A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1264 entries
belemnite
The bullet-shaped internal skeleton of a Mesozoic cephalopod, related to squid and cuttlefish. The animal had ten arms lined with hooks, an ink sac, and fins; what fossilizes is the rostrum or guard, a dense calcite counterweight in the tail. They occur in such numbers in some beds that the rock is nicknamed a belemnite battlefield.
Etymology
From Greek belemnon, a dart or javelin, for the obvious shape. The folklore ran the same way: These were thunderstones, darts flung from the sky during storms and buried point-down where the lightning struck. There is even a mechanism for the belief, since heavy rain washes soil off a field and brings the guards to the surface, so they really do appear after thunder. In the Netherlands, they were donderstenen, Donar’s stones, and were kept up under the roof tiles to keep a house safe in a storm.
Notes
Scandinavian tradition called them vätteljus, gnome candles, and much of Europe knew them as elf-bolts. Elsewhere they were Devil’s fingers or Saint Peter’s fingers. In Scotland, they were bat stones, steeped in water for horses; in southern England they were carried against rheumatism. Objects resembling them appear beside the Egyptian god Min as a sign of lightning.