Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
Book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost sees the gatekeeper of Hell, named Sin, revealing to Satan that she is his daughter, and that their incestuous relationship resulted in their offspring, Death. When she finishes this revelation, Milton writes, “the subtle Fiend his lore / Soon learned, now milder, and thus answered smooth…”, promising to set her and all the other devils free from their “dark and dismal house of pain”.
‘Lore’, in this context, means ‘education’, ‘teaching’, or ‘lesson’, its original (often religious) sense from Old English ‘lare’, which in turn derived from the same Germanic root as ‘to learn’. Only in the 18th century did ‘lore’ come to mean something like “the body of traditional facts, anecdotes, or beliefs relating to some particular subject” (OED), as in “Grecian or Roman lore”, “sacred lore”, and even, in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, “the lore of birds’ eggs”.