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The meaning of celtic eburos peter s university of utrecht

Peter Schrijver University of Utrecht The meaning of Celtic eburos Introduction There is no doubt that Proto-Celtic possessed a phytonym eburos It survives as Old Irish ibar Middle Welsh efwr Middle Breton h evor Although we lack control over their lexical meanings numerous Continental Celtic names beginning with Ebur o - can be connected with this etymon too The general assumption is that the original meaning of the phytonym is ? yew tree ? Sanz et al - Matasovi ? Sims-Williams and Delamarre are some of the most recent proponents of that idea A notable exception is Dagmar Wodtko who did not assign a meaning to the proto- form The aim of this paper is to show that eburos did not mean ? yew tree ? The evidence for eburos meaning ? yew ? The only strong argument in favour of the meaning ? yew ? is the well attested meaning of the Irish word OIr ibar MoIr and Sc G iubhar ? yew ? Taxus baccata Welsh efwr however denotes ? hogweed cow parsnip ? Heracleum sphondylium a large perennial umbellifer while Breton evor denotes ? buckthorn ? Frangula alnus a woody shrub There is very little that these three plants have in common botanically It is not at all clear why we should single out Irish and select the meaning ? yew ? as the Proto- Celtic meaning The Continental Celtic material provides plentiful formal evidence for the presence of eburoin personal names place-names and due to a recent ?nd from Spain a theonym As usual in such cases however the semantic information that is provided by names is non- existent at worst and inferential at best A case in point is the name Eburones of a people that lived in present-day northern Belgium and the southern part of the Netherlands There is a famous story reported by Caesar which states that after their crushing defeat against Caesar one of the two leaders of the Eburones Catuvolcus poisoned himself by ingesting yew Catuvolcus taxo cuius magna in Gallia Germaniaque copia est se exanimavit ? Catuvolcus killed himself by yew which is widespread in Gallia and Germania ? Caesar De Bello Gallico VI This has been taken as an indication that the Eburones had a special connection with the yew Sanz et al mélanges en l ? honneur de pierre-yves lambert which was formalized in their name If Eburones meant ? yew people ? that would certainly make for a nice story but it is worth stressing that this particular point apparently escaped the storyteller Caesar who does not mention the connection explicitly Furthermore since the pharmacological properties of yew have presumably always been well known using it as a poison cannot have been the prerogative of a people whose name contained a word meaning ? yew ? Another indication that in Continental Celtic eburos may have denoted the yew is derived from the name of the Aulerci Eburovices a tribe of Central Gaul Eburovices contains the root wik-