21 December 2020
Heathen is an unusual word. For despite being a very old one, it has retained its meaning pretty much intact through the centuries, with few additional senses or connotations. A heathen, of course, is someone who is not an adherent to one of the Abrahamic faiths, although in early use it was sometimes used to refer to Jews and Muslims as well. But while its form and use in English is well documented and understood, the word’s early history is contested, with two competing explanations.
The word is common in Old English, with close to a thousand extant instances. Since many of the surviving Old English texts are religious ones, the high number is not terribly surprising. For example, the eleventh-century gospel of Mark 7:26 found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 140 reads:
soðlice þæt wif wæs hæðen sirofenisces cynnes
(truly that woman was a heathen of the Syrophoenician people)
The original Greek is:
ἡ δὲ γυνὴ ἦν ἑλληνίς, συροφοινίκισσα τῷ γένει:
(the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by nation)
Heathen is also common across the Germanic languages: the Old Frisian hêthin, the Old Saxon hêðin which gives way to the present-day Dutch heiden, the Old High German heidan and the present-day German heide, and the Old Norse heiðinn with the present day Swedish and Danish heden.
The common explanation is that heathen comes from heath, a tract of uncultivated or wild, but not wooded, land, from the Old English hæþ. A heathen, according to this explanation, is a dweller on the heath, which corresponds to the Latin paganus, originally a rustic person and later a worshipper of older gods. Paganus is, of course, the source of pagan. It is presumed that Christian writers in the Germanic languages translated paganus as heathen. There are some problems with this explanation though. The endings, particularly the difference between the Old High German -an and the Old English -en, are not explained. Furthermore, the oldest of the Germanic appearances, the fourth-century Gothic gospels, places it earlier than most of the Latin Christian writings.
The Gothic gospel of Mark renders the opening clause of 7:26 as:
wasuþþan so qino haiþno, Saurini fwnikiska gabaurþai
(truly the woman was a heathen (Greek?), a Syrophoenician by birth)
The competing explanation is that Gothic, an East Germanic language from the Black Sea region, borrowed it from the Armenian հեթանոս (het’anos) which in turn comes from the Greek ἔθνος (ethnos, nation). Thus, the Gothic haiþno would be better translated as Greek than as heathen, which would make the Gothic biblical verse a word-for-word translation from the Greek. From the Gothic it spread to the other Germanic languages. This explanation is chronologically sound and accounts for the phonological changes.
We’ll probably never know which one of these explanations is the correct one. I prefer the second as it accounts for all the evidence better, but the first is far from implausible.
Sources:
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. hæþen, hæþ1.
“Gothic Bible and Minor Fragments.” Wulfila Project.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. hethen, adj. and n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. heathen, adj. and n.1, heath, n.