merry / God rest you merry

Cover of Puck magazine for 25 December 1907; illustration by L. M. Glackens depicts John D. Rockefeller, Joseph B. Foraker, Henry H. Rogers, Edward H. Harriman, David J. Brewer, and James R. Day singing carols to Theodore Roosevelt

18 December 2024

Merry has a quite straightforward origin, although the title and first line of the Christmas carol God rest you merry, gentlemen is confusing to some. Merry comes from the Old English myrige, meaning pleasant or delightful.

When applied to people, the sense of being happy, especially when that happiness is fueled by alcohol, is in place by the latter half of the fourteenth century.

An example of the Old English can be found in Ælfric of Eynsham’s homily for the Sunday before Ash Wednesday:

Þeos woruld, þeah ðe heo myrige hwiltidum geðunt sy, nis heo hwæðere ðe geliccre ðære ecan worulde þe is sum cweartern leohtum dæge.

(This world, though it might sometimes seem merry, is more like the eternal world than a prison is like the light of day.)

But the Christmas carol God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen is frequently misinterpreted, with merry assumed to be modifying gentlemen, and reading the phrase as merry gentlemen, may God [grant] you rest/peace. But that reading puts the comma in the wrong place and fails to recognize that here the verb to rest is transitive, meaning to make someone or something remain in the specified condition, in this case a state of merriment. So the carol’s opening line actually means gentlemen, may God keep you merry. The stock phrase rest you merry dates to late thirteenth century, when it appears in one version of the romance Floris and Blancheflour. From Cambridge, University Library MS Gg. 4.27.2, lines 157–58:

So him sede child Floriz
“Rest þe murie, sire Daris.”

And Shakespeare uses the formulation twice, “Rest you merrie” in Romeo and Juliet, 1.2, and “Rest you happy” in Antony and Cleopatra, 1.1. It appears in many other places, but the Christmas carol is probably the most well-known use of the phrase.

What prompted me to write this article about a very pedestrian word origin was a 2014 article in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana Advocate about a Southwestern Louisiana University professor who claimed that merry once had a meaning of strong or mighty, and that God rest you merry meant may God keep you strong, and that merrie old England actually meant mighty old England. This is completely wrong. Merry never meant mighty or strong, and I have no idea where this professor got that idea or if the belief is more widespread.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Quinquagesima.” The Old English Catholic Homilies, The First Series. Roy M. Liuzza, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 86, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 186.

Floris and Blancheflour. Cambridge, University Library MS Gg. 4.27.2.

Middle English Dictionary, 2024, miri(e, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2001, s.v. merry, adj., merry v., merry, adv.; March 2010, rest, v.1.

“SLU Professor Reveals History Behind Famous Carols.” The Advocate (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 17 December 2014. NewsBank: Access World News—Historical and Current.

Image Credit: Louis M. Glackens, 1907. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

reindeer

Page from the 1821 booklet The Children’s Friend

16 December 2024

Reindeer, Rangifer tarandus, are a species of deer native to the arctic and subarctic of Europe, Siberia, and North America. The word is a borrowing from the Scandinavian languages—it’s hreindýri in Old Icelandic and rendjur in Swedish. (The usual word in Swedish is simply ren, but rendjur is an older form.) The first element of reindeer is from the Germanic root rein, which is of uncertain origin, but is likely a reference to the creature’s antlers. Deer is a Germanic root meaning animal or beast, which only later specialized to mean the species of ruminant mammals. So the original, literal meaning of reindeer was likely “horned beast.”

The word makes one appearance in Old English, in an account of a voyage to Norway that is found in the translation of Orosius’s history. It is not so much an example of an Old English name for the creature as it is the use of a foreign word:

Þa deor hi hatað “hranas”; þara wæron syx stælhranas, ða beoð swyðe dyre mid Finnum, for ðæm hy foð þa wildan hranas mid.

(They call those deer “rein[deer]”; six of them were decoy-rein[deer], which are very dear to the Finns, for they catch the wild rein[deer] with them.)

The hran in this passage is an Anglicization of hrein.

This early use of the word did not catch on, however, and it doesn’t appear again in English until the fifteenth century, when it appears c. 1440 in the Alliterative Morte Arthure:

Than they roode by þat ryuer þat rynnyd so swythe,
Þare þe ryndez ouerrechez with reall bowghez;,
The roo and þe raynedere reklesse thare ronnen,,
In ranez and in rosers, to ryotte þam seluen.

