The Kennet and the Thames
The Kennet is a chalk-bed river that flows out of Wiltshire, joining the Thames at Reading, the two rivers then rolling together out to the North Sea.
The Thames, of course, is the prime river of Southern England.
What does the name ‘Thames’ mean? Nobody knows. What does ‘Kennet’ mean? Nobody knows.
I don’t mean to wallow in ignorance when I say so. We know some things about these names: for instance, that they are pre-Roman, and reflect some Celtic, aboriginal meanings. We can trace ‘Thames’ — which, incidentally, has always been pronounced with a hard ‘t’ — back, via its Middle English name Temese, to some ancient Brittanic original, perhaps Tamesas or Tameessa, which may have meant ‘the dark [river]’. Mallory and Adams’s Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (1947) argues this, comparing the Russian темно, Lithuanian tamsi ‘dark’, Latvian tumsa ‘darkness’ and the Welsh tywyll ‘darkness’ [p.147]. Unlike the chalk-bed Kennet, much of the flow of the Thames is muddy, and perhaps this is why the river has that name. There are other rivers in the UK with similar names: the Tamar in Devon and Cornwall, the Tame in Yorkshire and others. (One further detail: though known as the Isis in Oxford, it seems that this is actually an abbreviation of Temisis or Tamisis, one of the river’s early names, and not a separate moniker.)
So far as the Kennet is concerned, we might note that, until relatively recently, the spelling of this name was Kunnit or Cunnit. Scholars, a little warily, point out that there are many Celtic words derived from the stem cun-, meaning ‘hound’ (compare the modern Welsh ci, cŵn ‘dog’ ‘hound’), hinting that perhaps it was named as the river that flows as swift as a running hound. I’m not persuaded, I must say, not least because the Kennet is not an especially fast-flowing river. It is clean (or was, before modern pollution) rather than dark, and remains, an angler friend of mine tells me, a marvellous fishing river. But scholars skew prudish: fonder of bland, inoffensive etymological sources for the placenames they discuss — as if there were no towns in medieval England with streets called Gropecunt Lane.
The Kennet is a beautiful river, but the Thames has been a constant in my existence. Apart from four years as an undergraduate, when I lived in Aberdeen, I have lived all my life in the south of England and most of that time on or close-by the Thames. I was born in London, south of the river. When I was a little kid we lived in Sydenham. This was more than a mile from the river, though my Dad worked in Guy’s Hospital and I have strong memories of being taken up to town by my Mum to have lunch with him in a pub with a terrace overlooking the Thames. This was the early 70s, and the river stank, I remember it vividly, or odorifily: it really reeked — black waters retreating at low tide to reveal mudbanks like slime. Horrible. Thank the gods that prevailed, the river was cleaned up during the 80s and now no longer stinks. Londoners like to boast that there are salmon in the flow.
As an adult I lived in Windsor for a long time. Then I moved to Wandsworth and then, when my daughter was born, to Putney. Afterwards for many years we lived in Staines-upon-Thames — the river wasn’t far beyond the end of our road, just on the other side of the railway line. Now I live in East Berkshire, land enclosed on three sides by the great loop of the Thames between Chertsey, going north and northwest upriver to Windsor and then south and southwest to Sonning and Reading. I work at a university in Egham, which town abuts the Runnymeade fields on which the Magna Carta was signed, whilst the Thames flowed sweetly by. My wife works in Reading and I am often in that town. My sister and her family live nearby in Henley-on-Thames. From the river museum in that place I learned that the Thames has one particular distinction: it was the only river in pre-Roman England worshipped as a god. We know this because archaeologists have retrieved many ancient swordblades from this river, something not true of other English rivers: offerings, these, by the locals to the divinity that the river was. ‘I do not know much about gods,’ T S Eliot declared with studied seeming-offhandedness ‘but I think that the river/Is a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable.’ Critics suggest he was talking about the Mississippi here, but I prefer, for personal reasons, to think these lines refer to the Thames, once wild, now largely tamed with locks and overbuilding. Old Father Thames, old artful river, stand me now and ever in good stead.
This is what I think: as the Thames was treated as a god, so too was the Kennet taken to be a goddess. These two flows unite at Reading — the importance of this town depends upon the fact — and tangle together as they roll to the sea. I think it is about fertility. Rivers may slice through the land like a sword, flowing dark, fast and strong; or rivers may lay in the body of mother earth as a cut through which flows life and birth and futurity. Why is this river called the Kennit? It rises at Swallowhead Spring near Silbury — swallowhead is another name for the vulva — and flowed through much of the time of human settlement as the Cunnit, meeting and uniting with the sword of the Father. This is the River Cunt — that splendid word of great antiquity and continuity in English language and life.
The Wikipedia entry on the Kennet used to include a discussion of this possible etymology of the river’s name, but it has been edited away (as you can see in the page’s ‘talk’ section). It’s a taboo word, cunt, of course: offensive to many, and often used offensively. But there is something holy and beautiful about it, the word and the thing, and something profound in the comprehension of fertility as such as divine, I think. We should reclaim the word, and return the Kennet to its ancestral, non-euphemistic name. I’ll petition the authorities, and offer a blade to the Thames as I do.
