the fold of wise Fjalar;

þvi's ölþr bazt, at aptr of heimtir But best is an ale feast when a man is able hverr sitt geþ gumi. to call back his wits at once.

My thanks to http://w1.859.telia.com/~u85906673/asar/havamal/havamal.html, which has the

Hávamál in Icelandic, Swedish, and English, side by side.

It can be perplexing to tell the historical difference between references to beer, ale, and other alcoholic drinks. In the Eddaic poem Alvíssmál verses 34 and 35, a variety of Old Norse terms related to fermented beverages appear and are implied to be synonyms:

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Þórr kvað: Thórr said:

Segðu mér þat Alvíss, - öll of rök Tell me, Alvís - for all wights' fate

fira I deem that, dwarf, thou knowest -

vörumk, dvergr, at vitir, how the ale is hight, which is brewed by men,

hvé þat öl heitir, er drekka alda in all the worlds so wide?

synir,

heimi hverjum í?"

Alvíss said: Alvíss kvað: 'Tis hight öl (ale) among men; among Aesir bjórr Öl heitir með mönnum, en með (cider); ásum bjórr, the Vanir call it veig (strong drink), kalla veig vanir, hreinalög (clear-brew), the giants; mjöð (mead), hreinalög jötnar, en í helju mjöð, the Hel-Wights; kalla sumbl Suttungs synir. the sons of Suttung call it sumbel (ale-gathering).

After the initial, formal, meaningful serving of drink by the queen or noblewoman, the revelers would later be served by other men or women who se þe on handa bær hroden ealowæge, / scencte scir wered (carried the carven cup in hand, served the clear mead) (Beowulf ll. 495-

496a). After the first round of formal drinking, the sumbel changed in focus somewhat, focusing more on companionship and bonding among the participants.

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Palestine For a long time we have had no proof of any kind of regional trade in the Mediterranean basin concurrent with the Roman Empire. We have amphorae in Britain, but there haven‘t been enough to account for the annona militaris, or public supplies to the military stationed there. It is only recently that we have compiled enough information on amphorae to begin to postulate that there was a sizeable Palestinian wine trade to the Mediterranean basin, and to estimate its impact on trade in late antiquity (before about 400 ACE). We cannot prove the shipment of honey or honey wine from pottery sherds (yet), but we do have olives pits and grape pips in amphorae, and there are hundreds of production-oriented grape presses in the Middle East, far too many for local consumption. We know that there were regions famous for their honey in this period (southern parts of Gaul, for instance, was known for lavender honey). While we cannot yet trace mead or honey shipment, we have too interesting a glimpse into ancient alcohol trade to ignore entirely.

Palestinian wine was shipped in distinctively-shaped amphorae, often signed by the maker or merchant, making it easier to trace when we find sherds. The most substantial deposits of these Palestinian amphora have been found in modern Libya, Egypt, Sinai, Jordan, Cyprus,

Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Sardinia, and Spain; some have been found in Switzerland,

Germany, Britain and Egypt. Even after Roman dominance of the Mediterranean basin faltered, extensive Palestinian wine consumption continued. Tchernia‘s work on Roman wine consumption postulates that men required between 146 and 182 liters of undiluted wine annually, and women about half that amount67. Multiply that by the spread of Roman citizens throughout the empire and you have a potential trade juggernaut.68

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Persia Persia has a long, honorable tradition of wine-making from grapes. Grape wine seems to date back at least seven thousand years in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iran, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania‘s Patrick E. McGovern et al.

See also the anecdote under Rome, below, about Pompeii‘s attack against the

Heptakometes, which took place in Asia Minor.

In general, I can find modern discussions of grape wine in modern Turkey and what was once ancient Persia. While there are now several regional distilled beverages, such as arak and raki, I could find no historical notes about meads, though there are those that claim distillation

(for perfumes and the cosmetic kohl) was invented in Persia. Given the rise of Islamic influence c. 7th century AD, it might be surprising to find historic recipes, though any known references would be welcome.

Poland According to beer100.com, which regrettably does not list its sources, Polish mead produced in LublinMead (yes, that‘s a place) was once very popular in Northern Europe, often produced by monks in monasteries in areas where grapes could not be grown. It faded in popularity, however, once wine imports became economical. Slavs are reported especially partial to it. In Polish it is called miód pitny (pronounced [mjut pi:tni]), meaning "drinkable honey".

