Words and Oxen and Maps: Making Connections
A while back, I was reading something for work (a historical account of La Salle’s travels, or an old map, or something like that) and came across an interesting word: septentrionalis. Lots of the time, I can puzzle out the meanings of titles in French or Latin, at least for books about explorers because they’re all pretty much the same few words. But I didn’t really get this one. “Sept-” means “seven,” but that didn’t seem to fit because whatever I was reading was from the 1600s, not seventeen hundred something. I shrugged it off and didn’t think about it until weeks later, when for some reason I actually looked it up.
Septentrion is an old Latin term describing the north, or northern regions. Breaking it down, you’ve got “sept-” for “seven” and “triones,” which evidently means “plow oxen.” Wait, what? How do you get “north” out of that?
Stars, that’s how. Stay with me here, I promise it’ll make sense. One of the most familiar groups of stars in the night sky is the Big Dipper — cultures around the world have described those stars and created stories around them. In addition to looking like a dipper or ladle, the same stars can also be seen as a drinking gourd, or a bear, or a bear followed by hunters, or a coffin followed by mourners, or a group of wise men, or a boar, or a chariot, or a wagon, or a plow. It’s that last one that we need to focus on. In the United Kingdom, those stars are (or at least were) commonly called the Plow; aha, there are our plowing oxen. And if you look up at the night sky, you’ll see there are seven stars in that Plow or Dipper, hence “sept.” Put them together and you have septentrion.
The Plow or Big Dipper is close to the North Star. If you’re in the UK or most of Europe (or the northern half of Asia, or North America at the Great Lakes or above), the Big Dipper is always visible in your clear night sky, and it’ll help you find north. So the stars themselves became a sort of stand-in for the idea of northerliness.
And that’s why you end up with 17th-century maps of North America, made in France, titled things like “Amerique Septentrionalis,” all because of how some people in Europe saw a handful of stars in a certain way and stuck together two Latin words to describe it. I think that’s pretty interesting.
What’s the point of this story? Well, I guess what I really wanted to convey is the idea of connectedness. An explorer’s map is tied to language and astronomy; a single word can reveal a lot about someone’s understanding of the world and the context that they’re living in. History is fascinating because of stuff like this.
