Peace-Weave
In a Time of War
These days, in English, we have just one word for peace. The ancestors, though, saw it differently.
1400 years ago, the Anglo-Saxon-speaking Hwicce, the original (and eponymous) Tribe of Witches knew of two kinds of peace: frith and grith.
(Frith—kin to free, friend, and Freyja—ultimately derives from the ancient Indo-European root meaning, apparently, “love of one’s own.” The origin of grith remains unclear.)
Frith I’ll define as peace within a community. Grith, however, is peace between communities.
It’s a useful distinction. One can, after all, have one without the other.
What does it say that we ditched our old peace vocabulary in favor of a foreign import? “Peace” comes from Norman French and, ultimately, Latin. It’s a Red Crest peace, an imposed peace, a top-down peace-from-without. As always, the Abrahamics talk a good peace—pax, shalom, salaam—but, throughout history (as current events all too plainly demonstrate) their deeds have invariably given their words the lie.
Frith and grith, though, are organic: peace-from-within, peace-between. While peace is defined, in essence, by an absence—of hostilities—frith and grith are a matter, rather, of proactive relationship: relationship within and relationship between.
Peace is something that you make. Frith and grith, rather, are something that you weave. Blessed, indeed, are the frith-weavers.
A woven peace: opposing forces, warp and weft together, together making something whole and new.
Frith, grith: not one kind of peace, but peace in different modalities.
Time to set up the loom, folks.
Time to set up the loom, and weave ourselves some peace.