Mead was a favored drink among the Polish-Lithuanian szlachta (nobility). During the Crusades,

Polish Prince Leszek I the White explained to the Pope that Polish knights could not participate in the Crusades because there was no mead in Palestine.

Rome In Rome, water sweetened with honey is aquamulsa. In the TV series Rome, one household‘s rise in the world can be tracked by the hostess offering honey water to an honored

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guest, instead of plain water. Most Roman references to alcoholic beverages pertain to wine rather than mead, but Apicius uses mead in a number of recipes, and it is clear that honey was used extensively as the primary sweetener. Wine, which was often drunk very young (two weeks from pressing seems pretty common), could be sweetened with honey. Wine was sometimes stored in amphorae lined with pitch, which changed its flavor (at first I thought the pitch was to render the amphora leakproof for shipping, but this doesn‘t seem to be the case). It could also be smoked by being stored in an attic by a chimney to give it the semblance of ―age‖ and thus better quality.

In studying trade patterns in the Roman Empire, I have found many amphora studies trying to track where products originated and where they ended up. Graffiti on the amphora themselves marking the maker and possibly the vendor help greatly. Sometimes whole sealed amphora are found (mostly on seabeds) with olive pits or grape pips in them. I have not yet seen an example where we know the amphora carried honey or mead, yet clearly mead was known in

Rome and used extensively in cooking, and Rome was generally too large to support itself agriculturally; some of its honey was undoubtedly imported. Maybe future DNA studies on potsherds will tell us more.

Mead made with crushed fruit was meloneli, probably the origin of our term ―melomel‖.

Virgil (first century BC), the famous Roman poet used a bee hive to protect his valuables from ‗tax‘ collectors.69

―In the first century B.C., honey plays a part in the misfortunes of a

Roman campaign, led by Pompeii the Great, against the Heptakometes in Asia

Minor. Interestingly, it is not the bees themselves that are employed in this

instance but, rather, their honey. About one thousand of Pompeii's Roman troops

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were passing through a narrow mountain pass when they encountered a cache of

honey. The soldiers, accustomed to raiding and looting to augment their

provisions, halted their advance and eagerly devoured the honey-- and soon

became afflicted with delirium and violent seizures of vomiting and purges! In

such a condition they were easily defeated by the local Heptakomete defenders

who took their cue to attack. It seems that the honey had been left in the soldiers'

path not in an act of flight from the advancing forces but as a poisonous bait to

stupefy them. The locals would have been well aware that honey produced during

certain times of the year was naturally poisonous. Honey yielded from the nectar

of such plants as Rhododendron ponticum and Azalea pontica [both of which

grow in my yard – EP] contain alkaloids that are toxic to humans but harmless to

bees. After the offending blooms have stopped flowering, beekeepers in areas

where these plants are common (such as the area of present-day Turkey where

this incident occurred) routinely remove this toxic honey so it doesn't contaminate

subsequently produced stores. The poisonous honey is then fed back to the bees

during time of dearth-- if it hasn't been used first for national defense.‖70

There are several things that stand out to me in this passage. First, honey was gathered only in certain times of year. Presumably there wouldn‘t be visual cues in the honey itself to tell the beekeeper which to discard, so the beekeeper would have to know about how much honey the bees would have produced in a certain amount of time. With modern box hives this isn‘t too hard to do, but skeps would make this much more challenging. Perhaps the local beekeepers put out new skeps when the rhododendron and azaleas started to bloom. Both plants are native to

Asia Minor, so it is believable that they would have been in Turkey for this campaign. If either

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plant were imported elsewhere – and the Romans were great importers of exotics – the beekeepers in the new locale could have been in for a surprise!

Russia

In Russia, water sweetened with honey was known as tschemiga. According to beer100.com, mead remained popular as medovukha and sbiten long after its popularity declined in the West (it does not mention when this might have been). Sbiten is often mentioned in the works by 19th-century Russian writers, including Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Some beer producers attempt to revive sbiten as a mass-produced drink in Russia.

In 946, the Slavic St. Olga, on the occasion of her son's funeral, provided limitless quantities of mead. She invited her enemies only, who, presumably, had somehow been instrumental in the death of her child, and five thousand inebriated `mourners' were slain in their stupor by Olga's allies. Similarly, in 1489, 10,000 Tatars were dispatched by Russians whom the

Turkish invaders had been pursuing. The Russians left mead behind in their flight and returned after sufficient time for the Tatars to drink themselves into a daze. 71

Scotland There is an 1843 treatise called the Scotish [sic] Gael, ―more particularly of the northern, or Gaelic parts of that country, where the singular habits of the aboriginal Celts are most tenaciously retained‖.

