German Names for Merels

Jonas Richter's "German Names for Merels" traces the naming history of the nine men's morris game in German, with related Dutch, French, and Latin material, and asks how the mill-based name that dominates today in Germany and Austria came to replace an older number-based tradition. The article distinguishes two naming lines: a number-based tradition, with forms such as "Neunstein" and "den neunten stein ziehen," and a mill-based tradition built on "Mühle." The earliest German attestation identified is an early-fifteenth-century translation of Deguileville's Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, in which a verbal phrase renders the French merelier, while "Neunstein" appears in a 1432 Stuttgart contract.

The author's central argument is that "Mühle" did not begin as the name of the game. Drawing on sixteenth-century Latin-Dutch dialogues, bilingual phrasebooks, and lexicographic works by Kiliaan, Fischart, and others, Richter contends that mill terms first denoted positional formations, a row of three pieces and especially the "running mill" (Fick- or Zwickmühle), before becoming labels for the game as a whole. He argues that these gaming terms were established by the 1470s, since their figurative uses in writers such as Geiler and Luther predate the surviving gameplay references. Earlier etymologies based on grinding, windmill resemblance, or foreign terms are rejected.

The article leaves one question open. Richter weighs two explanations for the shift: the legal status of mills as protected sanctuaries, which may have made the protected row of three a fitting namesake, and the metaphorical image of mills as tireless, profitable motion that suits the running-mill position. The evidence cannot decide between them, though both may operate together. The metaphorical usage suggests an earlier, unrecorded ludic sense underlying the naming development. The closing bibliography supplies the lexicographic and scholarly sources on which the analysis rests.