Flowers and leaves of Boswellia sacra, a tree that produces frankincense, on the campus of Florida International University in Miami. Branches of a tree with green leaves and orange and yellow blooms.
20 December 2021
[26 December 2021, updated with correction to the etymology of the Greek from Languagehat.com.]
Frankincense is the aromatic resin of the trees of the genus Boswellia that is burned as incense. Frankincense is perhaps best known as one of the gifts the Magi bring to the infant Jesus. The Vulgate Matthew 2:11 reads:
et intrantes domum invenerunt puerum cum Maria matre ejus et procidentes adoraverunt eum et apertis thesauris suis obtulerunt ei munera aurum tus et murram. (Vulgate)
(On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh—New Revised Standard Version.)
The Latin tus or thus can refer to incense generally and the resin of the genus Boswellia in particular. The Koine Greek original is λίβανος (libanos, frankincense). The Greek, in turn, is probably a borrowing from a Semitic language—the Arabic word for it is luban, and the Proto-Semitic root is *lbn, meaning white, a reference to the milky appearance of the resin as it flows from the tree.
The English word is borrowed from the Anglo-Norman phrase franc encens. The basic meaning of franc is free, but it can also mean noble or distinguished. In other words, the term means high-quality incense. The Anglo-Latin francum incensum makes an appearance in 1206, although the more usual Latin nomenclature was liberum incensum. However, there is a slight problem with this etymology in that while the Latin liber means free, it was not generally used to mean noble or distinguished. Additionally, the noble/distinguished sense of franc in Anglo-Norman and Continental Old French was, as a rule, only applied to the social status of people. Francencens is the only example in Old French where franc is applied to a plant.
That issue does not rule the standard etymology out, but it does suggest an alternative. It may be that the Latin liberum incensum is a re-analysis of the Greek libanos, turning the Greek word into a more familiar adjective in Latin. The franc would then be a straightforward translation of the Latin, with a subsequent semantic shift to mean noble/high quality, as that would make more sense in the context of incense
Frankincense, or variations thereof, appear in Latin, French, and English in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The date corresponds to the rise of the cult of the Magi and the growing importance of the Magi in Christian worship and iconography. For instance, the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne, a reliquary said to contain the bones of the three Magi, was built in the thirteenth century.
The Anglo-Norman francencens may have appeared as early as 1216 in a copy of a trade record from early in the reign of Henry III. It appears in a list of customs duties for products arriving in the city of London. The problem is that this is in a fifteenth-century manuscript (the Liber Albus) that purports to reproduce a thirteenth century document. Whether the word appeared in the original or whether it is an interpolation by a later scribe is unknown.
John Gower uses the phrase franc encens in his Mirour de l’Omme, written c. 1370:
En genullant luy font offrens,
C’est orr et mirre et franc encens,
En demoustrance par figure
Qu’il estoit Rois sure toutes gens,
Et verray dieus omnipotens,
Et mortiel homme en sa nature.(Kneeling, they make offerings to him of gold and myrrh and frankincense, demonstrating that he was king of all peoples, and truly both omnipotent God and mortal man in his nature.)
Frankincense appears in English use in the closing years of the fourteenth century. One early and instructive appearance is in John Trevisa’s 1398 translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things):
Sabea is a cuntrey in Arabia and [haþ] þe name of Saba þe sone of Chus. Þis cuntrey streccheþ in streyȝt lengþe estwarde toward þe see Persicum, and is nyȝe to Caldea in þe norþe, and endeth at þe [see] of Arabia in the weste, and is nyȝe to Ethiopia in þe southe. And þis londe bereþ [thus] frannkincense and ȝeueþ goode smelles, for in wodes and lanndes þerof groweth myrre, canel, thus, and oþer swete spicerie.
(Saba is a country in Arabia and has the name of Saba, the son of Chus. This country stretches in a straight line eastward toward the Persian Sea, and is near to Chaldea in the north, and ends at the Arabian Sea in the west, and is near to Ethiopia in the south. And this land bears frankincense and gives good odors, for in the woods and lands thereof grow myrrh, cinnamon, incense, and other sweet spices.)
All the extant manuscripts of Trevisa are copies (or copies of copies) of an original. The published edition of Trevisa’s work that I take this quotation from uses London, British Library, MS Additional 27944 as the base manuscript. The words in square brackets appear in other manuscripts and are thought to be in Trevisa’s original. Bartholomæus Anglicus’s Latin reads est autem regio thurifera (and this is an incense-producing region). Trevisa’s original seems to have included both thus and frankincense, indicating that he thought frankincense would be unfamiliar to many readers. The fact that later copies omit the Latin word indicates that within a few years the word frankincense had become familiar.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2008. s.v. francencens, franc.
Bibla Sacra Iuxta Vulgatem Versionem, fifth edition. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson, eds. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Matthew 2:11, 1528.
Comment on “Frankincense.” Languagehat.com, 22 December 2021.
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. incensum, sacristarius. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Gower John. Mirour de l’Omme. The Complete Works of John Gower, vol. 1 of 4. G.C. Macauley, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899, lines 28,165–170, 313.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. frank-encens, n.
Müller, Walter W. “Notes on the Use of Frankincense in South Arabia.” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, vol. 6, 1976, 124–36. JSTOR.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NSRV), augmented third edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007, Matthew 2.11, 10 New Testament.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. frankincense, n., frank, adj.2.
Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Liber Albus, Liber Customarum, et Liber Horn, vol. 1. London: Longman, et al., 1859, 230. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things, vol. 2 of 3. M.C. Seymour and D.C. Greetham, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. 15.131, 802. London, British Library, MS Additional 27944.
Image credit: Scott Zona, 2008. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
