Edie
I held my wine glass up so that it reflected the incandescent light beaming out from the kitchen behind me. The glass was getting cold in my hand, and I shivered, pulling my wool scarf around me. Ahead of me was all darkness, and beyond that, the North Atlantic Ocean. I was close enough to the water that I could smell the saltiness in the air, but my cabin was tucked far enough into the hills that the roof sustained minimal salt and wind damage. It was still strange to think of it as my cabin.
There were four neat rooms inside, all with stone exposed instead of plaster-covered walls, which I preferred. The east side of the house held the bedroom, bathroom, and study, while just behind me, the kitchen, dining area, and living room were one great room opposite the others, roughly the same size as the aforementioned three rooms combined. The kitchen had an old Aga stove that Frank loved to cook on, and I shared the house with him, free of charge, except for the full Irish breakfasts he made us every morning to sustain us through a long day of wind-whipped winter walking and amateur archaeology. The rest of the year, he lived on a boat that he had been meaning to fix up, and while it was good enough for his needs, I worried about him this time of year when every morning was frosted over, a remnant of the unimaginably cold night before. I suppose it was a little less frigid on the canals of London than here on the North Atlantic, but something told me he liked to get away from the city as much as I liked having him with me.
We had always shared everything freely, without counting debts owed or expecting recompense. Our sharing went beyond the material, comprising our deepest thoughts, feelings, and most bizarre impulses. We shared with that rare freedom and abandon that isn’t bound by propriety, self-consciousness, distrust, or sociopolitical correctness. This type of rare and raw truthfulness can only be shared with a true soulmate or best friend. But there was one thing I had been keeping to myself, from everyone. Even him.
I saw the glowing tip of his cigarette and heard the crunch of his boots on the icy gravel drive before I saw him coming around the corner of the house, wrapped in a massive hand-knit scarf, some old Christmas gift from an ex-boyfriend, I thought.
“I was thinking about the etymology of Imbolc,” he said, without preamble.
“Mmhmm, I poured you something to warm you against the chill,” I said with a coy grin. He grabbed it from me sprightly and went on, getting more and more talkative the more he imbibed, exciting himself about the conversation. I could see this was revving up the big linguistics nerd in him. “Do tell.” I raised my glass in a motion of cheers.
“You say Imbolc is a proto-Celtic festival, so the language of it has to be older than what we have in the form of early Gaelic from fifteen hundred years ago. Even if medieval Gaelic language speakers heard ‘Imbolc’ in the core sounds of the word, they still would have just designated the meaning to fit their own understanding.”
I stared at him blankly. He tried again after a long drag of his cigarette. “OK, I mean, if the culture was assimilating, they wouldn’t have given the celebration a new name altogether; they would have stuck as close to the original name as possible to avoid confusion. Like, think of Easter sounding just like the pagan spring festival of Oster. Capisce?”
“Right.” I agreed, dizzied from jumping from modern English to ancient Gaelic to Italian in one sentence. Frank was like a language acrobat.
He jumped into the air a bit as he excitedly began again, fulfilling that acrobatic image.
“And so the translation would have just shifted through time as the proto-Celtic languages were lost but the traditions and festivals passed through time and culture. Which means, the question is really what words in proto-Celtic languages make sounds like im-bolc because it’s almost certainly not derived from the medieval Gaelic emmolc, meaning goat’s milk, as is currently believed. Catch my drift?”
I nodded, and he started to pace as he continued. “Well, I think the etymology of some of these festival names is pointing us in a bit of a specific direction. The furthest we can go back linguistically is to the word emholg, from the Indo-European root hmelg, which relates to purification. So maybe with Imbolc, we’re looking at a purification ritual, which would fit with the stone circle sites you’ve described to me.”
“That’s true,” I agreed. “And the timing within the wheel of the year seems right. Maybe they needed to purify themselves for the same reason we work out and drink green juice in the New Year.” Frank nodded excitedly and took his first, long sip of the whiskey I had poured for him. “And of course, February was the holy month of purification for the Romans, and they actually used goat’s milk in some of the rituals, so it makes sense that it would be muddled together or rather…conflated through time,” I pointed out as I grabbed the untouched, burning, hand-rolled cigarette from his left hand and took a puff myself.
