On the word ‘Houyhnhnm’
In the fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver makes his way to the land of the Houyhnhnms — intelligent equine creatures with the ability to talk. This is, in effect, Swift’s utopia: the closest the novel comes to showing a perfect society. It’s not without its satirical edge, for though they are noble and kind, the Houyhnhnms in effect enslave Gulliver (though he is happy to be enslaved by then). There are also, on this island, certain ape-like creatures, descended it seems from a human couple who were shipwrecked there and bred: the brutish, violent, horrible Yahoos.
In the course of this final voyage Gulliver encounters true happiness twice within two versions of the good life. The first is that of private domesticity, the second that of the rational utopia he encounters in Houyhnhnm land. … Between the third and fourth voyages, Gulliver spends an unprecedented amount of time with his family: “I continued at home with my Wife and Children about Five Months in a very happy Condition.” [Erin Mackie, ‘Gulliver and the Houyhnhnm Good Life’ The Eighteenth Century 55:1 (2014), 112]]
The irony is not just that Gulliver cannot rest contented where he is at home, but must go voyaging off again, but that after his second period of happiness, with the Houyhnhnms, he cannot return to his former state.
Gulliver becomes a member of a horse’s household and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their way of life, rejecting his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization and commands him to swim back to the land that he came from. Gulliver’s “Master”, the Houyhnhnm who took him into his household, buys him time to create a canoe to make his departure easier. After another disastrous voyage, he is rescued against his will by a Portuguese ship. He is disgusted to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, whom he considers a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous, and generous person.
He returns to his home in England, but is unable to reconcile himself to living among “Yahoos” and becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.
Mackie explores this larger irony: that living in utopia is the ruin, not the making, of Gulliver:
And so in Houyhnhnm Land Gulliver abides, at least for a moment, in a second scene of happiness… But in a manner that recalls the negation of happiness of the book’s opening, his participation in the Houyhnhnm good life is announced and terminated in a single breath: “In the midst of all this Happiness, and when I looked upon myself to be fully settled for Life, my Master sent for me … [to] command me to swim back to the Place from whence I came” … This second Houyhnhnm happiness is obviated as a kind of unreality … For, try as he might, he can’t shake his humanness. Confirming his very human capacity for mimicry and misrepresentation, Gulliver seeks to secure his happiness in a mode that not only denies the possibility of human happiness but at the same time is clownishly contrary to the Houyhnhnm reality he would access: “By conversing with the Houyhnhnms I fell to imitating their Gait and Gesture . . . and my Friends often tell me in a blunt way that I trot like a Horse” (235). Gulliver thus becomes the thing which is not, a living breathing falsehood; the Houyhnhnm have no word for this in their language and no place for it in their land.
What about the name Houyhnhnm? Well, (to quote Wiktionary) it is ‘a humorous, onomatopoeic play on the sound made by horses.’ Swift, in inventing this name, is imitating the sound of a horse whinnying.
Is that all we can say about it? Well, I wonder.
One thing Swift seems to be doing is playing with the concept ‘human’. We might take human to mean us, in a purely descriptive, taxonomic sense: homo sapiens. But the context of Swift’s utopian speculation suggests we might want to take it, rather, as an ideal to which any rational creature might aspire (‘humani nihil a me alienum puto’ and so on). The Houyhnhnms are more or better humans (more humane, accessing a nobler humanity) than actual humans — and indeed Houyhnhnm as a word reads like a kind of extended, hypervocalic version of the word ‘human’, just as the second syllable of ‘Yahoo’ truncates the fuller hoo-manity (as the Yahoos themselves represent an abbreviated, filed-down, brutal shrinkage of humanness) — interestingly the first syllable of ‘Yahoo’ is the noise a rider or carter might would make to encourage a horse to go. Ya! Go-on! But of course, nobody rides the Houyhnhnm, or harnesses them to carts or carriages.
