Porch note: In the spirit of this essay and honoring “kith and kin,” the author’s original British-English spellings have been retained.
Kiithth kiithth kiithth rustle the grass heads, framing the fine sky as I lie back, cradling my head. Kiithth kiithth… It’s sometime halfway through one of those long-in-the-memory summer holidays, and my brother and I are hiding out again in our den in the middle of the field. We have sacrificed some of the grass to fashion a hollow and heaped it up to give us ticklish comfort. It towers above, still swaying. Kithth kithth…
Kith. To be found in kith and kin. And in Modern English almost only to be found in kith and kin. Kith is one of a group of “fossil words,” a term linguists use to describe those archaisms that are preserved only inside a phrase or idiom.
Imagine a wet and windy afternoon hunting for fossils at the base of the cliffs at Lyme Regis on the south coast of England. Among the preserved remains of ancient lizards and perfect ammonites, you find a smooth stone that intrigues you. You crack it open and pry it apart to reveal its surprising contents: a word. A precious gem-word, which seems spiky at first, but as you continue to look, it draws your gaze into its depths and offers hidden riches.
A pleasing alliteration has great power. I give thanks that kith and kin has preserved kith and this vestige of usage. But the sword of power is double-edged; over time kith has been twisted in meaning and lost its distinctiveness.
When kith and kin first started to be combined in the late fourteenth century, they were understood as country and kinsfolk. Just as kith and kin is a plural idiom, so it enclosed a plurality of meanings: home, place, neighbours, friends, family. Then, as is the way of English, the usage gradually evolved, the two elements became almost synonymous, and the meaning of the idiom narrowed.
Nowadays, if I do a quick internet search for kith and kin usage I mostly find definitions or meanings like friends and family. The online Cambridge Dictionary cites some nuggets from UK government debates preserved in Hansard: “But what about schemes for resettling our own unemployed, our kith and kin, in industrial life again?” and “I do not believe that it is in the nature of this country ever voluntarily to abandon its own kith and kin.”
All the same, gazing into its depths from the vantage point of my laptop, I can still see the shadowy imprint of kith’s history and the possibility of reanimating it in modern English. Kith is not lost to us.
It is the Middle English kitthe, from Old English cyðð: kinship, relationship; kinsfolk, fellow-countrymen, neighbours; native country, home; knowledge, acquaintance, familiarity. The multiplicity traces back through cunnan to the Proto-Indo-European root *gno-: to know, which has also yielded the German kennen and French connaître. (Both of these, of course, signify knowing a person or place, as opposed to wissen and savoir, knowing a fact. But English has only one word that has to do the work of both, and does it less well. Perhaps English could borrow the Scots ken?)
So kith encloses relationship, encloses home, and knowledge. It holds the possibility of truly and deeply knowing and understanding a place. Of being related not only to its people, but also to the place itself. I am reminded of Alastair McIntosh’s story in his book, Soil and Soul, of an English group lamenting their perceived lack of the tradition so valued in Scotland: “I simply suggest,” he said, “that they dig where they stand, and recover their own suppressed but very wonderful traditions.”
Oxfordshire, the Vale of the White Horse, was my place for the first nineteen years of my life. I moved away to university and to work, but after seven years found myself moving back to within ten miles of my old stomping ground, as the crow flies.
Then one day I was standing among a number of others looking anxiously up at the sky and wondering what the low cloud forebode. All of a sudden, surprising even me, I announced that it wasn’t going to rain. I hadn’t thought about it. It had just come to me, bypassing my higher brain function on its way to becoming a whimsical blurt. Somehow I knew, not as head knowledge, more a felt intuition. Not surprisingly, there was skepticism among some of the group when I explained. Others came to my defence. It didn’t rain.
There were other occasions too when I felt it would rain, or not rain. I have never been sure how I knew. Perhaps it is a sensitivity to changing atmospheric pressure, or a subconscious awareness of cloud patterns. Somehow the weather of the place had lodged itself in my bones while I walked and cycled to school or played in the green spaces around my home.
Although I have now lived in Exeter in southwest England for at least as long, and have spotted a few weather patterns such as a fine start with cloud rolling in later, I have not yet noticed a similar intuition lodging itself inside me. A year halfway spent elsewhere would not have helped, nor would a “grown-up” lifestyle, focused on tasks inside instead of basking and imprisoned behind screens at the expense of being.