―That the Hyllanders had anciently a liquor made from honey, appears from an

ancient allusion to it. It is probably that the beverage was similar to metheglin, or

mead, called mil dheuch by the Gael. This excellent liquor is made by boiling

honey in water in certain proportions, subjecting it to fermentation…‖72

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Wales Welsh law is very specific and gives us historical markers on the official status of bees and mead.

The Cyfraith Hywel, the Law of Hywel from Wales is roughly contemporaneous with the

Bechbretha of Ireland, c. 942-950 AD. There are some interesting procedural distinctions, but it is enough here to say that significant law-tracts have existed on beekeeping for at least thirteen hundred years. The mead-brewer was a privileged person at court, and was protected ―from the time he shall begin to prepare the mead vat until he shall cover it.‖ The butler was protected

―from the time he shall begin to empty the mead vat until he shall finish.‖ 73

The medieval Welsh law-book Llyfr Iorweth states that a person of free rank must give the king of vat of mead, or two vats of bragget (bragaut,or braggot), or four vats of beer (cyryw).

Perhaps this indicates a relative value on these three kinds of drink. The Book of Iorweth was increasingly superseded by English law after the thirteenth century.

James Logan wrote in the Scotish Gael in 1843 (p. 343):

―…and the Welsh, who have different ways of making it, and have used it from

early times, derive its name from med elyg, medicinal, and lyn, a drink. The

mead maker ranked the eleventh person in the household of the Kings of Wales.‖

Ransome refers to Guest‘s translation of the Mabinogion, in which the sixth century

Welsh bard Taliesin is represented as singing these words (Maelgyn began to reign about 517):

―May abundance of mead be given to Maelgyn of Anglesey, who supplies us

From his foaming mead horns, with the choicest pure liquor.

Since his bees collect and do not enjoy,

We have sparkling mead, which is universally praised.‖74

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And last but not least, we have a recipe for health. [I almost listed this under Rome.]

According to Acton and Douglas (p. 13), Pollio Romulus wrote Julius Caesar about mead. Pollio was over 100 years old and vigorous, which he attributed to drinking copiously of the local

Welsh metheglin and to rubbing his legs with ―oyl‖.

Thanks for reading all of this. I hope it is beneficial to you. These last honeyed words I will leave to you, my fellow Dreamers: ―No poems can please long or live that are written by water-drinkers.‖ (Horace, first century BC) 75

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Linguistic Notes by Bill Kasselman I HAVE NOT GOTTEN HIS PERMISSION TO REPRINT THIS.

The following section is copied directly from Bill Kasselman‘s ―Canadian Word of the

Day: A Swarm of Bee Words‖, http://www.billcasselman.com/unpublished_works/bee_words.htm, accessed January 19, 2008.

Bill Kasselman is a writer and broadcaster who has made a career of studying words from the

Canadian point of view. Everything that follows was lifted directly from his site.

Our English word bee has many Germanic and Slavic cognates and relatives.

Old English béo

Old Norse bý

Modern German Biene

Dutch bij

Old Teutonic *bini

Lithuanian bite

Latvian bite

Russian pčela

Polish pszczola

Old Church Slavonic bŭčela

Irish bech

Welsh begegyr

Words for ‗bee‘ and ‗honey‘ of Indo-European origin occur in most Finno-Ugrian languages

(e.g. Hungarian méh and méz), although some scholars (often Hungarian) suggest that Indo-

European may have borrowed the me* roots from the Finno-Ugrian language family.

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Here is the word for bee in several other languages of the world.

Language bee

Albanian bletë (apis, honeybee).

. إج تمبع ل ل عمل ,(melissa) ن ح لة , م سبب قة ت هج ئة Arabic

Asturian abeya

Basque erle

Blackfoot naamóó .

Bulgarian трудолюбив човек , пчела.)

