I know that I promised a post about a spear-tree this week, but it's turning into quite a long one, so here's a placeholder, all about my journey of discovery into the laurel tree, and how I was completely wrong for a good few years.
Oh, the laurel. What can I say about the laurel that has not been said already?
Well, here goes. This post won't actually go into too much of the symbolic analysis of the laurel that could be done, and which I probably will do at some point in the future on one of these posts. Instead, this post will mainly explore exactly what we should imagine when we read the word 'laurel' or laurus in a Latin text. But first, a brief comment on why the laurel is possibly the most important tree in all of Rome's history (and yes, I am a) biased, and b) very much looking at the oak tree with narrowed eyes).
The Roman triumph was a procession through the streets of Rome, in which a victorious general and his army marched through the city, cheered on by the population, and were celebrated. The general was dressed up as either Jupiter or a king, and was pulled in a four-horse chariot. This festival has been the subject of intensive study over the past couple hundred years, with the most influential recent book being perhaps Mary Beard's The Roman Triumph, written in 2009. In addition to the general and his army, their were the spoils. The booty. The loot. Animals, enslaved people, enemy leaders, and more. Valuable artwork, representations of geographic features, extremely culturally significant items, all paraded through the city and shown off to the people of Rome. But we're going to look past that and zero in on the crown worn by the general, which was made of laurel leaves. This crown, the corona triumphalis has affected English in a number of different forms, most obviously the phrase "Don't rest on your laurels".
But when we talk about the laurel in England, we have a very different tree in mind. I remember once being a part of a scavenger hunt around campus, as a fresh-faced first year undergraduate, and one of the items we needed to source was a laurel crown. According to the strict letter of the law, and with the utter absence of fun, everyone failed.
We all came back with a crown made of what we had been raised, in the UK, to believe was laurel. It was not, however, the laurel that Romans knew. What ti was instead was Cherry/English Laurel, or prunus laurocerasus, which lacks many of the distinctive qualities of the bay laurel, or laurus nobilis that was used in the crowns. Instead of a densely packed cluster of leaves, we had crowns of a few large leaves, with woody branches twisted together. The ultimate effect was very different.
But the differences were not just aesthetic (although the lack of fruit on the hastily constructed crowns at 10pm in a dimly lit student bar was apparent). The bay tree has one other key element: it has a fragrant smell, as anyone who has used a bay leaf in cooking will tell you. Without knowing this, we were busily constructing crowns that we believed were of the same leaf, and were extremely happy with the result. In fact, we could not have been further from the reality.
A. The Cherry laurel is large-leaved
B. The Cherry laurel has no berries
C. The Cherry laurel does not smell
D. The Cherry laurel is not a tree
What we were reconstructing bore no resemblance to the actual crowns worn, and our understanding of the crowns of the Roman world was changed as a result. The next time one of us read 'laurel' in a textbook, or in a Roman source, we immediately recalled the very different hedge, and not the delicate fragrant tree, sacred to Apollo.
However, if we had just taken a moment in those dimly lit bars, not relied on our understanding, and done a little bit more research on 'What is a laurel?', we would have learnt a lot more about the triumphal crown than any of us had planned to that night. But, had we done that task properly, we would have found that task completely undoable.
On that cold November evening, any bay laurel that was outside in the UK would have died.