“I thought Ireland was the only place in Europe never invaded by the Romans?” Frank asked.
“It is,” I responded as I exhaled smoke. “That reminds me, I need to tell you something I’ve been thinking about.”
Ignoring me, he continued, “But the Romans did go to Scotland. Of course, they only made it to the lowlands before they were terrified, ran back to England, and built Hadrian’s Wall, but there still would have been contact and an exchange of ideas.”
I cleared my throat again and prepared myself for his response to my next revelation.
“I wanted to tell you…I’ve been meaning to mention—”
“What? Just say it! Out with it.” He stood, facing me, hand on his hip, and I looked beyond him out into the blackness of the sea and what was on the other side of it. Waiting. The answer to the book’s completion was waiting for me over the horizon. I just knew it.
“I think Sully and the research he is referencing are wrong.” I paused to let the weight of saying it out loud settle. It felt worse than I had anticipated.
Frank raised one eyebrow again, this time even higher. “Hmm?”
“I…I think I’m going to have to rewrite a section of his book on the rituals at the standing stones—I mean, in addition to finishing the etymology bit we’re talking about. I think we need to—I mean I need to—” I was clearly struggling with my confidence and articulation and started to wring my hands.
“So what are you asking me to do?” Frank asked impatiently.
“What I’m saying is, I think you’re right. I think the etymology of the festivals is derived from Scotland. I think early Scottish and Irish people island-hopped and exchanged ideas that informed the rituals they performed.” I pointed to an invisible map in the air of the North Atlantic and Irish Sea, the bodies of water that lay before us. “There was a series of small islands off the coasts of the larger ones. The receding ice of the Holocene, which invited ancient people to settle here eight thousand years ago, would have revealed hundreds of, if not more than a thousand, habitable islands.”
Frank drank the rest of his whiskey from the small glass and turned to look out into oblivion with me. The wind sent an icy gust up from the ocean, and he wrapped the giant French scarf around the both of us.
“Most of those islands are here, on the western side of Scotland, just as accessible from Ireland,” I said.
Frank made a noise deep in his throat. “Damned ferries,” he said.
“Just as accessible with proper boat technology…maybe not quite as accessible given current ferry timetables.” I laughed. “The answer is out there; I know it.”
“Isn’t there a standing theory—I was reading about it—that the creation of farming in the Neolithic didn’t render people quite as sedentary or stationary as we thought?” Frank asked.
“Right! I believe that we currently drastically underestimate the extent of movement and boat technology of the people who built the stone circles. I think they were worldly. If they picked up and moved their Welsh blue stones to the south of England for Stonehenge, then why wouldn’t their temple complexes be larger, comprising multiple islands with many structures?”
Frank nodded, eyes narrowed for understanding.
“And I think I can prove it…if we go.”
“We need more wine!” Frank chimed in as he turned to make his way to the kitchen and the wine rack that Sully and his family had so conveniently left stocked. I laughed, and suddenly my insecurity and fear were allayed.
“So we’re taking a trip?” Frank asked as he came back out of the house, equipped with a bottle of Spanish red. He poured his little rocks glass to the rim and refilled my wine glass, which I had been practicing my speech on earlier.
“I’m asking if you will go with me and be my research partner,” I said and held my glass up to toast him. “I’m also asking if you think I’m crazy to do this. I’m not even thirty, and Sully’s the most esteemed Neolithic archaeologist in the world.”
“Then I would trust him.” Frank spoke certainly as he touched his glass to mine. Now it was my turn to raise my eyebrows. “You should trust him for choosing you to finish his work, my dear.” He stared back at me, glass raised in the air, the light refracting through it from the house turning the wine to melted rubies in a cup. “Here’s to hunting some spirals,” he toasted.
“To new adventures,” I added.
“Sláinte!” we said simultaneously. And we drank.