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A quest for GEAS

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in high school more than 40 years ago, and always admired the way D&D could pull in material from all know mythologies and tap into the history of high fantasy literature, from the Lord of the Rings to the old Conan novels.

While I don't expect every phrase from this rich (but strange) heritage to show up in every dictionary, one huge pet peeve of mine is that the word GEAS is not in the Scrabble dictionary or any dictionary used by any online games I play.  Heck, you can always find ROCS and LICHES and ghosts and goblins in modern games.  But never GEAS.

GEAS comes from the Irish, through Scottish to English.  A GEAS is an unwilling quest, which can also be conveyed as a taboo, or the curse that will be bestowed upon you for breaking a taboo.  If you take on a quest of your own free will, that's one thing.  But if a demigod gives you a GEAS to walk to the ends of the earth, you're in for a world of pain.

Wikipedia has a fine page talking about this odd bit of mythic heritage.  It mentions the original Irish terms, their Scottish and Gaelic directions, and concludes that they passed into English as both GEAS and GEIS.  Neither one is in the dictionary.  It's almost as if the authors of dictionaries were under a geas to never mention it.

I saw the word GEAS today is the most unlikely way.  

We were at BJ's Brewhouse having some wings, and some wall art showed the stages of making beer.  The step that mentioned yeast was partially blocked by some wires, and "yeast" (with the T blocked and Y half hidden) looked exactly like GEAS.  See the green arrow above -- I can't tell you how that tiny detail popped out and grabbed my attention.  So, the gods of beer were giving me a compulsion to write this little article...

The Oxford English Dictionary does have these words.  No game uses it, but it's nice to see it acknowledged somewhere.  It has both GEAS and GEIS, pronounced "gesh" and "gay-sh", first found in English in an 1880 poem by Samuel Ferguson.  Meaning "an injunction, moral obligation or taboo".  OED also has a version of GEAS meaning "go" (probably "goes", and probably pronounced "gays") from Old English, and I could hear that coming up in a Scottish accent even today.

When gaming, every time I said it or heard it I think it was "gi-iss".  We could only guess.  Next time, I will say and use it more properly. 

Speaking of gaming, in the D&D first edition Player's Handbook, Geas was a 6th level magic-user spell which "places a magical command" upon a creature, which must be followed until completed; failure to do so will "cause the creature to grow sick and die within 1 to 4 weeks."  There's a final note about how the "casting and fulfillment are tricky, and an improperly cast geas is null and void immediately."  We the player would read that as "improperly worded," like when trying to word a wish or a contract with otherworldly powers.  Tricksy tricksy stuff here ...

As for the ties to fantasy literature, here's a funny bit from a fan over on the Michael Moorcock website.  Mr. Moorcock created such epics as the tales of Elric and Stormbringer (which I recently found a wonderful 4-volume hardcover collection of).  The fan says "I am 35 years old and live in New Zealand and have made it a personal geas to deliver to friends (and foes alike) your collected writing for their perusal and enjoyment."  The whole fantasy fanbase knows what he's talking about.

Put GEAS in the dictionaries, where it belongs.  Or at least let us use it in our games.

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