It is spending “quality” time with the particular, paying close attention to it, dwelling with it for a significant period, that leads to knowledge and love – and this applies to place as much as people. I have many memories attached to the place of my childhood – there is the stream where we used to catch sticklebacks in jam jars; that housing estate was once a field where we built dens and stayed out longer than we should; that old motte and bailey castle, which is now more overgrown and seems flatter than of yore, was a great place for tracking and other adventures. We used to attempt to sledge into the moat. I can’t remember whether it was through the snow or mud, or both.
People attentive to their kith are aware of how it changes over time. Science measures biodiversity by naming and counting species, taking snapshots. Those who know and love a country intimately can see change happening, the thinning out and retreat of some species, the encroachment of others. In the cities they can see the changing land use patterns, and take note of the dance of shops, cafés, and charities in the high street.
Today, I see fill-in “development” threatening the green skyline of Exeter and blocks of student housing deepening the urban canyons in the city centre. The house martins used to chuckle in the early mornings in their nest above my bedroom window, and I would watch their acrobatics over the housetops. But now they have all but disappeared from the neighbourhood and the herring gulls have moved. This will have become a baseline for newcomers to the area. Read Richard Jefferies’ descriptions in Wild Life in a Southern County of the wildlife in mid-nineteenth century Wiltshire, and weep for what used to be. Whatever we have now, we must record: the sounds, the variety, the numbers. We must photograph it, paint it, celebrate it in prose and poetry, melody, and song. Otherwise the collective memory dwindles and fails, and we lose what we have lost.
I wonder…do I treasure my childhood memories only because I have left the place and returning recalls them to mind? Is it the distance and nostalgia that gives them value? If I had stayed in that place, I may have continued to lay down newer memories over the older, such that all become the richer as they become entangled. But I might equally well have lost the possibility of new connections.
Do I then treasure my early memories because they were from a more carefree time before the angst of teenager-dom came crashing in? Because I was in the habit as a child of seeking out new adventures in the same old familiar places? Over the years the memories were mixed and crushed, fermented and clarified, and place is the barrel and bottle where this rich vintage has been aged and stored.
How much of the sense of adventure and wonder have I lost as an adult? More than some, less than others. It is said that time speeds up as we age, as each moment becomes proportionately smaller compared with the totality of the moments preceding it. Perhaps memories also do that. Each new memory now seems insipid compared with childhood and loses its significance. It was easier to wonder as a child; there was nothing to compare it with.
I am so grateful that I do have the memories. Those fields have now been built on, blackberrying is no longer a national pastime, jam jars are now for tea-lights, the lure of screens keeps children inside, and the outside world is full of danger. And so our kith, our sense of place, is eroding along its fault lines.
Jay Griffiths writes in, Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape, that kith in its sense of country means the home that lies outside the house. Allowing children to spend all their time in front of screens and depriving them of the outdoors, great or small, has caused them to lose contact with their kith, or even prevented them from connecting with it at all. They have little or no sense of belonging, which has contributed to an epidemic of mental health problems. COVID has only exacerbated the issue.
On reflection, I can see that my sense of kith reflects the country, this home outside the house, rather than the people. My memories of place are linked to activities with friends and playmates, but I have forgotten the names and faces of most, and I have kept up with hardly any at all. The family home is still there, though, so what of my kin and their sense of kith?
When it was launched in early 2006, the Great Britain Family Names website was very popular with progonoplexics researching the distribution of their surnames. Mapping the data from the 1881 Census alongside comparable information in 1998 could give a sense of the ties between kin and their kith, then and now.
My name Bryden (not to be confused with Brydon) is not a very common surname, and in 1881 England and Wales were largely Bryden-free. The clear concentration was in southwest Scotland, which persisted into 1998 despite a century of unprecedented mobility including migration south of the border.
My dad was one of the diaspora. He grew up in Ayrshire in southwest Scotland and studied at the local university, then moved to London for work. In a similar vein, my mum’s family came from the Leeds area, but her parents moved to the Forest of Dean on the Welsh border for health reasons and she grew up there. She also moved to London for work, where she met my dad. After they married, they relocated to the Vale of the White Horse, again for work.
And yet… Dad remained a proud son of Burns country all his life and mum still treasures her Yorkshire roots. They and their kin may have spread all over the country, but their kith remained in the north.
So let’s do some quarrying for kin as well. The word first appeared in about 1200 CE as variously kin, kyn, ken, and kun. (Spellings were a free-for-all during the Middle English period.) It derived from the Old English cynn: “kind, sort, rank, quality, family, generation, offspring, pedigree, kin, race, people, gender, sex, propriety, etiquette”. This splendid smorgasbord traces back through Proto-Germanic to the Proto-Indo-European root gene- "give birth, beget", which also gives us words like genesis, gene, and genus. The blood relationship was the key. In the 1540s, for example, widows could not be legal next of kin.
