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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2970089" data-attributes="member: 7240">First, the nature thing: my point is not that the word did not exist but that the concept to which it is assigned did not. Until the 13th century, nature referred to the universe and how it works. There was no category other than nature into which things could fall. The opposite of nature was not culture or the supernatural or social constructions or technology; nature used to contain all of those concepts. When one talked about nature, one was talking about everything. Because there were no things that were not natural, the idea of "nature spirit" didn't make a whole lot of sense. An entity could be associated with a part of the physical world but not with the whole of the physical world because that wouldn't qualify as an association; it would simply mean that the being was associated with everything equally.As to the etymology of Faerie, I am indeed aware that popular scholarship is still catching up to a debate that remains very live in the academic world. The Peri example is nevertheless taught by a number of medievalists (e.g. Sheila Delany), whose arguments I have found persuasive. Here is a precis of why they disagree with the conventional theory of the etymology:1. The fatum association is not one that one sees gradually emerge in literature. English literature of faeries never uses the term fatum to refer to these creatures. Instead, the authority on which the fatum theory rests is based on taking medieval etymologists at their word when they assert how the word came into being. But fictive etymology was a standard part of medieval scholarship; if we treated the word "Briton" the way we treat "faerie" etymologically, we would be asserting that it came from Brutus, the Trojan founder of England. So, I find it highly problematic to take medieval etymologists at their word on this word when scholarship has disproven them on so many others. 2. The term that was in use in England before "faerie" is "aelf." Faerie appears in the high medieval or late medieval period out of the blue to refer to creatures who were elves a century or two before. This suggests that the term was a sudden import and not the gradual modification of an existing word. Now, genshou's point also has merit; the Anglo-Norman period in England was one in which French loan words were imported into English on a fairly large scale. 3. Many scholars of literature of the Scholastic Renaissance in England and France are seriously reappraising the extent of Islamic influence on literature in the period. Both the grail romances and Chaucer's works are now undestood to be surprisingly direct importations of Sufic allegorical literature. Given that the influence of Islamic thought on literature is being seriously reappraised at the moment, it seems an equally reasonable time to reassess the arrival of terms from the Islamic world. While my view has yet to command majority support in the academic community, it is my expectation that, given the West's new interest in Islam, this may change in the next few decades as people continue the work of looking more closely at cultural exchange in the High Middle Ages.</blockquote>

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