Small stories I’ve learned. The second.
In the year 2806 of the Creation of the World, the rightful monarch of Lusitania garbed himself with the name of Górgoris, he who has invented Honey, and he was also called Melicolas. Invented in the etymological sense of invenio, Old Latim for “I find”.
Górgoris had a daughter, whose name has been lost, who grew infatuated with a man of low fortune. They kept their love affair fairly secret, but denunciation surfaced by a simple but sound, visible proof: pregnancy.
As Fate commands it, she gave birth, but the now Grandfather shed no tears of joy for the infant’s life. Quite the contrary: he ordered the newborn to be exposed to the wild beasts.
However, these did not eat the child. So it came to be that he was put in a wooden carrycot and left on the unreturning stream of the wide, long and forgetful river Tage. The child was being carried away towards the sea, but it was caught against the banks of what is known today as the City of Santarém.
Now, at first it was adopted and breastfed by a doe, but later the kid was taken care of by humans. These gave him the name of Ábidis, and the place were he was fed by the doe was named “Foodstuff of Ábidis”, or in the Old Languages, Esca Abis. Time and again, these words met further corruption, be it language-, fact- or credulity-wise, until it became Scalabis in the time of the Romans and Santarém, the time we now tread our lives.
Górgoris had a daughter, whose name has been lost, who grew infatuated with a man of low fortune. They kept their love affair fairly secret, but denunciation surfaced by a simple but sound, visible proof: pregnancy.
As Fate commands it, she gave birth, but the now Grandfather shed no tears of joy for the infant’s life. Quite the contrary: he ordered the newborn to be exposed to the wild beasts.
However, these did not eat the child. So it came to be that he was put in a wooden carrycot and left on the unreturning stream of the wide, long and forgetful river Tage. The child was being carried away towards the sea, but it was caught against the banks of what is known today as the City of Santarém.
Now, at first it was adopted and breastfed by a doe, but later the kid was taken care of by humans. These gave him the name of Ábidis, and the place were he was fed by the doe was named “Foodstuff of Ábidis”, or in the Old Languages, Esca Abis. Time and again, these words met further corruption, be it language-, fact- or credulity-wise, until it became Scalabis in the time of the Romans and Santarém, the time we now tread our lives.
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