One thing that has always puzzled me about London is the slightly bizarrely named area “Elephant & Castle” which I assumed for years was just a nickname, but apparently not.
Doing a little research I’ve come across the top 3 most popular reasons for the name, although whether any of these are right, well you tell me…
1) This one made least sense to me, but some claim it’s simply an anglisised corruption of corruption of “la Infanta de Castile” which is generally regarded as the Spanish for Eleanor of Castile who was Edward I’s wife. In Spanish and Portuguese a monarch’s daughter is referred to as a “Infanta”.
That one has been pretty much dismissed by the etymologists (people who study the history of words) as not a very likely reason.
2) The area took the name of the pub which stands in the middle of the area and has done in one form or another since the 18th Century. However although pubs do often have odd names, there’s the question – where did the name of the pub come from? Plus there’s documented evidence that this name was around in the 17th Century.
3) The best one I’ve found mostly for quirkiness was a story from the 1600’s when a resident of London was said to have stood on London Bridge, looked into the sky and seen a cloud shaped like an elephant with a castle riding upon it’s back. Other people would then “see” this, and the idea grew.
Of course it is just possible that someone was, as some say today, “thinking outside the box” and has been confusing everyone for the next several hundred years…?
2 Comments
Would a person in the 1600s have known what an elephant looked like???? Very, very doubtful!
I don’t know – Hannibal was using elephants to cross the alps in 218–203BC so I guess it’s quite possible someone would have had at least the notion of what one was by 1600…?