Crenellated: Medievally Speaking

Honestly, I just like the sound of it... "Crenellations. Crenellate. Crenellated." Try saying one of those out loud. Really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? A wonderful blend of crunchy and mellifluous consonants together in the same word. The acclaimed author/human thesaurus Cormac McCarthy has a penchant for using words that have no reason to be recognized in our current society. If you don't understand the backgrounds and contexts of the words in his bag of tricks, you'll likely miss out on the images he's invoking. By my count, he uses the word "crenellated" just once in the novel Blood Meridian, but it's used masterfully to bring a visual pattern or an effect to mind. 

I actually used to know what crenellations were when I was younger (and nerdier). I wasn't kidding  about how I sensed my vocabulary retracting after high school. Anyway, I'm happy to announce that, after seeing this word in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, I've returned it to my vocab arsenal. My gut instinct on first sight was that it either had to do with royalty (coronations, being crowned) or the top of the head (cranium, or also being crowned). As it turns out, it's not THAT far removed from either of those things. Crenellation is a pattern found on top of castle walls, but it's not a cognate with "cranium" or "coronation" as far as I can tell.

 This is an example of crenellation: 

                                            Specifically, the ridges and spaces at the top of the wall.

According to Wiktionary, the word "crenellation" originates from the Latin crenella as a diminutive of crena (literally “a notch or serration”). The word also appears in Old French as cren (“a notch”) or crener (“to notch”). The word shares its origins with the common English word cranny, similarly meaning “a small opening, as in a wall or rock face; a crevice.”

McCarthy uses the word "crenellated" quite wondrously in one of his most grandiloquent passages in Blood Meridian, in which he describes horsemen, seeming to be made of the rocky environment itself, materializing through the shimmering heat of the desert: 

“Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.”  

Perhaps you're asking, "How do you get an adjective used for describing solid castle walls to describing shimmering heat?"

McCarthy is using an incredibly specific, archaic word to describe the visible heat in the desert, shimmering and rising from the ground in an almost solid pattern of crests and valleys - reminiscent of the ridged pattern atop a castle wall. It's likely that he's just trying to tell us that the heat makes the ground seem to rise and fall like the undulating crests and valleys of a wavelength. But where did McCarthy come up with this word?

In ancient and medieval times, towns were surrounded by fortress walls to deter invaders. The tops of these walls had walkways called parapets where defenders could hurl things down onto attackers. Architects and stoneworkers created patterns on the tops of castle walls called battlements, where archers could stand and quickly shoot down, but then take cover while reloading. The patterns formed rectangular ridges and blocks, separated by smaller spaces - gaps where the archers could stand when shooting down. To reload or take cover from enemy fire, they could step to the side and hide behind the ridges of the wall. The ridges or blocks were called "merlons." "Crenels" were the names for the spaces between the merlons on the battlements. If this isn't making sense, just look at this picture of a battlement.

                                      Making sense now? A pattern of crenels and merlons is called crenellation.

The dictionary definition probably explains its function most clearly:

crenellation (plural crenellations)

1. A pattern along the top of a parapet (fortified wall), most often in the form of multiple, regular, rectangular spaces in the top of the wall, through which arrows or other weaponry may be shot, especially as used in medieval European architecture.
2. The act of crenellating; adding a top row that looks like the top of a medieval castle.

I used to know what crenellations were, because as a young boy, I was really into knights and castles, and the names for their weapons, fortifications, and equipment. Alas, I must have cleared some of those terms from my brain around the time I needed to free up some space for biology terms and algebraic equations. Shame, because I don't remember those anyway. But there you have it - the meaning and origins of "crenellated." Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

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