Mummers and MomoeriAuthor(s): Gareth MorganSource: Folklore, Vol. 100, No. 1 (1989), pp. 84-87Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1260002 .

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Folklore, vol. 100:i, 1989 84

Mummers and Momoeri GARETH MORGAN

THREE British scholars travelling in Northern Greece in the first decade of this century, (R.M. Dawkins, J.C. Lawson, and A.J.B. Wace), revealed the survival there of primitive dramatic rituals with striking similarities to English mummers' plays.' Writing in 1933, E.K. Chambers recognised that the Greek plays were the 'closest congeners' of the English ones,2 and more recently their similarity was also stressed by Alex Helm.3 This in itself presented a problem of transmission which has never been satisfactorily faced. The passing from country to country of a piece performed by an individual- e.g. a song or story-is commonplace. For a group performance to travel from one end of Europe to another, leaving no close analogues in intervening areas, is a process much more difficult to conceive.

Beginning in 1927, a new series of mummers' plays has come to light. They are the products of the Greek-speaking population of northern Turkey (Pontus); they have been collected almost entirely from exiles who were forced to leave their homes and migrate to Greece in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War (the 'Asia Minor Catastrophe') of 1922. In 1980, a collection of over fifty of these plays was published by Samouilidis.4 Their very existence seems unknown to English-speaking students of mummers' plays.

In these plays we find considerable variation of scale and detail, but the main themes are remarkably uniform. Nearly all involve a Combat, followed by a Resurrection. One of the protagonists is nearly always a horseman (never described as Saint George). The slain hero is revived, sometimes by a Doctor, sometimes by the Bride. Subsidiary characters may include such familiar personages as Black Man, Fool, and Devil. There are hobby-horses, and wild beasts. The characters stand in full view at the back of the action until their turn comes to 'enter'. If the hero's resurrection is effected by the Doctor, the agent is the well-known nip from a flask. (If the Bride raises the dead man, she does it with a prodigious medicinal fart.) Other similarities, in a quite, may be ignored, since they are readily transferable from one dromenon to another.

It is clear that these plays deserve the closest attention by students of the English mummers' play. On another occasion I hope to present more detailed analysis and description of performance and content. For the moment, the focus of our investigation is upon the problem of transmission, which is now raised in a yet more acute form. In this essay some attempt is made to investigate the most striking similarity of all: that the Greek plays are generally known as Momoeri or some variant thereof. The resemblance to the word 'mummers' and its cognate forms in other Western European languages is too close to be coincidence. From now on, in considering these plays, and especially in considering their names, the two branches, from East and West, must be taken together.

Various etymologies for 'mummers' and 'mumming' have been proposed, none satisfactory. The most favoured has been from the word 'mime' (Greek mimos, Latin mimus). This would entail a violent and unexampled change of vowel: the semantic difficulty is almost as great. In both East and West, the mime was the chief dramatic

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MUMMERS AND MOMOERI 85

form of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. It was characterized by a realism of detail that might often result in earthy humour, and so was contrasted with the theatre of ideas comprised by classical tragedy and comedy. But it was still a respectable literary genre well into the Middle Ages. Even when it was attacked by Christian zealots, the objects of their hostility were the persuasiveness of the portrayal of immoral manners, and the influence which its lavish theatrical productions had upon society. There is no hint of a ritual plot (the few fragments we have are extremely varied). Even in the late Middle Ages, when theatres had decayed and disappeared, and mimi became the word for travelling players, their performances are given when they arrive at a great house, are not limited to certain seasons of the year, and are professional. The word 'mime' itself, in Greek and Latin, continued alive; in Greek it was firmly linked with the standard word for 'imitate'. It is impossible to imagine that 'mummer' could have developed from this source.5

It has been-suggested that the origin might have been the German mummen, 'to wear a mask.' But this meaning, and mummer itself, did not appear in German until the second half of the sixteenth century. Before this, mummen meant 'to mumble'; nor is there any earlier derivation for it in the sense 'to mask.' It seems clear that the noun is the first borrowing in German (and in Dutch, where the forms are parallel) and the verb is a back-formation, isolating one of the chief characteristics of mumming-plays, the wearing of disguise.

