In Which Miss Bunny Finally Gets Her Witch-Name
All my cats down the years have come to me with other names: out-names, you could call them, names for everyday.
Though sometimes it's taken a while, they've all got proper witch-names eventually.
I acquired Miss Bunny (AKA the Bun, Bun-bun, the Bunster, Bunny Butt, and—of course—Bad Bunny) just after Lunasa last year. Being a Manx cat with a stumpy little tail, the name fit well enough, but—from the beginning—it struck me as a prose name, a name-from-without.
“Well,” I thought, “the inner name will come.” The first lesson of Witchery is patience.
To reach the new place, sometimes you have to get out of Dodge first. In the course of a recent road trip, it occurred to me: A Manx cat needs a Manx name.
(Closely related to Irish, Manx is—was—the Celtic language formerly spoken in the Isle of Man.)
Presto!
Bonnag is the Manx name for a kind of sweet tea loaf. It's the Isle of Witches calque of bannock, the pan-Celtic griddle-bread.
And thereby hangs a tale: a stumpy bunny tail, presumably.
Bannock is an old and interesting word. (Every word's a story.) In the Anglian dialect of the Hwicce, the original Anglo-Saxon tribe of Witches, it was bannuc: one of Old English's rare handful of Celtic loan-words. (The Scots Gaelic version is bonnach.) This, in turn, derives ultimately from Latin panis, “bread.” There must be a story here, too—it's hard to believe that Britons didn't make bread until learning how from the Red Crests—but that's another tale for another day.