Dulcarnon or dulcarnoun is a term used in the Middle English poem Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer, in a line given to Criseyde: "at dulcarnoun, right at my wittes ende". It became proverbial. The etymology is from an Arabic phrase dhū-al-qarnayn meaning "two-horned", and the term was in use in medieval Latin.[1][2]

Dulcarnon was used to refer to the exposition of the Pythagorean theorem in the Elements of Euclid, considered baffling. In Chaucer's poem, Pandarus conflates it with the Pons asinorum, an earlier result in Euclid on the isosceles triangle.[3] Alexander Neckam had used it for the Pythagorean theorem, though in a way that allowed for the confusion; Richard of Wallingford applied it to the Pythagorean theorem.[4]

By the 17th century to be "at Dulcarnon" was to be at the end of one's wits, or in a dilemma in the sense of a predicament.[5] John Selden made the connection to dū'lkarnayn, a Persian term via Arabic, writing in his 1612 preface to Michael Drayton's Polyolbion. He used it to point to Chaucer as a learned and a witty poet.[6][7] Stephen Skinner in the later 17th century corrected a muddled annotation to Chaucer's line by Thomas Speght.[8] Walter William Skeat adopted the derivation of Dulcarnon from the Arabic: for which see Dhul-Qarnayn.[9]

Dulcarnon: A Novel was published in 1926 by Henry Milner Rideout.[10]

Notes

  1. ↑ Chaucer, Geoffrey; Windeatt, B. A. (2016). Troilus and Criseyde: "The Book of Troilus" by Geoffrey Chaucer. Routledge. p. 297. ISBN 9781134963928.
  2. ↑ Cannon, Garland Hampton; Kaye, Alan S. (1994). The Arabic Contributions to the English Language: An Historical Dictionary. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. p. 185. ISBN 9783447034913.
  3. ↑ Hill, Thomas (2013). She, this in Blak: Vision, Truth, and Will in Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Ciseyde. Routledge. p. 58. ISBN 9781135510282.
  4. ↑ Joannes David Bond, Quadripartitum Ricardi Walynforde de Sinibus Demonstratis, Isis, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1923), pp. 99–115, at p. 106. Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society JSTOR 223600
  5. ↑ Stanley, Eric Gerald; Hoad, T. F. (1988). Words: For Robert Burchfield's Sixty-fifth Birthday. Boydell & Brewer. pp. 21–2. ISBN 9780859912594.
  6. ↑ Chaucer, Geoffrey (2018). Walter William Skeat (ed.). Chaucer ́s Works. Vol. 2. BoD – Books on Demand. p. 711. ISBN 9783734040658.
  7. ↑ Spurgeon, Caroline Frances Eleanor (1925). Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900. CUP Archive. p. xcvi.
  8. ↑ Kerling, Johan (2013). Chaucer in Early English Dictionaries: The Old-Word Tradition in English Lexicography down to 1721 and Speght's Chaucer Glossaries. Springer. p. 146. ISBN 9789401770248.
  9. ↑ The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements. Cambridge University Press. 2015. p. 418. ISBN 9781107480421.
  10. ↑ Rideout, Henry Milner (1926). Dulcarnon: A Novel. Hurst & Blackett.
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