Loire sediments

The Loire would thus appear to owe its name to mud, a name apparently rooted in a Celtic language - that of the lands where it eventually ends up, after its epic descent. But how did the word from the mouth of the river come to ascend its course? As salmon do? Or memories? But to refer to what unit? How could people living all the way upstream relate to this mud, this turbid matter and word from downstream? I searched in books on the origins of words, in works devoted to hydronyms, but no one has spoken of this strange journey, of this journey in reverse – the great and mysterious ascent of a proper noun.

A river whose name is shrouded in mystery

Other hypotheses cite different origins. The name is so familiar, yet remains puzzling, with no definite “source” (like the river itself). Neither is the water flowing in the Loire clear - there is always, first and foremost in fact, some silt: “Most of the various origins cited - *lig, *leg, *lueg - allude to (…) a spreading out, a collection and depositing of geomatter, comprising silt or clay, sand or pebbles, aggregates or gravel, which the river, in countless places, is still continuously sweeping along or leaving behind to this day.”¹

In other words, sediments. Sediments are all those things that the river picks up, churns and sets in motion again. The watercourse erodes everything it touches; transports the broken up mineral or organic matter, that which gradually builds up and amalgamates over a long period of time (which far exceeds our lifetimes); brings forth the landscapes and bestows fertility on farmland (this makes me think of what Élisée Reclus said about “great working rivers”, or of how we now look at rivers as drivers for terraforming: diggers, scoopers, carriers, shapers - fully-fledged sculptors of the country). For the Loire is not all liquid, it combines two flows: water and sand (it is even said that the sand is what gives it its style); and this combination gives rise to islands, banks and strands. The alluvial sand and aggregates are also one of the most sought-after resources, subject to extraction which, like all forms of mining, assumed massive, devastating proportions a century ago.

A river of sand that is sometimes wet

It’s enough to inspire the poet in me... A very old word climbs up the river in secret, ascending from the estuary, and it is as if all of us, Loire residents, were people of silt, people of muddy, miry lands. I like that, as I come from the estuary, and I like the idea that the composite, shifty water of the estuary - this unsettled and unsettling voice - slips overboard, whispers continuously and absorbs all the phrases of the Loire. And I dream: “Loire”, it’s as if the whole river was called “Sediments”. As if it above all wanted to tell us about what it does and can do to the Earth: about its erosive and heaving strength, about these rocks that it eats away at, about these centuries it wears away, about all these lives it shakes up, holds in suspension and carries with it. This is the stuff of time itself: trimmings, peelings, tiny scraps of everything, discards and eliminations, persisting and holding fast, alluvium and allusions which slip into the memory and remain not as a trace but as the very soil itself.

Marielle Macé

A CNRS Research Director and literature specialist, Marielle Macé is the author of the noteworthy and notable Sidérer, considérer, Nos cabanes, Respire and Une pluie d’oiseaux, published respectively by Editions Verdier and Corti. She is working on the solidarities between poetry and an anthropology extended to things and beings other than humans.

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1. Source: Loire Article on Wikipedia, French version (auteurs). Content under the licence CC-BY-SA 4.0.