Laverne Gay (b. Lodi,
California, 1 December 1914; d. Sacramento, California, 5 August 1997)
In an online essay on the updating of the entry for the word ruel-bone in the Oxford English Dictionary, the lexicographers (and Tolkien
scholars) Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, have noted that,
besides Tolkien, there is another modern writer who re-used the obsolete Middle
English word ruel-bone in the twentieth
century. The word appears in a line from
Chaucer’s “Sir Thopas”: his sadel was of
rewel-boon (2068). The word is related to Old French rohal (or rochal) which
meant “walrus-ivory”. Gilliver, Marshall
and Weiner wrote:
Intriguingly, during the OED revision process evidence came to light of another modern writer using ruel-bone in a text which was published significantly before any of Tolkien’s uses could have come to public attention. The entry now includes a quotation from the historical novel Wine of Satan (1949)—subtitled “A Tale of Bohemond Prince of Antioch”—by the little-known Californian writer Laverne Gay. Her research in medieval sources was evidently sufficient to equip her with a fine array of unusual vocabulary with which to enrich her rather highly-coloured narrative: other examples from Wine of Satan include baselard, a kind of dagger, and nasal used as a noun to mean the nosepiece of a helmet. In the quoted passage, the crusading Robert of Normandy is described as sitting ‘erect in his rewel-bone saddle’. The author could have acquired rewel-bone (her chosen spelling) from various sources—perhaps Chaucer, or even the original OED entry—but her use of the word evidently did not catch on.
Laverne was educated by the Domincan Sisters, first at Lodi
(St. Anne’s) and later at Stockton (St. Mary’s). Her interest in poetry and
journalism was encouraged, and in 1932, her final year, she edited the convent
newspaper and yearbook. At the
University of California, she majored in Latin and history, and was junior
editor of the Daily Californian. Her
interest in medieval history was awakened by attending the lectures of
Professor James Westfall Thompson (1869-1941).
She once reminisced that “it was during his new graduate lectures on ‘The
Irish Element in Medieval Culture’ that I came upon St. Columban’s royal friend
Theudelinda of the Lombards, whom he later characterized to me as neglected by
history and a ‘natural’ for me to do. So she became the subject, first of the
original research and later of a first novel.”
Laverne Kels graduated from the University of California in 1936, and after
taking a teacher’s degree she taught high school for two years in the Oakland
School System.
On 28 January 1939, she married Arthur Joseph Gay (1913-1986),
an optometrist. After the outbreak of
World War II, her husband’s work with the Navy sent the couple to Texas and
then to Idaho, before they returned to California. They had two children,
Stephen (b. 1942) and Janis (b. 1947).
Gay’s first novel, The
Unspeakables: A Tale of Lombardy (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945) was set in the sixth century. It centers
on Theudelinda, princess of Bavaria, who marries the Lombard king Authari, and
after his death, marries the Duke of Turin who is later crowned the king of all
Italy. Reviews were mixed. Kirkus
called it “good history—good biography—good reading, though slow-moving in
spots” (1 September 1945), while the New
Yorker noted that “the tale would have been better in a style less
pretentious than Mrs. Gay’s determinedly literary one. Brocade is all right to a point, but four
hundred pages of ‘Her light laughter broke on the morning air like shards of
finest porphyry’ . . . gets to be rather wearing” (13 October 1945). The
Weekly Review added: “there are so many characters in the book, so many
battles and so much description of feasting and pageantry and kissing that you
may be confused. The opulence of the style will not diminish your mental fog” (21
October 1945).
Of the obscure words in the novel noted by Gilliver,
Marshall and Weiner, nasal appears
only once, in the prologue:
But now his face was a strange and savage-looking mask, with the dank red, ear-length hair dishevelled over it, the ragged beard upon it, and the white streak left on his nose and forehead by the nasal upon the helm. (p. 4)
Rewel-bone also
occurs only once:
Godfrey, his noble face alight, his great brown charger restivem stomping for the fray; Robert of Normandy, his high stirrups making his mount grotesquely tall, looking almost child-like at this distance, erect in his rewel-bone saddle. (p. 231)
Baselard occurs at
least six times by my count, but I will quote only the first appearance:
As he dismounted, she leaped from her horse, and was backed against a tree, her riding whip in one and a sharp-pointed deadly-looking baselard in the other. (p. 12)
One can see from these short extracts that Gay’s prose has a
descriptive vividness to it. Wine of
Satan was selected as a Book Club title, and was considerably more
successful than Gay’s first novel.
In the early 1950s, Gay worked on a contemporary novel, but
it was never published. She did
occasionally review books for the magazine Books
on Trial, but mostly she seems to have ceased publishing. From 1951 through 1964 she worked on the
board of the Mercy Children’s Hospital Guild.
Laverne Gay died in Sacramento at the age of eighty-two.
NB: Some details in the above sketch, including Laverne Gay’s
reminiscences, are taken from an entry in Catholic
Authors (1952).