Nowadays, kin no longer means blood relatives only. In the UK, there has been a trend for families to become more atomised. Think nuclear family with mum, dad, and 2.4 children living within their four walls and emerging for leisure and tourism as a self-contained unit. On the other hand, they have also recently become more complex, with blended families, same-sex partnerships, and surrogate parents increasingly common. And in all cases, the rights of blood relatives are being extended to non-blood relatives: spouses, partners, and step-parents.
Yet the Hansard excerpts quoted earlier, although they employ a flourish of rhetoric, are effectively circumscribing who we care about. Phrases such as charity begins at home are used regularly. The Department for International Development was an easy target for budget cuts and merger with the Foreign Office in 2020, despite many protests.
I would like to develop a broader sense of kin.
Back in the first century CE, on the Middle Eastern fringes of the Roman Empire, a sometime carpenter and itinerant preacher was asked what he meant when he instructed people to love their neighbours as themselves. Jesus’ response was to tell a story, the “Parable of the Good Samaritan,” in which he described a neighbour as anyone who helps us, or who we help. In other words, the whole human family are our neighbours and our kin.
Today, I’d like to cast the net still wider.
But not into the realms of the imaginary. Not into modern fandom and its usage of kin as a verb, so that to say “I kin Mr Spock” or “I kin Neytiri” means that I identify with these fictional characters, that I relate emotionally and empathize with them.
It may be natural or even healthy to be able to empathise with characters in books, and their stories, thoughts and feelings, which require an exercise of the imagination and stimulate the same parts of the brain as actual experiences. It gives us an insight into the human condition.
It may also be natural to want and good to be able to see yourself represented in books and on screen, and with that, to know that you are seen and are not alone. But to identify with fictional characters to such an extent as to elevate them to the status of kin, strikes me as a worrying indicator of a pathology in society. There is a loss of a sense of family, a prevailing disconnect from our communities, that means many are seeking relationship and common ground in the (potentially deliberately manipulative) inventions of the minds of other people. It’s a no through road.
KiKiKiKiKithKithKithKith clap the pigeon’s wings, as I step into the garden and disturb its scavenging for grain fallen from the bird feeder. No, I want to stay in this world.
Consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and the insights of the author Robin Wall Kimmerer. Member of the Potawatomi people of the upper Mississippi and western Great Lakes, and scientist researching mosses, these two strands are intimately wound in her life and writing.
To Kimmerer, all natural things are animate. If we pay deep attention, we see that all things are interconnected, whole and rich and nurturing, more than is understood by the sort of science that divides in order to investigate.
In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, she muses on the inadequacy of it as a pronoun. It is language that distances and objectifies. It allows us to disrespect and exploit. It is not something that we love. So she has been seeking a respectful pronoun to augment he, she, and it in the English language. A pronoun that represents the animate and interconnected. She found inspiration in Anishinaabe, the language of her people. There, the word aki refers to the land, so for example bimaadiziaki means a living being of the earth. Kimmerer noticed that the sound ki has resonances with chi and qui, Italian and French who, and with one pronunciation of qi, the vital life force that in Chinese philosophy binds all things together.
So Kimmerer has adopted ki as a pronoun, to communicate the life force of mosses and trees, rocks and water, to acknowledge they and all natural things are beings of the earth. She only uses it for the artificial: tables and barbed wire and cars and all the other things that we make.
She points out that modern scientific studies are all showing that animals and plants are more sentient than we previously gave them credit: “What we’re revealing is the fact that they have extraordinary capacities, which are so unlike our own, but we dismiss them” because we do not recognise ourselves in them. But she is careful to say that she is not ascribing personhood or human characteristics to non-humans. No, in ascribing being-ness to moss, say, she is ascribing moss characteristics to ki.
Kimmerer goes on to note that we already have a word in English that would be a corresponding plural pronoun. You may have already guessed that this word is kin. So we are all fellow beings of the earth, not just our own kind. You, me, ki are all kin. All kinds of things around me and under my feet are my kin. Taking off my shoes and standing on the earth brings me into direct contact with my kin…and hence my kith also becomes my kin. The “and” in kith and kin must not separate the two words, but reflect the bond between them.
This is a great gift that Kimmerer has given, but one that takes time and attentiveness to fully unwrap and appreciate. Internal and external attentiveness. It is a deeper and richer sense of kith that comes through my body. And just as my sense of rain seemed more an intuitive rather than a physical sense, it is a broader more intuitive way of understanding.
