 Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can't fit into the main videos. Today, some extra bits of information for my video about the word ghost, and if you haven't seen that yet, click on the card. In the main video, we identify the ultimate edamon of ghost as the Proto-Indo-European root geis, used to refer to the emotions of fear or amazement. We should be careful not to confuse this root with Proto-Indo-European ghosty, meaning guest and host. You might think it odd to have the same root meaning both host and guest, but in fact it reflects an ancient cultural value, the importance of the reciprocal relationship between guest and host, almost a quasi-family tie, a concept which in ancient Greek is expressed with the word Xenia, one of the key themes of Homer's Odyssey. Anglo-Saxon texts often pund on these similar-sounding roots. When Old English ghost was used to refer to a disembodied spirit, it was often in a pun with the word ghost, meaning visitor-stranger. Another similar string of letters that we should be careful not to confuse here is G-H-O-T-I. In this case, it's not an Indo-European root, but a demonstration that English needed spelling reform, because this string of letters could be said to spell the word fish. The G-H makes an F sound in tough, the O makes an IH in women, and the T-I makes a SH sound in nation. Silly English. This demonstration of spelling irregularity has often been attributed to George Bernard Shaw, who was certainly an outspoken supporter of spelling reform, but doesn't actually seem to appear in any of his writings. Speaking of Shaw, in addition to his early ghost writing, he continued his music criticism in his own name after his literary fame grew, and also made witty use of Hamlet in a satire of the more academic style of his fellow music critics by describing the famous to be or not to be speech thusly. Shakespeare, dispensing with the customary exhortium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon, an appointed posatory phrase in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop. Well, that is indeed the question, I think. And this brings us back to Hamlet. Not only does this same basic plot of son pretending to be insane while avenging his father on his murderous uncle, who married his mother and took over the kingdom, appear in the Latin Gestodonorum by Saxo Grammaticus, but there are also other Old Norse versions of the story, including a close parallel in Rolf's Saga Kraka, or the Saga of King Rolf Kraki. In this analog of the story, the role of the Hamlet character is actually divided between two brothers named Helgi and Hroar, who by the way appear as Helga and Hrothgar in the Old English poem Beowulf. The basic storyline of Helgi and Hroar follows that familiar plot in Hamlet, avenge the father on the uncle who married the mother while pretending to be mad. In another part of the saga is the story of a monster who attacks the hall, much like Grendel in Beowulf, but it's specified that the attacks always come at Yule, in other words Christmas, and the Yule time visit is a common pattern in many sagas, and indeed ghost stories. Think A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. You might think that Halloween would be the time of year when reports of ghost sightings was highest, but in fact, this isn't necessarily so. In the Old Norse sagas, we also find a parallel for zombies, the Apterganger, literally againwalker, or draugr, a word which can be traced back to a root which means to harm or deceive, and is thereby cognate with English dream, the stuff of nightmares I suppose. The draugr often appear in Norse stories, such as Gretis saga, which also by the way, like Rolfsaga Kraka, contains a close parallel to the Beowulf story. The more general European tradition that this falls under is the Revenant, from Latin, Reveniens, literally returning or coming back, referring to the dead come back to life in physical form to haunt the living. Usually the Revenants were wrongdoers in life, and were thought to spread disease. The only way to stop them would be to exhume the body during the day when they rested, and either decapitate them or remove and burn the heart. And perhaps most famously, there's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which the living dead is reanimated, not through necromancy, but through science. Well, even the living dead have to keep up with the times. And speaking of the word reanimated, it comes from Latin anima, meaning spirit or ghost, or breath or air, which can be traced back to the root meaning to breathe. So literally, Victor Frankenstein gives his monster the breath of life. That's some creepy CPR. As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people on the Endless Knot podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!