Things I didn't know I didn't know

[shewhomust]

Until I read this, it had never occurred to me to wonder about the etymology of the French word septentrional, northern:

...the edges of every map are inscribed with the stations of the sun's daily journey rather than the points of the modern compass: Couchant (the setting sun, west); Orient (the rising sun, east); Midi (noon); and Septentrion (north, from the seven stars of the constellation Ursa Major).

Isn't that lovely? The north, the land of the seven stars...

The information comes from Simon Loftus's book Puligny Montrachet, and the maps he is describing are those contained in Le Terrier de la Seigneurie de Puligny, a detailed registry of land holdings in that village in Burgundy compiled in the 1740s. Two huge volumes of lists of who owns what, and a third of maps - very pretty maps, to judge by the portion reproduced on the endpapers, with the coloured strips of the vineyards dotted with the houses of the village, with crosses and ponds and other landmarks. I can't think why the internet doesn't know about it (or, if it knows, isn't telling).

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Oh, we have those too - they turn up in one of the Mary Poppins books, for example.

But these seven stars are the Plough, which I suppose you never see in Australia: there's a pub near here called the Seven Stars, with the Plough on its sign.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

They look similar (I doubted my memory so I checked) and some of the stories overlap a bit, which is why I mentioned it.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I didn't know about the overlap - though seven sisters is seven sisters, I suppose. Sometimes they're cliffs. (And in London the Seven Sisters were elm trees, according to Wikipedia - I didn't know that, either.)