I also wonder whether the classically-educated Swift might not be playing a game with Greek here. The ‘H’ with which the word begins is an aspiration, not a part of the Greek alphabet (all Greek words that begin with vowels append a little diacritic, indicative either of ‘rough’ or ‘smooth’ breathing). The Greek letter H is a long e, and the ‘Hou-’ part of Houyhnhnm could be read across into ᾘώς or ἠώς — dawn. The rest of the word seems to me to play with ῠ̔́μνος (húmnos): a song, hymn, ode (generally one in praise of the gods or heroes). If it isn’t too much of a stretch to see the linkage:
Houyhnhnms = Houynhymnos = Hώ-υμνος or ἠώ-ἠὔυμνος ‘the good song of the dawn’.
A utopian sort of hymn. According to Pausanius, one of Hesiod’s most famous poems was called αἱ Ηοῖαι, ‘to the Dawn’, because every line began with ἡ οἳη: a genuine hoiy hymnos. We might even tallk of a ευ-ῠ̔́μνος, euhymnos, the ‘good song’ to parallel More’s ευ + τόπος ‘good place’ (which is also, as everyone knows, also an οὐ + τόπος, a no-place). Swift is clear they do sing hymns of praise in Houyhnhnmland:
The Houyhnhnms train up their youth to strength, speed, and hardiness, by exercising them in running races up and down steep hills, and over hard stony grounds; and when they are all in a sweat, they are ordered to leap over head and ears into a pond or river. Four times a year the youth of a certain district meet to show their proficiency in running and leaping, and other feats of strength and agility; where the victor is rewarded with a song in his or her praise. [Gulliver’s Travels, 4]
Back in 1951 H. D. Kelling showed how many of Swift’s supposedly nonsensical or gobbledegook names are actually interlingual puns out of French, Latin and Greek — several are lifted and shuffled about from Rabelais for instance: ‘the name of a Gentleman-Usher in Brobdingnag, Slardral, is, I think, clearly related to Rabelais’ cuisinier, Raslard … Swift simply reversed each syllable of the name of Rabelais’ character, giving him Sardral, then added an l (as Rabelais often did)’ [H G Kelling, ‘Some Significant Names in Gulliver’s Travels’, Studies in Philology, 48:4 (1951), 764]. Otherwise Kelling thinks Swift made use of reversals: for ‘Tramecksan’ and ‘Slamecksan’, the names of the Lilliputian parties (which, says Gulliver, differ by one-fourteenth of an inch in the heels of their shoes) Kelling argues ‘if we reverse the names Tramecksan and Slamecksan we find that the former are nas camard (nas keemart) or snub-noses while the latter are nas camels (nas keemals) or camels’-noses’. Of Lilliput and Blefuscu, he thinks the former is ‘derived from lill(e) — little — and “put” (having the connotations of Latin putidus — stinking or disgusting)’ and that the latter is basically the same: ‘Blef may be the result of substituting an l for the r in French bref — little or short. And uscu may well be derived from Latin oscus, meaning filthy, unclean, barbarous.’
Kelling, though, can’t do much with Houyhnhnms:
A more problematical example of reversal is the name Houyhnhnm, which according to Gulliver (p. 219) means “ horse” and in its etymology “the Perfection of Nature.” The fact that the word is close to “whinny” does not make it impossible that the meaning “horse” is concealed in the word. The Latin mannus can mean a superior horse — equus nobilior according to Spelmannus (Glossarium Archaiologicum, London, 1664). If Houyhnhnm is reversed the result is mnhnhyuoh; omitting the two h’s we have mnny, the pronunciation of which would result in a sound like manni, the plural of mannus. The remaining three letters, uoh, can represent voc, the root of vox.’ The word Houyhnhnm may then be derived from manni voc and would mean approximately ‘speaking horses.’
This seems a stretch to me — quite apart from the wrenching of mnhnhyuoh and its unlikeness to ‘mannus voc’, Kelling is wrong that mannus means ‘superior horse’. On the contrary, and whatever the obscure Spelmannus might have thought, it actually means inferior horse: Lewis and Scott are clear the word signifies ‘a small Gallic horse, coach-horse, cob’, not at all a Houyhnhnm-type beast. So in place of this I offer my speculative etymology: these more-than-human, ideal humans, these singers of the good-songs of dawn.