(Then they rode by that river that ran so swiftly;,
There the trees reached over with stately boughs;,
There the roe deer and the reindeer ran reckless there,,
In bushes and in roses to amuse themselves.)

The shorter form rein, without the -deer, was also common in English once, but has faded from use.

The association of reindeer with Christmas and Santa Claus dates to early nineteenth century New York. It was Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” that firmly established the eight reindeer that pulled Santa’s sleigh in the cultural consciousness, but Moore was not the first to depict a reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh. In 1821, New York printer William Gilley published a booklet that included an anonymous poem with the lines:

Old Santeclaus with much delight,
His reindeer drives this frosty night,,
O’er chimney tops, and tracks of snow,,
To bring his yearly gifts to you.

The drawing accompanying the poem shows a single reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh. 

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Sources:

The Alliterative Morte Arthure. New York: Burt Franklin, 1976, lines 920–23. Lincoln Cathedral 91 (Thornton Manuscript), fols. 53a-98b. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. TEAMS has a version with modernized spelling and glossing that’s easier to read.

The Children’s Friend, number 3. “A New-Year’s Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve,” part 3, New York: William B. Gilley, 1821, 1. Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. hrān, n.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. rein-der, n.

Orosius. King Alfred’s Orosius, part 1. Henry Sweet, ed. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1883, 18. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, third edition, December 2009, s. v. rein, n.2; reindeer, n.

Whipp, Deborah. “The History of Santa’s Reindeer.” Altogetherchristmas.com. n. d.

Image credit: Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

yttrium

Two samples of sublimed, dendritic yttrium with a one-centimeter yttrium cube for comparison

13 December 2024

Yttrium is a chemical element with atomic number 39 and the symbol Y. It is a silvery transition metal. It is used in the production of numerous electronic devices, notably in the phosphors in LED lights and formerly in cathode-ray tubes. Yttrium is toxic, and exposure to airborne yttrium dust can cause lung disease in humans.

Yttrium was the first of several elements discovered at and named for the quarry at Ytterby, Sweden. The others being ytterbium, erbium, and terbium. It was first identified by chemist Johan Gadolin in 1794, but he did not propose a name for the element. Three years later, Anders Gustav Ekeberg confirmed the discovery and proposed the Swedish name Ytterjord and the Latin name Yttria:

Den bör då namngifvas, och dårvid tyckes vara vigaft at hafva affeende på defs första upfinningsort, emedan hvarken af upfinnarens namn, ej heller af någon jordens egenskap kan formeras en nog kort och för flere språk passande benåmning. Den kan då heta Ytterjord, på latin Yttria, hvarigenom den både i ljud och bokståfver år fri från tvetydighet och förblandning.

(It should then be named, and in that case it seems to be appropriate to refer to its first place of discovery, because neither the name of the discoverer, nor any property of the earth can be formed into a name that is sufficiently short and suitable for several languages. It can then be called Ytterjord, in Latin Yttria, whereby both in sound and letters it is free from ambiguity and confusion.)

The -ium ending was subsequently added to conform to the standard practice of naming metals.

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Sources:

Ekeberg, A. G. “Ytterligare undersökningar av den svarta stenarten frail Ytterby och den dari fundna egna jord.” Kungliga Svenska Vetenskapsakademiens Handlingar 18.2, April–June 1797, 156–164 at 163. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gadolin, Johan. “Undersökning af en svart tung Stenart ifrån Ytterby Stenbrott I Roslagen.” Kongliga Vetenskapsakademiens Nya Handlingar, 15.2, April–June 1794, 137–55. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. yttrium, n.

wassail

“Origin of the Wassail-Bowl,” James Godwin, 1865. Rowena presenting a drinking cup to Vortigern.

11 December 2024

Wassail and wassailing are associated with Yuletide revels and overindulgence, although many people are a bit fuzzy on what the words mean. That’s somewhat understandable as the words have a variety of meanings. Wassail started out as a simple greeting, became a drinking toast, then became the drink and revelry itself, as well as songs associated with drinking, then carols and songs sung by people begging for drinks on Twelfth Night, and finally Christmas carols as we know them today.

The word comes from the Old English wes hal (and ves heill in Old Norse), meaning be in good health, a traditional greeting. For instance, an anonymous homily, HomS 24.1 (Scragg), copied sometime between 1000-1025 C..E., translates Pilate’s greeting to Christ, “Ave, rex Iudeorum” (Hail, King of the Jews) as “Wes hal, þu Iudea cyning.” In Middle English this became wæs hæil.

