Sain verb bless, protect noun blessing
‘Sain of the fairy-woman be thine, Sain of the elf-dart be thine, Sain of the red dog be thine…’ (The Fiery Cross)
Sain in Scots can be both a noun and a verb and it means to bless or a blessing. The word has a long history, coming to us from early Germanic and Scandinavian routes (compare Middle Dutch zegen, and Old Norse and Swedish signa - meaning the sign of the cross). It is archaic in English but still used in Scots, albeit rarely.
Rab Wilson used it in a poem he wrote especially for the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) in 2021 (A Newsin Wi Jack Aitken): ‘An we’ve a fantoosh team tae hain [protect], Ilk auld Scots wird, they store an sain.’ An earlier record in DSL comes from Thomas Ruddiman’s Glossary to Gavin Douglas’s Aeneis in 1710: ‘God safe you and sane you’. And a more vigorous usage appears in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1818): ‘God sain them! … In a country where men’s worldly gear was keepit from infang and outfang thief, as well as their immortal souls from the claws of the deil and his cummers - sain and save us!’
Sain is also used as a blessing to ward off ill health when a child sneezes (‘sain the bairn’). And, recorded in 1701 from John Brand’s A Brief Description of Orkney, Zetland, Pightland-Firth and Caithness, blessings were used to ward off evil spirits: ‘Especially at Hallow-Even, they use to sein or sign their Boats and put a Cross of Tar upon them … Their Houses also some use then to sein.’
Blessings weren’t always religious in tone. The Old-Lore Miscellany of Orkney, Shetland, Caithness and Sutherland recorded in 1848 that: ‘A lying-in woman was “sained” to keep the fairies off, by having a smouldering rag circled three times over her.’ As if being in labour in the mid-nineteenth century wouldn’t be dangerous enough!
In Robert Fergusson’s poem Ode to the Gowdspink [goldfinch], benediction comes from a beautiful bird. ‘The gowdspink comes in new attire, The brawest ’mang the whistling choir, That, ere the sun can clear his een, Wi glib notes sain the simmer’s green.’