Talk of the devil: OE Unhold and its Germanic cognates

This essay is a comprehensive investigation of the OE adjective unhold 'hostile, unfaithful' and its Germanic cognates. In its nominalised form, this adjective denotes the devil with the connotation of 'enemy, adversary', which was the very original meaning of Hebrew satan. The present study traces the etymology of the Germanic Primaeradjektiv *hultha- 'gracious, kind, loyal, faithful' and then discusses its un-derivative *unhultha- and its attestations in Old English, Old Saxon and Old High German, showing the glossographical usage of this derivative and its modest, short lived diffusion in English, whereas in German speaking areas it seems to have enjoyed a wider and longer circulation up to the present day. Finally, the relationship between Gmc. *unhultha- and the corresponding Latin (or, in the case of Gothic, Greek) lemmata will be discussed and an attempt made to ascertain whether such a relationship can be described in terms of lexical borrowing and if so, the exact nature of the borrowing process the Germanic formation underwent. As this study shows, such a process cannot be easily pigeon-holed within one clear-cut category of lexical borrowing and one that is applicable to all the Germanic languages; for they may have implemented different strategies of borrowing and possibly at different times.