Shadow
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” said the muffled voice on the old radio show. “The Shadow knows,” and he laughed softly. It was a good thing, though, because the Shadow, who possessed the power to hypnotize people so they would not see him, was a secret yet tireless fighter against wickedness and crime. Those who intend harm often dwell in shadows, so as to take the innocent man by surprise, or to hide their own dealings even from themselves. And we think of the shadow as a place deprived of light, and maybe close to the ultimate place of darkness, but if we know that God is with us, we can walk with good cheer. Would you like to see what the verse looks like in the English of King Alfred, 1200 years ago? A king, translating portions of the Bible? You bet: Alfred was a formidable man. Here it is:
Theah ic nu gange on midde tha sceade deathes, ne ondraede ic me nan yfel, for tham thu byst mid me, Drihten.
That’s easy for you to say, Your Majesty – you speak the language! But it’s our language too. I’ll translate it back into modern English: “Even though I may be walking amidst the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for you are with me, Lord.”
There’s an interesting little thing about our word shadow: it was the same word as shade, but in the cases other than the nominative. What that means is this: in Very Old English, as opposed to merely Old English, there was only the one word, scead, meaning shade, and pronounced like shad, if you draw out the vowel by adding an “uh” sound at the end of it. That was the word for both shade and shadow, if you were using it as the subject or object of the verb in your sentence. But otherwise, let’s say if you were in the shade, the form was sceadu: pronounced like that sha-uhd, but with an oo at the end. Then, lo and behold, sceadu became a word of its own. I suppose the sense was this: if you were in the shade, it was because there was a shadow. So, in English, shade suggests the general area, but the shadow is what makes it shady.
What fine shades of meaning these words provide for us! They are sometimes sinister, as when that oaf of a monster, Grendel, comes sneaking along to Heorot under the sceaduhelm, the helm of shadows, because he wants to break into that hall when everybody’s asleep, and do his murderous deeds. It’s good to be in the shade, at least on a hot summer day, because it shields you from the heat of the sun, and you may catch a cool breeze there, because the air moves a little when there’s a difference in temperature between one place and another. But if you are in the shadows, you are probably up to no good. Perhaps you are getting together with another businessman, supposedly your competitor, to conclude a shady deal. Or you may be shadowing someone: you’re a detective on the lookout. The old slugger once in a while can hammer the baseball over the fence, but he can’t catch up with a high hard fastball; he’s a shadow of his former self. But a kindly old man may smile at the little boy who follows him everywhere, because he wants to grow up just like Grandpa: “He’s my little shadow!” Maybe the cleverest rhyme on shade is Tom Lehrer’s, in his satirical song about a supposed purloiner of other men’s mathematical work, Nikolai Lobachevsky:
Plagiarize, Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, So don’t shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize... Only be sure always to call it please, “research.”
Our word comes from an ancient Indo-European root that means darkness, though it doesn’t seem to have a lot of cousins elsewhere. One of them is ancient Greek skotia, most powerfully used by the evangelist John, at the beginning of his gospel: “And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” German Schatten, shade, is a close cousin, but the Romance languages take their words for shade and shadow from Latin umbra, which comes from a root meaning blind. We have coined several words from umbra, most notably the umbrella, pronounced in some areas of the United States as umb-er-ella, the thing you carry not, originally, to keep the rain away, but to keep the hot sun away – to give you a nice bit of shade.
Fascinating as always!
I’ve always wondered at the fact that our rain guard is rooted in the Latin word for shadow. Ironic that umbrella moved aside for what originally would have meant the same thing through a converse meaning (and which I assume must have entered later through French or Spanish?) the parasol… indeed, other languages have the -umbra word (ombrelle, sombrilla) as well as the more obvious latin derivatives (parasol, paraguas, parapluie) so why in our lovely anglic tongue have we never coined our ‘forain’ , or perhaps ‘frowater’? Mr. Esolen, do tell if thou knowest.