You might think that physical aspects of the Earth’s geography would have names as old as anything in English. But there are some geographic features with names that aren’t as old as you might think.
“Volcano,” for example, is a word that dates back only to the 1600s. Its first eruption into English was in a book by Samuel Purcas in 1613, The book had a title typical for its era: “Purchas his pilgrimage; or, Relations of the world and the religions obserued in all ages and places discouered,” and the relevant passage reads: “A Vulcano or flaming hill, the fire whereof may be seene..aboue 100 miles.”
In 1669 the word “volcanello” showed up,, meaning a small volcano or specifically a volcanic island, and although nobody today has probably ever heard the term, it remained in use until the early 20th century. “Arab report speaks persistently of geysers and volcanelli, if not of more considerable manifestations, at Bir Borhut in the Eastern Hadramu” appeared in The Nearer East by David George Hogarth, published in 1902.
Hogarth’s use of “volcanelli” as the plural is historically appropriate, because the original “volcano” was borrowed directly from Italian. And that may have something to do with the word’s relatively late arrival into English. In Italy, after all, they have real volcanoes (or, I suppose, “volcani”) to observe, while in England and most of the area where Germanic languages were spoken, few people eever saw anything like a volcano.
Although today “volcano” is in common use and virtually everybody knows it, the word had at least one rival: “ignivomous.” It’s pronounced “igNIVomous”, with the second syllable stressed — or at least it was when it was still used, up until the mid-1800s. It appeared about the same time as “volcano,” but this one is derived from French instead of Italian. Its original roots are Latin; it’s formed from “ignis” (fire) and “vomere” (to vomit). Etymologically, an “ignivomous” mountain simply “vomits fire,” which isn’t a bad description of a volcano.
Jules Verne wrote adventure stories spanning the whole world, and his characters encountered all sorts of geographical wonders — some were even real. When they encountered volcanoes, though, Verne sometimes used the word “ignovimous” instead. He described a mid-ocean volcano in The Field of Ice this way: “This enormous ignivomous rock in the middle of the sea was six thousand feet high, just about the altitude of Hecla.” A couple of paragraphs earlier, Verne calls the same mountain a “volcano:” “Apparently there was only one crater to the volcano, out of which the columns of fire issued, streaked with forked lightning.”
Verne being Verne, of course, this particular ignivomous rock was located at the North Pole. In fact, for reasons having to do with the plot, it’s exactly at the North Pole. The Field of Ice features a recurring trope that Verne used: that the earth is hollow and you can get to the inside by going through openings at the north and south poles: “Among other opinions put forth was one in our own days, which greatly excited Altamont’s surprise. It was held that there was an immense opening at the poles which led into the heart of the earth, and that it was out of the opening that the light of the Aurora Borealis streamed.”
The Field of Ice was part of Verne’s Voyages Extraordiares series — specifically it’s part 2 of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, which was published in 1866 and was only the second installment in the series. This was probably the first appearance in Verne’s work of the hollow earth idea, which he expanded on in his very next novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, published in 1867. Except there’s a bit of a puzzle there — it seems Verne published the initial version of Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864, prior to The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, but revised it and republished it in 1867.
There’s another interesting bit of trivia about Verne’s work, and it still affects works of fiction. The Voyages Extraordinaires series consists of fifty-four novels (all written with a pen!), and the main character in Voyage to the Center of the Earth is Professor Lidenbrock, who is German. He appeared in other books as well. But in 1870-71, the Franco-Prussian War happened, and that was the end of sympathetic German characters in anything from Jules Verne (who was, you’ll recall, French). His first book after the war had a German character — Professor Schultze from The Begum’s Fortune — but Shultze was a bad guy — really bad — and is one of the models for the supervillains in modern books and movies. It’s also not by accident that most supervillains speak with accents, and tend to have ignivomous tempers.
