[Ads-l] Etymythology watch: the strange case of the Elephant and the Enfanta (again)

[Laurence Horn]

In today’s NYT, in the column on restaurant closings, we read about the impending demise of a 50-year-old West Village establishment, Elephant & Castle:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/dining/nyc-restaurant-news.html

Scroll down to last entry, and in particular to the potted false history of the restaurant’s name:

The name derives from a location in London where there had been a pub called Enfanta de Castile with a name that got garbled and which was destroyed in World War II. 

According to the restaurant’s web site, at https://elephantandcastle.com/about-us/, the purported Enfanta de Castile pub is taken to have honored the 13th century Princess and later Queen Eleanor of Castile.

I was pretty sure I’d read on several occasions that the facts were entirely otherwise, and that no pre-garbling pub Enfanta de Castile ever existed. So I started with Wikipedia, which presents (at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_and_Castle) a far more plausible story of the Elephant and the Enfanta. The entry draws on the research of Stephen Humphrey and his published history in 2013, showing that "the image of an elephant with a castle on its back has been popular for centuries and throughout Europe (the earliest example predating Queen Eleanor by 1,500 years), and pointing out the fact that the sign only begins to be used in the area about 500 years after Eleanor was alive”.

(Note in passing that while the NYC Elephant & Castle credits itself for the & in its name--"Our Elephant & Castle has replaced “and” with an ampersand”—that ampersand has marked the Northern Line tube stop for some time before the NYC restaurant ever opened its doors.)  

But then I had a memory of having read about the Enfanta etymythology some years before 2013, and recalled that the place to go for such information was Michael Quinion’s late lamented World Wide Words site. Here’s his account from a page he posted in 2000:

https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa-ele1.html

Among other difficulties with the story, Quinion notes:
Not the least of the problems is that Eleanor of Castile wasn’t an infanta (or at least wasn’t known as that — the term only appeared in English about 1600); the one infanta that the British have heard about from school history lessons is Maria, a daughter of Philip III of Spain, who was once controversially engaged to Charles I. But she had no connection with Castile. The form Infanta de Castile seems to be a conflation of vague memories of two Iberian royal women separated by 300 years.

There’s no disagreement between Quinion and Humphrey on debunking the Enfanta myth, but they differ on the role (or lack thereof) of the Cutlers’ Company.

LH
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