Chapter CLXXXIX: Section X: Kettle

Among mythological objects the kettle or cauldron can hardly be omitted; certainly the very quaintest of human names, but perhaps referring originally to the cauldron of creation, and afterwards to the sacrificial cauldrons that boiled the flesh of the victims at the great _blots_ or sacrifices.

In the North, the vessel is _ketil_; in old German, _chezil_; in English, _cytel_; but the names from it seem to be almost entirely northern, though the cauldron is certainly the _olla_, so common a bearing in Spanish heraldry, and there at present regarded as the token of a large following, beneficently fed, somewhat in the same spirit as that in which the Janissaries used a camp kettle as their ensign.

Ketyl was the Norwegian conqueror of the Hebrides, and founder of the line of Jarls, of the Western Isles; and the family of Ketyl was very famous in Iceland, holding in honour an ancestor called Ketyl Hæng, from _hæng_, a bull trout; because when his father asked what he had been doing, he answered, “I am not going to make a long story of every fish I see leap; but true it is, that I chopped a bull trout asunder in the middle,” which trout turned out to be a great dragon.

Katla was Ketyl’s feminine, and not uncommon. The Eyrbiggia Saga tells wonderful stories of a sorceress so called, who, when her son was in danger from his enemies, made him appear first like a distaff, then like a tame kid, and, lastly, like a hog, but all in vain, for her spells were disconcerted by a rival sorceress, and she herself stoned to death.

Ketel does not often stand at the beginning of a word; but Ketelbiorn and Ketelridur are both Iceland names, and both the masculine and feminine are very common terminations; the masculine being, however, generally contracted into Kjel, and then into _kill_ or _kel_.[127]