In the Scottish village of Ruthwell the following anagram appears on the gravestone of one Gawin Young:
Gavinus junius
Unius agni usui
The first line is obviously just “Gawin Young” written in Latin. Regarding the second, I know that ūnīus agnī is the genitive of ūnus agnus (“one lamb”), and ūsuī is the dative singular of “ūsus”, meaning “use”. My guess is that “ūsuī” is in the dative of purpose, as in “for the use”. So am I correct in thinking that the translation would be “Gawin Young, for the use of the One Lamb”, meaning that the deceased is commended to Jesus?
Gawin’s also a perfectly good name—in fact, it seems to have been the preferred spelling of “Gavin” hundreds of years ago, in Gawin Young’s time. They’re both, in fact, variant forms of Gawain.
The dative case is also the case for an indirect object. Also, because “agni” is genitive, and because I think Njtt is right, and the “junius” means that Gavin was young, probably a child, I would guess the inscription means-- or, connotates, anyway, “A lamb is returned.” Even though Jesus is sometimes referred to as a lamb himself, he’s usually “the” lamb. He’s also referred to as a shepherd, and his followers as his flock.
It’s an anagram? I guess if the J is one of the Is in the bottom row, and the V is one of the Us, it is. That explains why the epitaph is so strained. If you want to say “Returned to Jesus,” there are more straightforward ways of saying that.
Junius is neuter, though, while Gavinus, agnus, and ūsus are masculine. The masculine form is junior (“Younger”). That suggests that the grammar here isn’t perfect, anyway, and might be hard to parse. I would agree with the OP’s interpretation of it.
Edit: according to the internet, he lived to be 54. Discussed here.
What do you mean “junius” is neuter? If it’s supposed to be “iunius,” it’s correctly declined as a masculine adjective. Just because it is derived from the name Juno, doesn’t mean that it can’t function as a masculine adjective.
The meaning is probably tortured, just because someone insisted on cramming it into an anagram, though, so I agree that it’s difficult to parse. And not just because I took Latin in 1980-81, and haven’t had much to do with it since then apart from reading legends on sculptures and paintings. And being really annoyed by words like “octopi.”
Gawin, not Gavin. And he wasn’t young; he was married and had 31 children.
If it means “a lamb is returned”, then why is agnī in the genitive?
Yes, that’s right.
Yes. There are of course many references to Gawin and his tombstone—he’s achieved some minor degree of fame in part due to his extreme fecundity—though I haven’t turned up any translations of the Latin inscription.
Because the genitive is used for possessive. Unless I’m confusing it with another declined language, which is possible. But I was thinking it meant “a lamb who belongs,” with the audience understand the “to Jesus” part, and “usui” means that Gawin is in the place he is intended to be, ie, Heaven. Yes, it’s strained, but that’s what you get when you insist on an anagram.
I don’t think this is generally well-known in the US. My mother is a linguist, and tends to know about curiosities like this, and I’ve never heard of it before, so I have no background information on it. It may be well-known among Americans of Scottish backgrounds, or among Catholics, since I’m assuming Gawin was, hence the Latin epitaph.
I am by no means a classics scholar, though, so I’m not going to push for my guess, except to say, do we know who composed it? Maybe whoever did wasn’t exactly a classics scholar either. If this were a Roman epitaph, I’d say there has to be an answer, but since this could be by someone with a couple of years of Latin in school, maybe it just contains an error.
No. The word is iuvenis “young,” and the comparative forms are iunior (nom. m & f. s.) and iunius (nom. neut. s.). Why do you think it is masculine? The I / J issue is a red herring: J is an alternative spelling for I before another vowel, and I am not sure what the name Juno has to do with anything. (Edit: Juno is feminine, anyway, not neuter.)
I think I’ve forgotten more Latin than I knew in the first place, and I totally spaced out the “iunior (nom. m & f. s.) and iunius (nom. neut. s.)” comparative forms. I pulled up Juno, trying to think of some other thing the word might refer to, if it wasn’t a last name or an indication of youth.
Now, if we already know that the stone belongs to someone named “Gawin Young,” scratch that, obviously, but I didn’t realize that was known information from other sources, because that isn’t in the OP.
Yes, we do know this—it was the very first sentence of my original post. I’m frankly a bit surprised that I’ve had to repeat this so often.
The two lines I wrote aren’t the only ones in the epitaph, nor are they the only anagram. Immediately below it is another one for his wife, this time in English instead of Latin:
Jean Stuart
a true saint
(Again, you need to read “I” and “J” as equivalent to make the anagram work.)
The tombstone also contains some rhyming couplets, and an attribution to “PENNANT”, though it’s not clear if that’s the author of the entire epitaph or just the final couplet. (I’m not aware of any poets from the 17th century or earlier with that name.) The entire epitaph has been widely reproduced (sometimes with typos) in chronicles and other literature, including the one posted by Dr. Drake.
If Astorian is Jewish, like me, “one lamb” and “Lamb of G-d” wouldn’t be a connection he’d (or she’d) immediately make. I’m more familiar with references to Jesus as a shepherd than a lamb himself, and I would expect a Jesus=lamb thing to be definite, but then, there’s the whole anagram aspect.
It can also be the word for the month of June, which in Latin is both an adjective (modifying “month”) and masculine, but it makes even less sense in context.
Yeah. I thought of that, but it wouldn’t make any sense to give the month of death, but not the year or date. I assumed the OP was guessing that “junius” was a last name, since he didn’t mention any secondary sources, and what Njtt wrote made sense.
Do “junius” and “unius” rhyme by design?
I think that the needs of the anagram probably came before strict grammatical structure.
