In a message dated 22/12/2006 19:15:44 GMT Standard Time,
chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET writes:
To Don
from Carolyn,
You sent this to the list on
Tue, 30 Apr 1996 14:56:13 -0700
From:
Donald Barton
Johnson
Subject: _Pale Fire_
puzzles
1. Is "Oswin Bretwit" in *Pale Fire,* whose
name Kinbote at one point
glosses as Zemblan for "Chess Intelligence,"
meant to unscramble
as:
"B
[i.e., black] writes to win"?
I've puzzled over it before and this is the
best I can come up with.
To a Swedish speaker, "Bretwit" suggests "board sense/knowledge/cunning".
Braedvett would
mean this. Braede [bräde] is actually the
name of a game, not chess, played on a board. Vett is of course cognate with
"wit", and close in meaning to common sense, but fairly distant from the now
more familiar English wit, which has come to mean something clever or amusing.
The older sense is retained in eg "he doesn't have the wit to
realise". Much of Zemblan seems to me close to Swedish. How this comes
about is a mystery to me, as I understand VN never visited Sweden, although I
believe his sister lived there.
The word also suggests
to me the Anglo-Saxon title "Bretwalda", which at one stage in Anglo-Saxon
England was used, in a rather ill-defined way, to designate the supreme
wielder of power over the inhabitants of Britain: ie the word might mean
Briton-wielder, but also Broad-wielder; cf German "breit" and
"Gewalt".
Charles