Mojo, Will, & Me

And every drop cries vengeance for his death,

‘Gainst thee, fell Clifford, and thee, false Frenchwoman.

-Duke of York

King Henry The Sixth Part III                       Act I, Scene iv, Line 149

Today I’m going to try to spend the whole post on one word. We’ve done a lot of talking about all of the characters and politics that make up Will’s history plays. And it’s obvious that the Duke of York is a little ticked off here, but we’re not going to get into that. Instead, we’re going to talk about the word ‘fell’, as in ‘fell Clifford.’

Now for those of you who are knowledgeable of this particular piece of vocabulary beyond its use as the past tense of fall, or as the verb meaning to cause something to fall, this may not be interesting. But I’m going to go for it anyway. There is a third usage of fell (apparently there’s even a fourth and fifth, but I’m not going there) and it’s as an adjective. Will used it pretty famously (I think we might have even covered it in an earlier post) in Macbeth when Malcom was referring to his whole family having been slaughtered:

All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

 One fell swoop. And this is the meaning that we’re dealing with today. ‘Fell’ as an adjective is applied to something bad; very, very bad. Usually it’s referring to bad as in deadly. If you’re a Tolkien fan, like me, you’ll be well versed in the use of ‘fell’. The professor used it quite a bit in his writing. It’s a pretty archaic word now. Perhaps it’s less archaic in Britain? I really don’t know. But in this country, aside from Tolkieners and Shakespeareans, you’ll not find too many people who know this meaning, let alone any who use it.

A quick look at oxforddictionaries.com tells me that this adjective has its origins in Middle English from Old French felon meaning wicked (person). And this, presumably is where we get the word ‘felon’. So ‘fell’, an adjective meaning very, very bad is related to the words ‘felon’ and ‘felon’ which refer to bad people and bad acts. So see, it’s not really that far a stretch to find a form of ‘fell’ in our modern usage.

Now I just went and polled the only other person in the house right now, and she had no idea what the adjectival meaning of fell is. And she is an extremely well educated and well-read lady. And indeed, she brought up the one fell swoop thing and pointed out that in modern usage we employ that phrase whenever we talk about getting a bunch of stuff done, with no bad implications involved:

I stopped by work and picked up some papers, met with some students, and dropped off my expense report. I got that all done in one fell swoop.

And of course she’s right. Nothing bad done there, and yet that’s exactly the type of usage you’ll find in 2017 America. We’ve come to think of the ‘fell swoop’ as something to do with how the swoop was accomplished, not the nature of the swoop being bad. I guess that’s a little example of changing language, and I guess that’s all I’ve got for today.

Speaking of Professor Tolkien, here's an illustration from his Children Of Hurin. This is the very end of the tale where Hurin finally meets up with Morwen, and then she dies. I'm not sure if this scene qualifies as being fell, but it's certainly no bed of roses either.