River

RIVERS are, to typographers, a blight of miniscule proportions – tiny streams of white space that wend their way through paragraphs of text, coincidences of gestalt psychology which serve to distract the reader, splitting one's attention from content by-way of form. For the rest of us, rivers divide not-so-much attention but landscapes, carrying water from higher areas to lower ground, feeding reservoirs, lakes, oceans and seas. However, over the course of the term’s history, such a common, everyday sense of a river as a physical, natural artefact — whether the River Nile or the River Ravensbourne – is, it appears, somewhat less central than this abstract, unifying concept of division itself.

To begin in the speculative reconstructions of the Proto-Indo European language *h₁reyp- — which is given as the earliest antecedent to river — means to tear, similar in sound and sense to the modern English rip. From this is formed both the Latin rīpa and rīpārius (meaning riverbank) as well as the Proto-Germanic *rīfaną or Old Norse rífa (meaning to rend or tear apart). Somewhat serendipitously both senses feed into the Middle English term rive — attested as early as the C13th — in the Latin case, as a noun, via the Middle French riviere and in the Norse, as a verb, perhaps via the Danish or Norwegian rift.

Rive or riue in this former sense – as a riverbank or shore — appears to have been used only regionally, towards the south of England, as in the C13th romance Sir Tristrem:

Now bringeþ me atte riue Schip and oþir þing. [Now bring me that river ship and other thing…]

Much more successful was the active, Scandinavian sense of rive as an act of tearing, rending, pulling, or in its most extreme cases, destroying — as demonstrated in this violent passage from the C14th history or ‘Runner’ of the World, the Cursor Mundi:

His kyrtil sal we riue and rend, And blody til his fader seind, [His tunic shall we rive and rend,

And bloody until his father send,]

Indeed, a river in this sense denoted a person who splits or tears something, a lacerator. Of course, the relative success of rive made way for the distinct—yet connected—term river during the same Middle English period. And in this word was invested not just the designation of natural waterways (which emerged as early as the C14th), but also figurative senses of unceasing or relentless movement, of timelessness and permanence. In its earliest figurative uses this concept of a river as something ‘timeless’ is taken on predominantly in spiritual contexts, as in Samuel Rutherford’s C17th text The Trial and Triumph of Faith, in which Christ is described as:

“...a mass, a sea and boundless river of visible, living, and breathing grace, swelling up to the highest banks [...] to over-water men and artels.”

However, during the later years of the 1600’s these spiritual senses were beginning to turn to more secular ends – as in Sir John Vanbrugh’s play, The Relapse; or, Virtue in Danger in which a young widow Berinthia muses, by way of analogy, on the ‘torrents of Love’ at work in the ‘Lovers in this Age’:

They have so: But 'tis like the Rivers of a Modern Philosopher (whose Works, tho' a Woman, I have read) it sets out with a violent Stream, splits in a thousand Branches, and is all lost in the Sands.¹

And before this even, in Shakespeare’s playwriting, figurative senses of river take on astonishingly sinister tones, as in the infamous speech of Titus Andronicus (written c.1593) in which the titular character’s brother Marcus, upon finding the young Lavina with her tongue cut, observes:

As half thy love? Why dost not speak to me? Alas, a crimson river of warm blood, Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind, Doth rise and fall between thy ros'd lips, Coming and going with thy honey breath.

The phrase (and image) of a ‘river of blood’ – certainly present beforehand but used to such shocking effect in Titus Andronicus – in some way speaks to the mixed origins of division and destruction present in this otherwise naturalistic term. And ‘rivers of blood’ would then go on to appear from the C18th onward, not in fiction, but in the very real revolutions of both France and America. For example, in a letter to John Adams (written in September of 1823), Thomas Jefferson argues that to achieve self-government in America:

“...to attain all this however rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over.”

Here the ‘timelessness’ of spiritual concerns is replaced by the ‘relentless movement’ of a newfound progress – perhaps, in the figurative transformations of river, one finds the truest expression of the bloodlust contained within the European project. And there is, perhaps, no better ‘modern’ example of how this specific history is invocated than in the ignominious speech, given by Enoch Powell in 1968, to which the phrase lends its name. In his incendiary response to the introduction of the Race Relations Act in the UK – a progressive piece of legislation which rendered the refusal of housing, employment, or public services on the basis of ethnicity or nationality illegal – Powell said:

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'.”

If only there were some other slogan – perhaps also formed in the 1960’s – that could provide some counter-phrase, some image of another world? A river determined not by this fractious etymology of rifts and rives, by the colonialism of the European enlightenment, but instead by reunifications, tributaries which do not so much divide as enjoin? A river derived not from blood, but from freedom?

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This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. And to which Amanda replies: But do you think this River of Love runs all its course without doing any Mischief? Do you think it overflows nothing. ↩