The derivation of the word from English 'mum' 'silent' is manifestly incorrect for a form of folk-literature so extensively dependent on words. Lack of gesture and emotion is a well-known characteristic of mumming, both in East and West.

John Minsheu (1617) suggested an origin from the ancient Greek mormo, 'a bogey- woman'. A derivative form, mormolykeion, 'bogey-wolf, is used comically by Aristophanes to mean a dramatic mask. But this must be considered a false trail. The development of rm to m, however natural in some modern English dialects, is not exemplified in the dialect of the period, far less in Greek.

Another false scent is given by Sathas' connection with either a Greek Momar or a Byzantine Bombaria.6 But the first is an 'ye olde' word probably invented by Lycophron, and appearing nowhere else; the second is a mysterious Byzantine festival involving a castanet dance.

Finally we come to the Latin Momus. Here we approach the truth, but not from the expected direction. The original meaning of the Greek momos was 'fault' 'blemish'. From this it became 'fault-finding' and finally developed connotations of abuse and scurrilous language. In the West, Momus was the Latin form of the trait, personified into a minor deity. As such, he may appear in academic and literary products; but there is no hint of any popular use that could have been adopted into so low-level an entertainment as mummers' plays. In the East, the situation is very different. The word itself has survived unchanged in one modern dialect (that of Oenoe, in Pontus) in the sense of 'fool.' Its cognates, however, momphe and memphomai, are the standard words, with a continuous history since antiquity, for 'blame' as noun and verb. The Pontic names, Momo(y)eri, Momoera, Momo(y)eria, etc., are all normal dialect developments of Momoyeri. This is a regularly formed compound meaning 'scurrilous old men'. The second element, yeri, 'old men', is the standard name for performers in such Greek dromena. In Skyros, the mummers are known simply as yeri. In Macedonia, they are

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86 GARETH MORGAN

Baboyeri, 'senile womanish old men'; in the Cyclades, Kukuyeri, 'cuckoo (crazy) old men'; in Thrace, Kaloyeri, 'good old

men', 'monks'. Such compounds are known from

antiquity. The Septuagint has eschatoyeros, 'extremely old man', and early Byzantine ecclesiastical Greek has lyssoyeros, 'rabid old man'.

The Western words, whose derivation has long been disputed, must now be seen as descendants of the Greek word, whose sense is clear. By the same reasoning, the mummers' plays of the West must be derived from the mummers' plays of Greece.

We are left with the problem of transmission. Interesting evidence can be derived from a study of the early distribution of the words in Western Europe. The first citations are from Lille, in north-east France. They come from municipal regulations. In 1263, 'people who go mumming must not be received' in 1395, 'it is forbidden to go mumming at night in any mask.' In 1454, there is similar mention from Therouanne, 35 miles to the west of Lille, of 'people who go mumming in winter-time'. Not until 1525 is there a citation from anywhere else in France. In Italian, Venetian references begin from about 1500; citations become very frequent in sixeenth-century Venice, with its strong traditions of carnival, regatta, and masquerade. The first English use was in 1502. The first to use the word in German appears to be Martin Luther, in 1578. About the same time, the word is found in Spanish writers. The implications are clear. For the first two centuries of its Western existence, the cognates of 'mummer' are confined to Flanders, and specifically to the town of Lille.7

