D&D Word History: Dweomer

The Spell that Wasn't: *Dweomer

One of the most curious words in the entire corpus of Dungeons and Dragons booksis *dweomer, which is defined in the 1st edition Advanced D&D Dungeon Master'sGuide (1979, p. 228) as follows: "From dweomercraeft, the art (craeft) of magic(dweomer)" . Fair enough, but then whence dweomercraeft? Turns out it is a real,if obscure, word used in Middle English (and presumably in Old English). (As aside note, I find words that start with dw- to be very compelling. The onlycommon ones in English are dwarf, dwell, dwindle, and their derived forms, buthow do you like dwale?)Dweomercraeft first shows up in Layamon's Brut, an epic history of England inverse, a sort of ancestral text to the Arthurian legends, written about 1215(over a century before Chaucer), which uses almost no Anglo-Norman (i.e. derivedfrom Norman French words). Layamon writes, "And Peluz hit wiste anan thurh hisdweomer-craeften". This doesn't help us much, but we also know of an Old Englishword gedwimer meaning 'sorcery' and gedwimere meaning 'sorcerer, juggler'. There is also a Middle English word dweomerlayk 'magic, practice of occult art,jugglery', also used by Layamon, and used by some later Middle English authorsas 'demerlayk'. And so the OED, based on this evidence, defines dweomercraeft as'jugglery, magic art'.Nevertheless, *dweomer is an entirely novel term, coined by decomposing and folketymologizing the compound dweomercraeft in a way that no earlier author haddone. Gygax has re-etymologized 'dweomer', as in D&D it always describes a spellor an act of magic rather than sorcery in general. It's a very innovativeneologism, one with nearly 8,000 Google results, and has been used elsewhere inprint by fantasy authors such as Katherine Kerr, a gamer whose novels have beenstrongly influenced by D&D. Despite its great antiquity, 'dweomer' is truly newto English.A possible origin: 'dweomerlayk' shows up as 'Dwimmerlaik' in Tolkien's Lord ofthe Rings, as an epithet applied to the Witch-King of Angmar by Eowyn at theBattle of the Pelennor Fields - you know, that whole 'I am no man' spiel.Tolkien also refers to Dwimorberg, the Haunted Mountain, and Dwimordene, thename given by the people of Rohan to Lorien. All of these 'dwimmers' and'dwimors' mean 'haunted' in the Rohirric language, which is of course just OldEnglish (cf. Foster's The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth, p. 101). There's nospecific evidence that this is the source of Gygax's *dweomer (Tolkien certainlynever uses it in that spelling, or as a noun, or as a non-compounded word of anysort), but it certainly could be, given the influence of Tolkien's oeuvre on theconcepts and settings of Dungeons and Dragons.