The Origin of framea

Abstract

In the Germania Tacitus repeatedly mentions framea as a term for a spear. The word occurs also in the thirteenth satire by Juvenal, and among the names of old weapons in Gellius. Later it appears in Eucherius (5th century), Gregory of Tours (6th century),l and Isidore (7th century). Tacitus states (Germ. 6.1) that it was a javelin (hasta) of the Germanic people; according to Isidore (Orig. 18.6) it was a sword: framea gladius est. Eucherius gives both meanings.2 Since Tacitus uses the word only in his Germania, and since he states explicitly, hastas vel ipsorum vocabulo frameas gerunt, it has been generally accepted that it is a Germanic word; but the original Germanic form which Latin authors rendered as framea is still uncertain and its etymology still unknown. No word wholly identical with it exists in the living Germanic languages or in older Germanic records. Several different attempts have been made to reconstruct forms corresponding to it. W. Wackernagel assumed3 that the protoform of framea was a derivative of the Gothic verb hramjan 'to crucify, fasten to', and thought that a correspondence fr ' hr was supported by the fact that in some manuscripts of the Lex Salica adhramire is rendered by adframire. J. Grimm and especially M. Daberkow4 supported this view. Phonetically, it is conceivable that Germanic inital hr might be replaced by fr-. There are indeed cases in which Gmc. hris rendered by frin the Romance languages; thus, OS hroc, a counterpart of modern German Rock, was borrowed into French as froc (which in turn was borrowed into English as frock and back into German as Frock). But neither *hramja nor any possible counterpart of it exists in the Germanic languages; and the meaning of this stem is very far from that of framea. K. Miillenhoff6 attempted to derive framea from Gmc. frama-; cf. the preposition Engl. from, the adverb Gothic fram 'farther', OS OHG fram 'away', the adjective OE fram 'vorwairtsdringend, kuihn, keck, dreist', and the verb ON fremja, OE fremman, OS fremmian, OHG fremmen 'vorwartsbringen, vollfuiihren'. But here again we have the same shortcomings: there is no Gmc. noun *framja, and it is difficult to connect these words semantically. In spite of this, Mullenhoff's hypothesis has been accepted by W. Krause.6 The latter has constructed a theory that Germanic names of weapons formed an ideological unity meaning