What if we were more playful in our understanding of relationships? If I were to see the underground mycelial networks that bind trees into relationships as my kin also. Perhaps I could then conceive of my human friends as a mycelial network of strands that help to stitch me together, bind me to memories and places, and complement these memories and places. So friends and family need not be an etiolated understanding of kith and kin but lavishly synonymous.
Kimmerer also writes: “in Indigenous ways of knowing, we say that we know a thing when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect, but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing – of emotional knowledge and spiritual knowledge.” While the lenses of science – from the electron microscope through hand-held magnifying glasses to the James Webb telescope – enable us to pay a more intense attention to the natural world of which we are a part, we are often looking at the surface of things, their material being alone.
What if we were to listen to our home with the ears of our heart, with the proprioception of our soul? To open ourselves up to a relationship with a particular place. We might hear the voice of the spirit of the place, its genius loci. It might become transfigured before us. This is all kith. Kith is far greater than the sum of its parts. Its meaning is uncountable.
Although…I doubt it is possible to have a universal sense of kith. Even if my sense of kith is enriched by taking off my shoes to bring me into contact with my kin the grass and the soil, and even if all things are my kin, that does not make the whole earth my kith. For all that we might recognise our kin everywhere, for all that we are part of the world-wide web of material relationships, and for all that we are at depth connected within the collective unconscious, as Jung would argue, we all need to be rooted in a particular place.
And for all that many of us now live as anywheres rather than somewheres, nor do I think that the whole earth is available to me, to pick and choose a spot that might become my particular place. In my mind, it smacks of colonialism and a lack of respect for the peoples whose kith it already is and has been for ages past. In my gut, it just feels wrong. Even nomadic tribes stay within certain boundaries, and move from one place to another within an area that they know intimately. We each need our own boundaries, and we must respect that others need theirs.
But healthy boundaries must also be porous. Cell walls and skin are necessary boundaries for our bodily life, while taking in nutrients through their membranes and expelling toxins in order to survive. Emotional and behavioural boundaries are vital for healthy human development and mental well-being, but no-one is an island, and nuclear families that don’t embed themselves in their community are impoverished.
While a sense of kith is fundamental to our well-being, seeing place as the setting for people has of course other opposite risks. We want to own the land and exclude the foreigner and the unknown. This too is unhealthy. Recognising that all things are kin, including all people, means recognising the value of the other, to the extent that they are no longer other, and welcoming them generously. Healthy boundaries are porous.
I like to play with words and pronunciation. The hard initial “k” of kith and kin gives clarity to where each word begins. Let us choose not to make this a “kicking k” that children learn in school and that excludes with violence. The close of kith is a voiced “th,” as through rather than though. Slightly harsh, it is still softer than the opening “k” and extends beyond the boundary of the sound. The softest unvoiced “n” of kin lingers even longer, and in my imagination continues to resonate, joining the chorus of all things.
Kiithth kiithth rustle the grass heads in my front patch of Exeter suburbia. Each year I leave the grass and the wild flowers for the pollinators. Hawkbit and daisy and self-heal and yarrow are only lawn weeds if they are not welcome. We’re in a breathless heat wave, and most have dried to a tinder, but at the moment they are enjoying the gentle early morning breeze.
Is it possible to kindle a sense of kith on moving to a new place? I may not have the childhood memories or develop the weather sense I think I had (and perhaps still have) where I grew up. But I can still pay attention to my surroundings great and small in the here and now, dig where I am, be a pilgrim by my own local creek, put down roots that connect with the pre-existing mycelial networks, play a little, picnic in the middle of roundabouts, forage for blackberries, and follow badger trails to the places where the wild things are. I can learn from others and let something of their deep respect and love and understanding of the land and its weather rub off on me, overlay maps from ancient and modern times to trace the origins of now, scratch the geological, historical, and sociological surfaces of southwest England, break open a few real and imaginary stones, and perhaps discover and add to its fossil record.
It is quiet, so quiet. No traffic on the road. And suddenly, as I lie on my bed with the window open to let in the cool morning air, there sounds the grass again. Kiithth... kiithth...
Clare Bryden is a freelance writer, artist, and web developer based in Exeter, UK. Her interests are wide-ranging, but primarily in the connectedness of humanity: relationships within the self, with our place, with the natural world of which we are part, and with God. Her creative practice springs from her desire to dive deeper into the soul, her attempts to communicate environmental and social issues, her need for hope and energy in keeping on keeping on, and her lifelong habit of making connections and finding patterns.