Friendship or fiendship: the complicated mix of loving and/or hating, (but usually complex configurations in between based on difference of expectations between ‘friends’) relationships.
Friendship or fiendship: the complicated mix of loving and/or hating, (but usually complex configurations in between based on difference of expectations between ‘friends’) relationships.
This tiny verse I thought I wrote in response to this prompt, or at least a wayof starting to have a response to it, probably is still haunted by having just read Simon Armitage’s new Gilgamesh.
I looked and longed: did not your glance intend we be embattled, my forever fiend. It's never likely that I'd find a friend in whose eyes now I find myself demeaned.
Having read it, I wrote about Simon Armitage’s new verse translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh (see it at this link). Some say (I saw it on The Guardian‘s letters page, it is not strictly a translation but a ‘version’ based on another’s translation since Armitage knows no more Akkadian than Alasdair Gray knew when he ‘translated’ Dante’s Divine Comedy. Both were dependent on others to provide suggested translations. Armitage says, in his ‘Note on the Translation’, that he looked to a recognised, but not undisputed, scholar for literal translation from which poem-making began. Gray fielded all the English (and any Scots) translations he could find to swoop among them and build from their viscera his own image of a progress from the infernal to beatitude.There is no progression in Gilgamesh. Created as foes (or fiends), they become friends under the practical education through sacred sex of Shamhat, the priestess. Here’s how I said it in that blog:
…for Gilgamesh and Enkidu, it is as if their equality was a parity in violent stength alone – needed to keep both happy expending energy in mutual combat to allow the ancient city of Uruk to thrive by its own resources, and freed of the greed of hungry superheroes, directed at it.
But if you know the poem, or as you read on, the ‘match’ no longer is one of parity of strength or violence in the heart but becomes to represent some other quality of relationship, recognised by the temple priestess and prostitute, Shamhat. When Enkidu expresses his desire, clearly implanted by the gods, to ‘stare’ Gilgamesh ‘down, be a match for his power’, Shamhat begins to persuade Enkidu that Gilgamesh has ‘prodigious strength greater than yours’, and then tells him the stories of how much more, he is, in metaphors of ‘ child’ and ‘an axe’ … both of which can be by Gilgamesh ‘loved’ and touched or hugged ‘like a wife’.Shamhat reminds Enkidu that Gilgamesh is not only the God’s chosen type of force but a force in the gaze of another:
you will see his features, set eyes on his face. His looks are striking, with a figure to be proud of. the very embodiment of manliness and vigour.
That manly vigour has other functions, of embrace for instance, is the very burden of the words of Shamhat, wise in sex and religion of the spirit and body. Her key message is that she knows ‘that a bond between you exists’. [7] From hereon it is Shamhat who in the even in the reported speech (often dream narration in this tablet) of others stresses the metaphor that links the two men in a ‘like a wife’ simile, which I see as double-edged as an Amazonian axe.Not everyone is content with the wife simile. The goddess Nimsun, the mother of Gilgamesh of whom Shamhat seems to be an earthly and mortal priestess-avatar, arranges for the temple votives like Shamhat to be for Enkidu those who ‘foster and raise him’, whilst she ‘will love him as mother would love her son. / Let Gilgamesh treat him as a brother would’. [8] The ‘brother’ relationship and nomenclature persists but is always somewhat inadequate, because its basis is always admitted as ‘chosen’ to replace an equal possibility of choosing a matching of ‘wives’ between the men. We still get other words for the other substituted, as here, especially when Ninsun urges her son to see Enkidu as a safequard to any vulnerability Gilgamesh may discover in himsel. Suddenly:
he is battle-hardened and a warrior to learn from, may he keep his companion, his 'double' safe, bring him home in one piece to the comfort of his wives. [9]
It is clear that destined foes can be instead friends, or even lovers justified by any naming of that bond. But I want rid of that word foe to replace it with ‘fiend’, which Christian thinking generalised into the demonic opposite of God and Christ, the Fiend, Satan. We can be easily mislead by the jingle used by guards to test people approaching a potentilly embattled castle or city, ‘Friend or foe’, to think that these words describing ally or enemy respectively are natural opposites, rather than twists of fate in how new words survive out of a choice of original opposites in root languages. The word foe seems to derive from a different root and by a different ‘route’ to its opposition to ‘friend‘ It is possible that we might have used instead the jingle ‘friend or fiend’, we’re fiend not stolen to satisfy the supernaturally lust gor hate. See these helpful entries on friend and fiend from the Online Etymological Dictionary (my emphases to show how tortured by happenstance their linkage is – although there appear to my eye to be slight contradictions between the entries about the origin of their opposition as words).
