How Did Montol Get Its Name?

On our page about the origins of Montol we mention that there has been – how shall we put it – a bit of to-and-fro in the past about the origin of the name.

So we did a bit of looking around and talking to people who were there at the start and here’s a summary of what we found out.

Firstly, there’s the idea we’ve seen from some that the name has to do with “balance”. There is indeed a word mantol in the Cornish dictionaries, with the English meaning balance. So far, so plausible, until we remember what we heard from the founders who say that the word they found was definitely montol, not mantol.

Here’s what we think happened, based on Simon Reed’s book The Cornish Traditional Year, the Late Alan M. Kent’s The Festivals of Cornwall – Ritual – Revival – Reinvention and conversations with Simon (who was one of the people mentioned above who started Montol in 2007).

The team were looking for a name for the revival and, none of them being scholars of the Cornish language, the looked around for suitable resources and came upon the website of Teere ha Tavaz. This was an organisation of Richard Gendall, who many will remember as a scholar and promoter of the language. That’s where, under the URL http://www.teerehatavaz.org/introduction/christmas they found the word Montol, translated as Midwinter. And they had a name for the festival!

Here’s where the story gets tricky, for the Teere Ha Tavaz website no longer exists. Alan Kent accessed it in 2017 and found the information, and we found the relevant page via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine last summer, but I had a look today and can’t even find it there any more.

So, a word that appeared in one Cornish dictionary and no others was chanced upon by the team that revived Penzance’s midwinter festival and has now taken its place in English as the name of Penzance’s Midwinter Festival. And you can put that in your dictionary.

By the way, if anyone associated with Teere Ha Tavaz has access to its old web pages anywhere, we’d love to hear from you to complete our story.