Czech včela , vèela

Ecuadorian miqui chuspi

Quechua

Esperanto abelo

زن بور ,(Bumblebee) زن بورع سل , م گس ان گ ب ین Farsi

Finnish mehiläinen

French abeille

Greek Μέλισσα

Note that the Greeks named the honey bee melissa, after its honey (Greek meli). The

pronounced in modern Hebrew de-vo-RAH) after its sting. Deborah) דבורה Jews named the bee is a common Hebrew feminine name. Deborah means ‗stinging bee.‘ The Semitic root is dbr, one of whose reflexes is dabar, a Hebrew word for ‗word, sting, goad.‘ Compare Arabic and Proto-

Semitic dabar(a) ‗sting, ox goad.‘

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An interesting but probably coincidental similarity exists in the Hebrew and Latin terms for ‗word.‘ In Latin it‘s verbum (the Latin root verb- ‗whip, lash, sting, cattle goad.‘ In Biblical

Hebrew, word is dabar from the triliteral verbal root dbr - ‗say, speak, prod, sting, goad.‘

Hebrew scholars offer other possible Semitic origins of devorah, the modern Hebrew word for bee. They consider ancient cognates like the Aramaic for bee, debarta, and its Syriac cousin, deboritha, as well as the Hebrew word for honey, debash. There is another shoresh

(three-letter word root) brought forth for consideration: the Mandaic Aramaic dibra 'back, tail, hence 'bee's stinger' (?) to be compared with the Arabic dubr 'backside, tail.'

Is the Greek word for honey hidden in a well-known Mediterranean place name? The island of Malta, say some sources, was first Melita ‗land of honey‘ (Greek meli, melitos

‗honey‘). But the preponderance of linguistic and historical evidence suggests that the place name Malta is Phoenician, the Semitic language of the Mediterranean trading people who colonized the six little islands which comprise Malta very early in history. The Semitic triliteral root mtl carries the meaning of ‗take refuge‘ or ‗hide.‘ The Semitic verb form malata can mean

‗one takes refuge.‘ Therefore it is quite likely that a later noun form ‗malta‘ may mean ‗place of refuge‘ or ‗isle of refuge.‘ If you examine the sea map and observe Malta‘s position south of

Sicily, not too far from Tunisia, and think from the perspective of Phoenician traders sailing stout and yare vessels to and fro upon the Mediterranean, such an origin makes good sailing sense and good linguistic sense.

The common Russian surname Medved is an apotropaic circumlocution for ‗bear‘ meaning literally ‗honey-eater.‘ This is an old Slavonic periphrasis for bear. Med is Russian for honey, and the ved root means 'eat.' The ved and yed roots are related to eсть [yest'] (Russian ‗to eat‘) and are cognate with other Indo-European verbs like Latin edere to eat‘ (which gives us the

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adjective edible) and even with English to eat. Another Russian word containing this Slavic root is the interesting and racist Samoyed, the name of a people and a breed of dog. Samo-yed means

'self-eater' in Russian, a synonym for cannibal! The Samoyed people do not call themselves by that name. They possess their own proper ethnonym, and it does not mean ‗cannibal.‘ Inuit is an ethnonym; Eskimo is not.

In order to keep bears away and/or to placate the spirit of the totemic animal of his ‗bear‘ clan, the tribesman never uttered the name of the animal, for fear that if one spoke aloud the word bear, then the animal itself might appear to devour one… How did one avoid saying the word ‗bear‘ out loud? One made up other names for the animal, and one old Slavic circumlocution was honey-eater or medved…

Source of Apis, the Classical Latin Word for Bee

The word for bee in the Romance languages stems from Latin apis ‗bee.‘ French abeille,

Spanish abeja, Italian ape — all descend from Roman buzzers. So do words like apiary and apiculture. This little note concerns the ultimate source of apis. Some scholars suggest that the

Latin root and even the Germanic words for bee like German Biene entered Indo-European languages from ancient Egyptian. One of the Egyptian hieroglyphic words for honeybee is bj-t.

Here are a couple of technical jottings on that hypothesis from linguistic journal articles:

―He explains the L. apis 'bee' after Brunner (1969) from Ancient Eg. as reduced form /af/ from

/?fj/ (pp. 713-14, 723, 727) and IE root +bi- or *bhi- by a different Ancient Eg. form /bj-t/ 'honey bee'.

PE *bhey- "bee" < SH *b[i]y- "bee" (in Egyptian, ?North, East Cushitic, ?West Chadic). For

Egyptian ~ IE see already Hodge; Gamkrelidze and Ivanov.

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PE *mel- "honey" < SH *mal- (secondarily *mul-) "honey" (present in Egyptian, East and South

Cushitic, Chadic).

PE *ap- (?.): Latin apis "bee" < SH *`a[p/f]- "bee, fly" (in Egyptian, South Cushitic).

