Macbeth, Tolkien, and My Geekster Son, At One Fell Swoop

So what in the hell does “fell” mean, anyway, and what does it have to do with swooping? Is this English?

Well, it is, and it comes from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the scene where Macduff finds out that Macbeth’s killers have murdered his whole family:

All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

First time I read this, my sophomore year of high school, I was so familiar with the turn of phrase (euphemism for cliché) that I read right over it. Only recently did I look it up at the Phrase Finder site and realized out that because Shakespeare coined or popularized more clichés than maybe God in the King James Bible (not just phases but words; if Shakespeare couldn’t come up with the right word on a playwright’s deadline he just threw together some syllables that sounded right), I missed the whole point.

The kite is a bird of prey, and the image is of this killer bird swooping down and taking out the chicks and their momma in, well, in one fell swoop. So what is now obviously the only way to express the idea was originally a pretty nifty metaphor that this showoff came up with out of the blue--and the first time I read it, what I took for lazy writing was in fact a genius making something out of nothing (see King Lear; really, it’s like this pushy know-it-all bastard Shakespeare is inside our brains whispering the ways to end our own sentences).

As for “fell,” that’s an old word meaning “terrible, horrible, awful,” that would have long ago gone the way of “avast me hearties” if Shakespeare hadn’t pickled it in formaldehyde for the rest of time by using it in “one fell swoop.” (I’ve read that Elizabethan English generally sounded like Wallace Beery as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, which is neither here nor there until you start thinking of Moses in the King James, Queen Elizabeth I, or Edmund Spenser talking like drunken pirates, in which case it’s kind of fun.)

I was talking this over with my son Sam, a college kid, gamester, and self-described nerd who reads and writes fantasy stories, and he tells me that “fell” is used all the time by fantasy writers, who (again because of overbearing whims of a trailblazing genius) are driven to cram old-sounding words into their books.

J.R.R. Tolkien was a Middle English scholar at Oxford who came by his tick of using archaic language in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings honestly. This was his academic turf, and though I’ve never been able to get far in his stuff, and I pretty much hate what strikes me as the cuteness of the language in the books, I don’t begrudge his use of it, since that was the world he chose to write about, an imagined archaic landscape.

As for everybody else these days who uses this meaning of “fell” outside of “one fell swoop,” I they should pay me a dollar for each time they fall.