Hag

It’s a word with a lot of negative meanings and connotations: a female demon, a harpy, a witch, a woman who has made a compact with the devil, an ugly or evil old woman.

The etymology is fascinating, however. From Middle English hagge or hegge, probably a shortened from of Old English hægtesse (harpy or witch), akin to Middle Dutch haghetisse (witch) – don’t these latter two sound like a sneeze? Also Old High German hagzissa and hagazussa (my personal favourite) also meaning witch or harpy. It is thought these all derive from a prehistoric West Germanic compound whose parts are akin to Old English haga, meaning hedge, and dūs, meaning devil. (Have you ever heard the term hedge wizard?) Dūs is also akin to the Norwegian tysja meaning elf or crippled woman. The derivations go on a bit longer with connections to Gaulish and Cornish. At any rate, the meanings are mostly negative, but I love the sounds of the words.

So why would a witch or hagazussa necessarily have to be ugly? Think of Galadriel, the Lady of Lórien, an elf queen, beautiful but also potentially terrible. If a witch had magic, why would she not make herself glamorous and enticing, or plain and ordinary if she didn’t want to be noticed? For example, Circe was a beautiful Greek enchantress living on the island of Aeaea who turned Odysseus’s men into pigs at a banquet. And in The Wizard of Oz we have two good and beautiful witches living in the north and south respectively. So, I don’t buy the cultural stereotypes of the hagazussa – I think that the fear of their power made people describe them in negative ways.

Witches are often portrayed as living in a forest. Some of the other meanings of hag tie in to this location -- an enclosed wooded area, and a section of timber marked off for felling. In certain cultures trees had power or magic and spirits (e.g. dryads) lived in or among them. Think of the oaks of the druids and the mistletoe that grows on these trees. In Norse mythology Odin created the first woman out of an elm tree log and the first man out of an ash tree. Sacred groves were common among the ancient Germans, Swedes, Slavs, Lithuanians, Greeks and Italians. In Rome, the sacred fig tree of Romulus was worshipped as well as a cornel tree (a species of dogwood) that grew on the Palatinate Hill.

By the way, the word hag has other meanings as well: to urge on or goad, to tire out, and to hack or chop.