Björn and Bread

This week, The Grasshopper has mostly been thinking about the staff of life.

For reasons that may become obvious over the next month or two, the Grasshopper has recently been researching the history of bread. And how fascinating it is. Since it first emerged as mankind’s staple food in the Neolithic period around 10,000 years ago, bread – added to somewhat later by its liquid equivalent, beer – has travelled with us along the pathway of evolution as our most constant companion

¹

, sustenance, comfort and – on quite a few occasions – incitement to battle and war.

Hopper is even drawn to the etymology of our modern English word ‘bread’. Very often, the roots of interesting English words are found in ancient Latin or Sanskrit – or even, like ‘murder’, ‘mosquito’ and ‘vomit’ – in both. But bread comes from our old pals the Vikings - brauð, brød, brad, brot, brood, brot, depending on where you want to stick your pin in the map – via the Old English breotan, meaning ‘to break in pieces’. Breaking bread and all that.

Going even further back into the Old English, the word for bread there is hlaf, which is where we get our word loaf. Now, here it gets even more interesting. The master of the household was the hlafweard – literally ‘one who guards the loaves’. Take the word through a few iterations – hlafweard to hlaford to lavord – and we get our modern word ‘lord’, with all the implications that come with it. The name Harold comes down through this word-chain too.

Also the word lady – literally ‘bread-kneader’. Hopper can think of several ladies in his past lives that needed plenty of bread.

Interesting, eh? Well, Hopper thinks so. More to come.

1. Companion: from Late Latin companionem, literally "bread fellow".