Neither the Old English nor the Old Norse phrase was especially associated with drinking. The first known association of wassail specifically with drinking appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) 6.12, written c. 1136, in an account of the wedding feast of Rowena and Vortigern. The text is primarily Latin, but the was heil and drinc heil are quoted in Old English. Historians question whether Rowena and Vortigern actually ever existed, but if they did, she would have been speaking an early form of Old English and he an early form of Welsh:

Accedens deinde propius regi, flexis genibus dixit: “Lauerd king, wasseil.”

At ille, uisa facie puellae, ammiratus est tantum eius decorem et incaluit. Denique interrogauit interpretem suum quid dixerat puella et quid ei respondere debebat. Cui interpres dixit: “Vocauit te dominum regem et uocabulo salutationis honorauit. Quod autem respondere debes est ‘drincheil.’”

Respondens deinde Vortegirnus “drincheil,” iussit puellam potare cepitque ciphum de manu ipsius et osculatus est eam et potauit. Ab illo die usque in hodiernum mansit consuetudo illa in Britannia quia in conuiuiis qui potat ad alium dicit “wasseil,” qui uero post illum recipit potum respondet “drincheil.”

(Going up to the king, she curtseyed and said: “Lord king, wasseil.”

At the sight of the girl’s face he was amazed by her beauty and inflamed with desire. He asked his interpreter what the girl had said and what he should reply. He answered: “She called you lord king and honored you with a word of greeting. You should reply ‘drincheil.’”

Then Vortigern, giving the reply “drincheil,” told the girl to drink, took the goblet from her hand with a kiss and drank. From that day forward it has been the custom in Britain that at feasts a drinker says to his neighbor “wasseil” and the one who receives the drink after him replies “drincheil.”)

Fans of J. R. R. Tolkien will recognize a similar scene in The Two Towers, where Eomer greets Theoden with “Westu Théoden hál!” (Health to you, Theoden!) Tolkien invented various languages for the peoples of his fictional Middle-Earth, but when it cam to the Rohirrim, he simply used Old English to represent their speech.

Some decades after Geoffrey wrote his history, Laȝamon’s Brut (written sometime before 1200, with an extant copy—British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix—from c.1275) provides an English-language account of the wedding feast:

Reowen sæt a cneowe; & cleopede to þan kinge.
& þus ærest sæide; in Ænglene londe.
Lauerd king wæs hæil; For þine kime ich æm uæin.
Þe king þis ihærde; & nuste what heo seide.
þe king Vortigerne; fræinede his cnihtes sone.
what weoren þat speche; þe þat maide spilede.
Þa andswarede Keredic; a cniht swiðe sellic.
he wes þe bezste latimer; þat ær com her.
Lust me nu lauerd king; & ich þe wulle cuðen.
whæt seið Rouwenne; fæirest wimmonnen.
Hit beoð tiðende; inne Sæxe-londe.
whær-swa æi duȝeðe gladieð of drenche;
þat freond sæiðe to freonde; mid fæire loten hende.
Leofue freond wæs hail; Þe oðer sæið Drinc hail.

(Rowena knelt and spoke to the king and rising said, in the English tongue, “Lord King, wassail. I am glad you have come.” The king heard this, but did not understand what she said. King Vortigern then asked his knights what were those words that the maid had said. Then Keredic, a very excellent knight, answered; he was the best interpreter of those who had come there, “Listen to me now, my lord king, and I will tell what Rowena, the fairest of women, said. It is a custom in Saxon lands whenever a company is glad of drink, that a friend says to a friend with a pleasant look, ‘Dear friend, wassail.’ The other says, ‘Drink hail.’”)

A later manuscript that contains the poem, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C.xiii, copied c. 1300, reads wassayl rather than wæs hæil. The Old English singular imperative form for the verb to be is wes, but in Middle English the inflection changed, and the imperative became identical to the infinitive be—as it is in modern English. Thus the shift from wes hæil to wassayl or wassail; as wes lost its meaning as an independent element in the phrase, the two words were combined into one.

Around this time, wassail began to be used for the drink itself. The poem Havelok the Dane, written c. 1300, has:

Wyn and ale deden he fete,
And made[n] hem [ful] glade and bliþe, .
Wesseyl ledden he fele siþe.

(Wine and ale did he celebrate, and made him very glad and blithe, wassail [did] he partake many times.)

And the noun was verbed as well. To wassail was to toast, and by extension to drink and carouse. Also from Havelok:

Hwan he haueden þe kiwing deled,
And fele siþes haueden wosseyled,
And with gode drinkes seten longe.

