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harlequin[harlequin 词源字典]

harlequin: [16] Harlequin, a brightly-clad character in the Italian commedia dell’arte, has a murky history. He seems to have originated in a mythical figure known in Old French as Herlequin or Hellequin, who was the leader of a ghostly troop of horsemen who rode across the sky at night. And Herlequin could well be a later incarnation of King Herla (in Old English Herla cyning), a legendary personage who has been identified with the chief Anglo-Saxon god Woden.

It seems likely that another piece of the jigsaw could be the erlking, the supernatural abductor of children described in a Goethe poem memorably set to music by Schubert; its name is generally traced back to Danish ellerkonge, a variant of elverkonge, literally ‘king of the elves’, which bears a resemblance to Herlequin that is surely too strong to be coincidental.

In early modern French Herlequin became Harlequin, the form borrowed by English (present-day French arlequin shows the influence of Italian arlecchino).
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