friend (n.): Old English freond “one attached to another by feelings of personal regard and preference,” from Proto-Germanic *frijōjands “lover, friend” (source also of Old Norse frændi, Old Danish frynt, Old Frisian friund, Dutch vriend, Middle High German friunt, German Freund, Gothic frijonds “friend”), from PIE *priy-ont-, “loving,” present-participle form of root *pri- “to love.”
Feond (“fiend,” originally “enemy”) and freondoften were paired alliteratively in Old English; both are masculine agent nouns derived from present participle of verbs, but they are not directly related to one another (see fiend). Related: Friends.
Old English feond “enemy, foe, adversary,” originally present participle of feogan “to hate,” from Proto-Germanic *fijand- “hating, hostile” (source also of Old Frisian fiand “enemy,” Old Saxon fiond, Middle Dutch viant, Dutch vijand “enemy,” Old Norse fjandi, Old High German fiant, Gothic fijands), from suffixed form of PIE root *pe(i)- “to hurt” (source also of Sanskrit pijati “reviles, scorns;” Avestan paman-, name of a skin disease; Greek pema “disaster, sorrow, misery, woe;” Gothic faian “to blame”).
As spelling suggests, the word originally was the opposite of friend (n.). Both are from the active participles of the Germanic verbs for “to love” and “to hate.” Boutkan says the “fiend” word was a Germanic analogical formation from the “friend” word. According to Bammesberger [“English Etymology”], “The long vowel in FIEND is regular. In FRIEND the vowel has been shortened; perhaps the shortening is due to compounds like FRIENDSHIP, in which the consonant group (-nds-) regularly caused shortening of the preceeding long vowel.”
Fiend at first described any hostile enemy (male and female, with abstract noun form feondscipe “fiendship”), but it began to be used in late Old English for “the Devil, Satan” (literally “adversary”) as the “enemy of mankind,” which shifted its sense to “diabolical person” (early 13c.). The old sense of the word devolved to foe, then to the imported word enemy. For spelling with -ie- see field. Meaning “devotee (of whatever is indicated),” as in dope fiend, is from 1865.
As people keep telling me, though I know it really, etymology proves nothing. Yet … yet, it opens up such potential poetry in the languge as well as indifferent verse like my own prefacing this blog. The idea of a state of ‘fiendship’ is magical to me, opening up the notion that ‘friendship’ is not a as simple as it seems. If we name a relationship covering the mutual thoughts and interactions of two or more people as a thing, then, if the world were as binary as people think it is, there ought to be its binary opposite – fiendships describing people locked in hate not love. But just as, as we grow older, we learn that love and hate are not opposities but often simultaneously possible contradictory but also complementary emotions within relationships, so we learn that only ‘friendships’ not based on simple expectations of others persist. Love and hate are not felt alone ever, except in the light of framings we expect to be mutual but nearly always are not. When two people say either I ‘love’ or ‘hate’ you to each other, they never, Ithink mean the same thing, though expectations build in each and in observers of them think they do. Likewise with friend or fiend. In a way the prompt shows how we get around this problem – we talk of good friends or bad friends to remove us from the issue, which is that the word ‘friend’ hs become an indifferent category.
We have friends, we count them even as measures of something or other, but often we feel there is something lacking (occassionally something in surplus) to to the word in some people in the eyes of another. These evaluations are rarely mutual and often this forms the germ of a widening gap between people that ends in true indifference, on one side or the other but rarely equally mutual) where friendship just ends – ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. As you grow into older age, this happens much more often and this is why the ‘enforced cheerfulness’ camp of psychologists perenially talk of the need for elders to sustain friendships, using the word usually in the kind of quantitative grip they use to hold everything of value in life. What makes a good friend may be something that changes as you grow older, but most often it changes around you and inside you with your conscious self struggling to come to terms with it in ever more refined definitions of what is ‘good’ in a friend, and what is bad in a fiend.