(When he had finished the feast and had wassailed many times and sat long with good drinks.)

Around the turn of the seventeenth century wassail came to be used for general drinking and revelry, especially drinking on Twelfth Night or Epiphany. Shakespeare records the following exchange that criticizes such carousing in Hamlet 1.4: 

   Ham[let]. The king doth wake to night, and takes his rowse,
Keepes wassell and the swaggering vp-spring reeles:
And as he draines his drafts of Rennish downe,
The kettle drumme, and trumpet, thus bray out
The triumph of his Pledge.
   Hora[tio]: Is it a custome?
   Ham. I marry ist,
But to my minde, though I am natiue heere
And to the manner borne, it is a custome
More honoured in the breach, then the obseruance.
This heavy headed reuealle east and west
Makes vs tradust, and taxed of other nations,
They clip vs drunkards, and with Swinish phrase
Soyle our addition, and indeede it takes
From our atchieuements, though perform’d at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.

Around this time wassail also came to mean a song sung, especially while drinking or in return for receiving drink, hence carolers going house to house, singing wassails and receiving drinks in return. Fletcher and Beaumont use this sense ironically in their 1607 play The Woman Hater:

Haue you done your wassayl, tis a handsome drowsie dittie Ile assure yee, now I had as leeue here a Catte cry, when her taile is cut off, as heere these lamentations, these lowsie loue-layes, these bewaylements.

But within a few decades wassail, and particularly the wassail bowl, or drinking vessel, was being associated with door-to-door Christmas caroling, as evidenced by this carol published in 1688:

Sweet Master of this Habitation,
with my Mistriss, be so kind,
As to grant an Invitation,
if we may this favour find:
To be no invited in,
Then in mirth we will begin
Many of sweet and pleasant Song,
Which doth to this time belong,
Let e'ry Loyal honest Soul,
Contribute to the Wassel Bowl.

In parts of southern England wassailing is drinking to the health of orchards and fruit trees on Twelfth Night. Robert Herrick’s 1648 Hesperides makes note of the practice:

Wassaile the Trees, that they may beare
You many a Plum, and many a Peare:
For more or lesse fruits they will bring,
As you doe give them Wassailing.

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Sources:

Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher. The Woman Hater. London: R. R. for John Hodges, 1607, 3.1, sig. E1v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“A Carrol for Twelfth-Day.” In A Cabinet of Choice Jewels: or, The Christians Joy and Gladness. Set Forth in Sundry Pleasant New Christmas Carrols. London: J. M. for J. Deacon, 1688, sig. B1v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Michael D. Reeve, ed. Neil Wright, trans. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2007, Book 6, 128–29. JSTOR.

Herrick, Robert. Hesperides. London: John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, 1648, sig. X4r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Laȝamon. Brut. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, eds. Early English Text Society. London: Oxford University Press, 1963, lines 7140–53, 370. British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

———. Brut. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, eds. Early English Text Society. London: Oxford University Press, 1963, lines 6690–703, 371. British Library, MS Cotton Otho C.xiii. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. wassail, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. wassail, n., wassail, v.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke (Second Quarto). London: I. R. for N. L., 1604, sig. D1r. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Skeat, Walter, W., ed. The Lay of Havelok the Dane. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1868, 38, lines 1244–46, and 47, lines 1736–38. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Two Towers. New York: Ballantine, 1965, 155.

Image credit: James Godwin, 1865. Illustrated London News, 23 December 1865, 624. Public domain image.

carol / carrel / corral

“Carols,” Nikiforos Lytras, 1872, oil on canvas

9 December 2024

Why do we call them Christmas carols? The word carol was introduced into English by the Normans and comes from the Old French carole. It shares a root with words like chorus and choir. But in what may be surprising to most, the first English carols were not just songs; they were also dances. After all, in ancient Greek drama the chorus both sang and danced, and Terpsichore, note the ending of the name, was the muse of dancing. Nor were early uses of the word associated particularly with Christmas.

Carol is first recorded in English use around 1300, and in these early citations it refers to a ring-dance. One of the earliest instances of the word is in the poem Kyng Alisaunder:

Mury is in June, and hote, verreyment,
Faire is carole of maide gent,
Bothe in halle, and eke in tent.

(It is merry in June, and hote, to be honest,
Fair is the carol of the noble maid,
Both in the hall, and also in the tent.)