For no place in North-West Europe could the reason be more obvious. The Counts of Flanders played a leading role in the Crusades, a role so prominent that they sometimes spent more time in the Eastern Mediterranean than they did at home. During the years from 1214 to 1244 the de facto ruler of Flanders was the Countess Joanna of Constantinople. Her great-grandfather was Count Thierry, who had joined the Second Crusade, and spent twenty years in the East. Her grandfather, Count Philip, died at the siege of Acre during the Third Crusade. Her father, Baudouin, had led the largest contingent in the Fourth Crusade, and had become the first Latin Emperor of Constantinople in 1204. He had been succeeded by her uncle, Peter, and her two cousins, Robert and Baudouin II. We have the names of many Flemish lords and knights who followed their lieges to the East. Some of them won fiefs in Greek lands. During the century and more of Frankish rule in the Morea, the barony of Veligosti was held by the Valaincourts de Mons; the Barony of Vostitsa by the family of Hugh de Lille; the Barony of Kalavryta by Otho de Tournay and his descendants; above all, the Seigneury of Thebes, which sometimes coincided with the Princedom of Morea, was held by the Falkenbergs de St. Omer. All these names, and many others less prominent in the affairs of Greece, come from a circle of forty miles radius, with Lille as its centre.

Traffic was not all one way. We know of a fleet of seven thousand men who returned from Constantinople not long after the conquest. Baudouin II came back to Flanders between 1236 and 1240 to recruit more adventurers. When the end of the ill-fated Latin empire came in 1261, and when, in the following century, the Latin lords of Morea were expelled, the flow back to the homelands, however alien they now seemed, was inevitable.

The Countess Joanna had rebuilt the city of Lille, which had been destroyed in war with France in 1213, and had made it one of the capitals of Flanders. Of all the cities of North-West Europe, this was the one most likely in the thirteenth century to have regular contact with the Greek East. Now that we know the origin of mummers' plays, it is highly appropriate that the first records of their Western existence come from Lille.

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MUMMERS AND MOMOERI 87

The mechanism of the transmission can only be guessed at. Did Flemish soldiers learn to be mummers in Greece and bring the play back? Or did the Greek retainers and the Gasmuli (the children of Franks by Greek women) follow their lords when they returned to the West? Nor do we know how it was spread, though Lille's preeminence in the woollen trade made contacts with England and Venice easy. These questions may succumb to future research. For now, we can say that Western mummers' plays come from Greek mummers' plays; and that the likeliest time and place for this borrowing was in thirteenth-century Flanders.

Department of Classics, University of Texas at Austin

NOTES

1. R. M. Dawkins, 'A Visit to Skyros,' Annual of the British School at Athens XI (1904), 72-80; R. M. Dawkins, 'The Modern Carnival in Thrace and the Cult of Dionysus, Journal of Hellenic Studies XXVI (1906), 191-206; J. C. Lawson, 'A Beast Dance in Scyros,' Annual of the British School at Athens VI (1899-1900), 125-7; J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folk-Lore and Ancient Greek Religion (London, 1910); A.J.B. Wace, 'North Greek Festivals and the Worship of Dionysos,' Annual of the British School at Athens XVI (1909-1910), 232-253; A.J.B. Wace, 'Mumming Plays in the South Balkans,' Annual of the British School at Athens XIX (1912-1913), 248-265.

2. E.K. Chambers, The English Folk Play (Oxford, 1933), p. 206. 3. E.C. Cawte, Alex Helm and N. Peacock, English Ritual Drama: A Geographical Index (The Folklore

Society, London,1967), pp. 23-4; Alex Helm, The English Mummers' Play (The Folklore Society, London, 1981), pp. 48-9.

4. Ch. Samoulidis, The Popular Traditional Theatre of Pontus (in Greek) (Athens, 1980). 5. For the history of mime, see H. Reich, Der Mimus (Berlin, 1903), and H. Wiemken, Der griechische

Mimus (Bremen, 1972). 6. Samoulidis, p. 131. 7. Dictionaries consulted include: C. Kiliaan (Kiel), Dictionarum Teutonicolatinum (Antwerp, 1574; repr.

Hildesheim, 1975); J. Minsheu, Hegemon eis tas glossas (London, 1617); J. and W. Grimm, Deutsches Woerterbuch vol. 6 (Leipzig, 1885); F Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne

languefranfaise, vol.5 (Paris, 1888); A. de Pages,

Gran Diccionario de la lengua Castellana Vol. 3 (Barcelona, 1901); Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1933); S. Battaglia, Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana vol. 10 (1978).

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