Perhaps a slightly disturbing origin of words today, cos I'm going to talk about the terrifying images that lie behind both nightmare and fury. It'a just after lunch, so we should be OK for a while, hopefully. But nightmare, people often think it refers to a female horse, that kind of mare. But in fact, it comes from a Germanis folklore in which a mare was a female spirit, or a goblin, or even an incubus - incubus meant "to lie upon", and that's exactly what they did, because they would sit, so the legent went, upon the sleeper's chest, constricting it so much that they felt like they were suffocating, and in the process given them incredibly bad dreams. Some nightmares were thought to be fatal, because of this suffocation process, so all sort of things, natural phenomena, illnesses, et cetera, were blamed on these horrible female spirits. Onto more horrible female spirits, in fact, because the Furies were probably the most scariest thing in the nightscape of Greek mythology. They were called the Erinyes and they were born of the blood drops from Uranus, they had snakes famously coiled it their hair and they roamed the land, avenging, it was said, perjury, murder, all sorts of crimes that been committed, for people. They were thought to be so sort of wrathful and full of rage, that rage eventually came over to us as well, via a very complicated route, but the French "rage" which gave us rage, goes back to the Latin rabies, meaning frenzy or ferocity, which is of course wherewe get our medical term today.
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