In Avestan the verb vaf, by origin ‘weave’, has come to mean ‘sing of, hymn’.
Thus Zarathushtra sings yə ̄ vå Asˇ
̇
a ̄ ufya ̄nı ̄ manasca ̄ vohu ̄ apaourvı ̄m, ‘I who
will hymn You, Truth, and Good Thought as never before’ (Y. 28. 3); yavat
a ̄θβa ̄, Mazda ̄, staomı ̄ ufya ̄ca ̄, ‘insofar as I praise and hymn Thee, Wise One’ ̃
(43. 8).
In Greek the metaphor is familiar. 0φανω‘weave’ (from the same root as
the Avestan verb) and the semantically close πλκω‘plait’ are repeatedly
used by Pindar and Bacchylides with objects such as ‘songs’ or ‘words’, for
example:
6 σ7ν Χαρτεσσι βαθυζ.νοι 0φα ́ να μνον α, π: ζαθα
να ́ σου ξνο 0μετραν $ κλυτα` ν πμπει πλιν.
Having woven a song with the deep-girdled Graces, from his god-blest
island your friend sends it to your celebrated city. (Bacchyl. 5. 9)In the following pages it will become increasingly apparent that these two
fifth-century exponents of the Dorian tradition of choral song were heirs to a
repertory of Indo-European or at least Graeco-Aryan imagery that is hardly
visible in the Ionian epic and Lesbian lyric traditions. However, in the present
case we can cite Sappho’s reference (fr. 188) to Eros as a plaiter of tales,
μυθπλοκο.^35
In two or three places, as in the above example from Bacchylides, 0φανω
appears in association with the noun μνο, perhaps with a sense of
word-play, as if μνο were derived from the 0φ- root. Scholars used to
take this etymology seriously, but it is nowadays rejected on phonological
grounds. We have already adverted to two other etymologies of this interest-
ing word.
From Irish Enrico Campanile adduced an example from the early text
Amrae Choluimb Chille (§52 Stokes): fáig ferb fithir‘the master wove words’.
At a much later date a member of a hereditary poetic family attached to the
O’Neills could write:
Not spinning the threads of wisdom
nor tracing our branching peoples
nor weaving a graceful verse...
Men of base trade look down
on our woven rhetorical songs.^36(^35) For 0φανω cf. further Pind. Nem. 4. 44, fr. 179; Bacchyl. 1. 4?, 19. 8; PMG 955?; CEG 660. 4
(fourth century); Call. fr. 26. 5; for πλκω, Pind. Ol. 6. 86, Pyth. 12. 8, Nem. 4. 94, Pae. 3. 12; PMG
917b. 3; Critias fr. 1. 1 Diels–Kranz.
(^36) Fear Flatha Ó Gnímh (early seventeenth century) in Thomas Kinsella, The New Oxford
Book of Irish Verse (Oxford 1986), 164 f.
- Poet and Poesy 37