The plenitude of the English lexicon is, let’s be honest, a burden. A joyous burden, perhaps, for those of us who delight in romping in the garden of words and in discovering literary trouvailles in ancient, dusty, vermiculated, foxed tomes, but – in its demands on memory and resources – it is a fardel all the same.
You know this word, fardel, perhaps? If you do, it is almost certainly from one place: the most famous soliloquy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a classic of existential introspection – and one-quarter as full of quaint and curious words as Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” How many of these have you seen in nature: contumely, disprized, quietus, bodkin, fardels, bourn, orisons? Unlike Carroll, who invented 28 words for his nonsense poem (one of the great pieces of verse in the language, thank you very much), Shakespeare invented none of those seven gems – though he is known to have confected the occasional lexeme.
Well, anyway. The sentence it’s in is this:
Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
So you can guess that fardel means something like ‘burden’. And it does: a bundle, a load, a pack. Bearing fardels is the kind of travail from which one might willingly seek quarter – by which I do not mean another load of goods from the quartermaster.
If you speak French, this word might ring a bell: fardeau is a common enough French word, and yes, it’s just the modern French realization of the Old French word that was ported over to English unchanged as fardel. I do like the first definition of fardeau from Littré:
Chose plus ou moins pesante destinée à être transportée ou élevée soit par l’homme, soit par les bêtes de somme, soit par un véhicule. Les fardeaux les plus extraordinaires que l’on ait élevés en France sont les deux pierres qui forment le fronton de la colonnade du Louvre.
Which, for those not conversant in French, means
More or less heavy thing for transporting or lifting by humans, by beasts of burden, or by a vehicle. The most extraordinary fardels to have been lifted in France are the two stones that form the pediment of the colonnade of the Louvre.
Definitions further down in Littré include “Ce qui pèse moralement” (That which weighs morally) and “Ce qui exige beaucoup de soin et engage la responsabilité” (That which demands much care and involves responsibility). In other words, all the crap we have to put up with every day. As the old revival hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” goes, “Are we weak and heavy-laden, Cumbered with a load of care?” Such fardels are not all stone pediments; some are more abstractly rocky impediments.
So a fardel can be, say, the two dozen bottles of wine I hefted back from the car after our latest trip to Niagara wineries, but it can also be the burdens of such duties and liabilities as are involved in earning the money to pay for all those bottles, not to mention the responsibility of driving the car there and back on the Queen Elizabeth Way, which – frankly – was the most onerous fardel of the whole trip. (If you’ve driven on any of the expressways around Toronto, you know what I’m talking about.)
And where did this fardel come from? French got it from Spanish, where it started as fardo ‘pack, bundle’, and it is commonly – thought not universally – thought that Spanish got it from Arabic fard ‘one of a pair’, referring to a saddlebag (and subsequently fardo came to refer to the pair of saddlebags). So you might say that, given that a fardel was first a half, if you could halve your fardel that would give you quarter.
But there’s an easier way to get quarter with a fardel. All you need is the other sense of fardel, which was used through the 1800s but is in desuetude now: it comes from Old English féorða dǽl, ‘fourth deal’, i.e., ‘fourth part’; it is cognate with German Viertel and Swedish fjärdedel and, like them, it means ‘quarter’.
So we have, as it were, two fardels. (Two bits, or not two bits?) But if we are to take one of them, I would say the Shakespearean one is the better half. It’s worth the effort, for those who want the decoration.
Sesquiotica 