Robert Mannyng’s devotional poem Handlyng Synne from 1303 records both the noun and verb in the sense of both singing and dancing:

Þese wommen ȝede and tolled here oute
wyþ hem to karolle þe cherche aboute.
Beune ordeyned here karollyng;
Gerlew endyted what þey shuld syng:
Þys ys þe karolle þat þey sunge,
As telleþ þe latyn tunge.

[A Latin version of the song follows.]

(These women went and enticed her out to carol with them about the church. Beune ordained their caroling; Gerlew wrote what they should sing: this is the carol that they sung, as told in the Latin tongue.)

General merrymaking was associated with carols from the beginning. The poem Cursor Mundi, also written about the same time, refers to:

Caroles, iolites, and plaies,
Ic haue be haldyn and ledde in ways,
Oþer men dedis oft i demyd,
þar-in my aun folis yemyd,
Poer and ald and men vnwyse
Til hethyng haue i driuen oft-sythes.

(I have engaged in and led in ways carols, jollities, and games; I did often deem that other men—poor and old and unwise men—took heed therein of my own folly until time and time again I have driven off the scorn.)

These early uses were not, however, particularly associated with Christmas. That association began in the early sixteenth century. Court financial records tell us that Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII, spent in December 1502:

It[e]m to Cornishe for setting of a carralle upon Cristmas day in reward . . . xiij s, iiij d.

And the early English printer Wynkyn de Worde published a book in 1521 titled Christmasse Carolles. Unfortunately, only an incomplete copy of this book survives, containing just two carols relating to hunting and bringing the game into the Christmas feast. So we don’t know what other Christmas songs might have been included. But over time, this association of carols with Christmas grew stronger, eventually driving out carols and caroling at other seasons.

The early use of the word to mean a ring dance also gives us another modern word, the library carrel. The use of carol to refer to a ring or enclosure also dates to the early fourteenth century. Robert Mannyng, whose Handlyng Synne is quoted above, also used the word in his Chronicle to refer to Stonehenge. And there are numerous medieval glosses of the Latin pluteus with the word carol. In classical Latin a pluteus is a shed or enclosure, particularly one used during a siege to protect the soldiers, but in medieval Latin had also come to refer to a monk’s work space (the medieval equivalent of the modern cubicle). We see the Latin carola used to refer to a monk’s “cubicle” in the thirteenth-century Customary of Saint Peter, Westminster:

De carolis vero in claustro habendis hanc consideracionem habere debent, quibus committitur claustri tutela, ut videlicet celerarius forinsecus aut intrinsecus, vel infirmarius, aut camerarius, seu alii fratres qui raro in claustro resident suas carolas in claustro non habeant; sed neque aliqui fratres, nisi in scribendo, vel illuminando, aut tantem notando communitati aut eciam sibimet ipsis proficere sciant.

(As for those having carols in the cloister, they must take into account this consideration, to whom the keeping of the cloister is committed, so that the external or internal steward, or the infirmary, or the chamberlain, or other brothers who rarely reside in the cloister, do not have their carols in the cloister; but neither do any of the brethren who know how to benefit the community, or even themselves, except in writing, or illuminating, or recording.)

This sense of the word starts appearing in English use in the late sixteenth century, making the shift from monasteries to libraries and universities by the end of the nineteenth century.

The corral for animals is also ultimately from the same Indo-European root, but that particular modern English word comes to us from Spanish America in the late sixteenth century.

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Sources:

Christmasse Carolles. London: Wynken de Worde, 1521. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Customary of the Benedictine Monasteries of Saint Augustine, Canterbury, and Saint Peter, Westminster, vol. 2 of 2. Edward Maunde Thompson, ed. London: Harrison and Sons for the Henry Bradshaw Society, 1904, 165. Archive.org.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. carola, carolus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Furnivall, Frederick J., ed. Roberd of Brunnè’s Handlyng Synne. London: J. B. Nichols and Sons for the Roxburghe Club, 1862, lines 9041–46, 280. Archive.org.

Kyng Alisaunder. In Henry Weber, ed. Metrical Romances of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries, vol. 1. Edinburgh: George Ramsay, 1810, lines 1844–46, 80. Archive.org.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. carole, n.

Morris, Richard, ed. Cursor Mundi, vol. 3 of 4. Early English Text Society. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1874–93, lines 28146–151, 1553. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

Nicolas, Nicholas Harris, ed. Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York: Wardrobe Accounts of Edward the Fourth. London: William Pickering, 1830, 83. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. carol, n., carrel, n.2., corral, n.

Image credit: Nikiforos Lytras, 1872. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.