Gollum's Daisies

I noticed in Lenten is come with love to toune that one line reads “Dayeseyes in this dales.” The first word is unmistakably familiar: “daisies,” but the revelation that arises from the poem is that it is a combination of “day” and “eye.”

In his work, The Hobbit, author and linguist J.R.R. Tolkien addressed this construct in a riddle, given in Gollum’s cave:

“An eye in a blue face
Saw an eye in a green face.
‘That eye is like to this eye’
Said the first eye,
‘But in low place,
Not in high place.’”

The answer is “’Sun on the daisies,’” as Gollum gives it. As such, it constitutes not only the answer to a riddle, but a kind of pun. “Sun” is the “day’s eye.”

Tolkien must have been aware of this. Indeed, a similar name formation arises in his flower, “kingsfoil.” The first half is obvious: “king.” “Foil” is a much more complex term. It may mean something like “to impede,” also “blade.” There is an aspect of it that connotes fragrance, from its root in Latin fullare, “to clean cloth.” Finally, it can mean “leaf.” As such, it stands for a variety of regal elements: a sword, a clean piece of linen, a rebuttal or tactical impediment of some sort (reaching perhaps, but the product of strategy and wisdom in governing; the product of a decree, maybe), a leaf, which is often an element of heraldry. In The Lord of the Rings, kingsfoil is the plant that begets healing to the wounded time and again, and which forms a significant part of (King) Aragorn’s heraldry after the War of the Ring.

Another two-part flower-name construct appears in English in the word “buttercup,” which, according to OED, is thought to be a combination of still two other two-part constructs, “butterflower” and “gold-cup” (or possibly “kings-cup”). Many other flower names I researched arose from Old French. “Rose” is actually from Latin. But there may very well be more English flower names that envelope older words with which we are familiar. Inquiry in this direction might well prove worth the effort.