(end of Bill Kasselman text)

Endnotes

1 Morse, Making Mead, 17-18 2 Schramm, The Compleat Meadmaker, pp. 4-7. 3 Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, 16-17 4 Schramm, p. 7. 5 Ibid, 34 6 Glazer, Structuralism 7 Acton and Duncan, Making Mead, preface

8 Koch, The Woman With The Drink

9 Enright, Michael J. Lady With a Mead Cup, 101 10 Unknown‘s Bilingual Beowulf at MIT, http://www.mit.edu/~jrising/resources/misc/webres/beowulf.pdf, accessed July 15, 2008 11 Bernebaum, Bugs in the System, pp. 65-72. 12 Charles-Edwards, Thomas, and Fergus Kelly, eds. Bechbreth,. 39 13 Toussaint-Samat, 16-17 14 Charles-Edwards and Kelly, 39 15 Crane, The Archaeology of Beekeeping,102 16 Reddy, Mike. Mike Reddy‟s Skep FAQ, http://homepage.mac.com/mreddygbr/skepFAQ/. Accessed July 15, 20087; Hagen, Ann, A Second Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food and Drink, 230 17 Kingsley & Decker, Economy and Exchange 18 Buhner, Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers 19 White and Doner,. ―USDA Technical Bulletin 1261‖, 7-8 20 White and Doner, ―USDA Technical Bulletin 1261‖ 21 Apicius, Apicius de re Conquinaria, p. 51. 22 Acton and Duncan, op.cit., 7 23 See a concise summary of this theory in the University of North Carolina catalogue, http://www.unc.edu/celtic/catalogue/stbrigid/essay.html, accessed July 6, 2008 24 New Advent website, containing the Catholic Encyclopedia among other sources, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310243.htm, accessed 7/5/2008 25 written 388 ACE. Rev. Richard Stothert, trans. Catholic Encyclopedia, Chapter 13 26 Ibid. 27Labbe, ―Concilia‖, VI 28 Dennis, British Beekeeers Association website 29 Dennis, British Beekeepers Association website, http://www.bbka.org.uk/articles/bee_legends.php 30 Jackson, Bees are People 31 Toussaint-Samat, 253-254.

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32 Bérubé, War and Bees, http://www.beekeeping.com/articles/us/war_bees.htm, accessed January 19, 2008 33 Spence, Mad About Mead, 27 34 Toussaint-Samat, 21 35 Spence, op. cit., 21 36 Bogucki, Origins of Human Society 37 Arnold, Power drinking in Iron Age Europe 38 Acton and Douglas, Making Mead, 13 39 (Hieatt, Hosington and Butler, Pleyn Delit. 40 Ransome,The Sacred Bee, 32-34 41 Kendall Bioresearch Co. website, most recently accessed April 8, 2008. http://www.kendall- bioresearch.co.uk/sacredinsect.htm#bee. 42 http://kalevala.gov.karelia.ru/songs/song27_e.shtml accessed July 6, 2008; also http://www.sacred- texts.com/neu/kveng/ accessed July 6, 2008 43 Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, 30-31 44 Acton and Duncan, Making Mead, 12 45 Ransome, 59 46 Ibid, 92 47 Ibid., 96 48 Toussaint-Samat, 22 49 Ibid., 22 50 Buhner, Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers 51 Acton and Duncan, 13 52 Toussaint-Samat, 15 53 Acton and Duncan, 12 54 Buhner, Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers 55 Toussaint-Samat, 15 56 Charles-Edwards and Kelly, Bechbretha, 41 57 Ross and McLaughlin, The Portable Medieval Reader, 497. They‘re discussing ―The Vision of Viands‖, a 12th century Irish text. 58 Toussaint-Samat, 36 59 Hieatt, Hosington, and Butler, Pleyn Delit 60 Ewing, 21 61 Viking Answer Lady website, http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/drink.shtml, accessed July 15, 2008 62 Hardman, "Bosi and Herraud", 80-81 63 Acton and Duncan, 11 64 Enright, 103-104 65 Buhner, 15-16 66 Philpotts, The Elder Edda, 89 67 Tchernia, Le Vin de l‟Italie Romaine 68 Decker, Economy and Exchange, 44-68 69 Stair and Stair, The Honey Factory 70 Bérubé, War and Bees. 71 Bérubé, War and Bees, accessed January 19, 2008

72 Logan, The Scotish Gael, p. 343 73 Ransome, 195 74 Ibid, 191 75 Buhner, 23

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