The Title
The title refers to the watch over the dead between the death and funeral, known as a wake. "Lyke" is an obsolete word meaning a dead body, and is related to the German word leiche and the Dutch word lijk, which have the same meaning. It survives in modern English in the expression lychgate, the roofed gate at the entrance to a churchyard, where, in former times, bodies were placed before burial, and the fictional undead monster type lich. "Lyke-wake" could also be from the Norse influence on the Yorkshire dialect: the contemporary Norwegian and Swedish words for "wake" are still "likvake" and "likvaka" respectively ("lik" and "vaka"/"vake" with the same meanings as previously described for "lyke" and "wake").
Read more about this topic: Lyke-Wake Dirge
Famous quotes containing the word title:
“In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)
“A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)