Etymology

On first looking into Chapman’s Homer, or rather, let’s be real, a quotation from it in a third party, my eyes slid home on this:

All done, he all to Thetis brought, and held all up to her./ She tooke them all, and like t’ hawke (surnamed Osspringer)

This is the at the end of the eighteenth book of the Illiad, according to the Project Gutenberg version, which has

All done, he all to Thetis brought, and held all up to her./ She took them all, and like t’ hawk, surnamed osspringer,

T’ hawke surnamed Osspringer? Parenthetical or not, this must be the Osprey, surely. And yes, the online OED confirms this, pointing out that Chapman’s circa 1611 usage is the only one known of in that cluttered cabinet of etymology. (They have “ospringer” with one s.) Did Chapmen create this word to feed the tyranny of his rhyming scheme: “up to her/Osspringer”?

Fish are Osprey prey. Osprey pray for fish.

And what prayer! I’ve seen them stoop down into ponds not much bigger then they are, zigzag-tucking their wings in and throwing their feet forward. Odd that they should be confused with the ossifrage, Latin for bone-breaker, or vulture, especially the Eurasian Lammergeir, German for lamb-vulture.

What does that chap or man Chapman mean, the fish hawk or the ossifrage/Lammergeier/Bearded Vulture, both still found over Greece. The latter would be more likely to hang around the battlefields, if you know what I mean, but speed is what is meant to be conveyed here. (Get your boy that armor, ma’am). So Alexander Pope, Samuel Butler, and William Cowper all use “falcon,” that paragon of the speedy wing’d thing, in their translations. Which falcon? There are seven species in Greece according to iNaturalist.

Butler puts the context plainly: “Lastly, when the famed lame god had made all the armor, he took it and set it before the mother of Achilles’, whereon she darted like a falcon from the snowy summits of Olympus and bore away the gleaming armor from the house of Vulcan.”

Here’s a list of The Birds of Homer. According to this, the actual Greek word used seems to be the “general term for falcon.”