Somali man collecting myrrh from a tree. A man cutting into a tree and catching the flowing resin in a basket.
17 December 2021
Myrrh is an aromatic gum resin from trees of the genus Commiphora. It is perhaps best known today as one of the gifts brought to the infant Jesus by the magi (Matthew 2:11; cf. frankincense). In the ancient world, myrrh was used for a variety of medical and ritual purposes, including use in burial.
The word comes from the Latin murra, reinforced in the twelfth century by the Anglo-Norman mirre. The Latin comes from the Greek μύρρα, which is ultimately a borrowing of Semitic origin. There are cognates in a number of Semitic languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac, but which one or ones Greek borrowed from are uncertain. The Semitic root means bitter.
The word appears in English in the early medieval period. One early instance is in the Vespasian Psalter, an eighth-century Latin text with a ninth-century, interlinear, Old English gloss. The instance in question is from Psalm 45:8:
myrre & dropa & smiring from hreglum ðinum from stepum elpanbaennum of ðæm dec gelustfulladun
Mirra et gutta et cassia a vestimentis tuis a gradibus eburneis ex quibus te delectaverunt
(All your robes are fragrant with myrrh and aloes and cassia from palaces adorned with ivory.)
No discussion of the origin of myrrh would be complete without the account from Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In that myth, Myrrha was the daughter of King Cinyras. The young woman fell in love with her father, but knowing incest was wrong and that her love could never be consummated, tried to kill herself. The suicide was prevented by her old nurse, who was horrified at the reason for Myrrha’s despair, but to save her life agreed to help her bed her father. Then, during the annual rites of Ceres, when wives were not supposed to sleep with their husbands, the nurse told the king that there was a beautiful, young woman who loved him. He asked the nurse to bring her to his bedchamber, which the nurse did. Father and daughter slept together for several nights, then one night, desiring to know his lover’s identity, the king lit a torch. Horrified upon seeing his daughter, Cinyras tried to kill Myrrha, but she fled. Pregnant, crying, and wandering in the wilderness, she prayed to the gods for deliverance, and they turned her into a tree, her tears becoming the aromatic resin. But the child continued to gestate, and at the appointed time the tree cracked open and the baby Adonis was born, the most beautiful man who ever lived, so beautiful that Venus, herself, fell in love with him.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2012, s.v. mirre, n.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. David Raeburn, translator. London: Penguin, 2004, Book 10, 397–410.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2003, modified September 2021, s.v. myrrh, n.1.
Sweet, Henry, ed. The Oldest English Texts. Early English Text Society 83. London: N. Trübner, 1885, 249. Internet Archive. London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A.l.
Image credit: Unknown photographer, 1970s, Somalia Ministry of Information and National Guidance. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.