Hallows?
Monday, July 23rd by carlaI haven’t started Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yet. It will be another week before I get home to the copy that is supposed to be waiting for me, and I’m avoiding all the reviews that might include any kind of spoiler. Please don’t tell me how it ends. (I’m not worried about Harry, but I am concerned about Hagrid.)
I figured checking up on the title would be safe. The word hallow has all but died from English as a noun. I’ve seen it as a verb: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address states, “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” In that sense I understood hallowing to be something a person can do to show honor or to set something aside as holy.
In church I learned hallowed as an adjective: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”
At some point I learned that Hallowe’en was a corruption of “All Hallows Eve,” but I never quite caught on to what a hallow was in that context. I thought it was a dead person.
So when I saw the phrase “deathly hallows,” I hope I can be forgiven some confusion. Apparently I was not alone, because the folks at the Merriam-Webster dictionary site (my favorite!) updated their entry for hallows and mentioned Rowling’s novel as the cause.
Hallows, according to Merriam-Webster, are saints, shrines, or relics. But in Rowling’s book they are deathly. Hmmmm … this should be interesting. Don’t tell me …
July 23rd, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Interesting. Currently, the pastor of my church is in the middle of a series in which he is “taking apart” the Lord’s Prayer over 8 Sundays. On the second Sunday, he explained the phrase “hallowed be Thy Name” — with lots of time spent on the word “hallowed.”
I looked it up again once I got home that Sunday:
www.answers.com/hallow
hal·low (hăl’Å)
tr.v., -lowed, -low·ing, -lows.
1. To make or set apart as holy.
2. To respect or honor greatly; revere.
[Middle English halwen, from Old English hÄlgian.]
It’ll be interesting to see what you think when you finish reading the book. I’ll have to ask my grandsons, too. They have the book, and they have different colored bookmarks so they can take turns reading it!! What funny guys … finally, they have something they both want to do besides playing on the dratted Xbox!!