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Tuesday 10 September 2019

MEANING OF "GEILT"

I have seen a reference to the Irish language word geilt which seems to feel that it signifies a wildman of the Bigfoot type.  However, it signified an ordinary human who had gone mad and is used in Irish today to mean that.  In the Middle Ages, there seems to have been a form of hysteria which affected some Irishmen: in battle they seem to have gone completely insane and to have taken to the woods, leaping from tree to tree, perhaps levitating or thinking they were.  It has been suggested the word comes from a primitive *ghel, meaning to fly.

The condition also existed among the Ancient Britons (ancestors of the modern Welsh).  Here the word for it was (g)wyllt.  It was supposed to have struck the wizard Merlin after the Battle of Arthuret.

It seems to have simply been used in this sense to mean someone with this condition, but it could also be used to mean a kind of spirit.  A Modern Irish word for a mermaid is muirgheilt (geilt of the sea).  But in the case of the wood-dwelling madman, it is used to mean a completely human lunatic.

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