Why Do We Say Cheers?
The earth sways as the northern hemisphere tilts back from the sun following the autumnal equinox. Days get shorter. The air gets colder. It’s time to come in off the patio and relax in the warm embrace of a cozy pub.
Once inside, surrounded by friends, we’ll raise our glasses and say Cheers! in an invocation of friendship and well-wishes. But why do we do this?
This week we explore the origins of the word cheers.
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A group has just arrived at a corner table in the dim light of an English pub. Low, warm light flickers against dark wood panels, old photographs, and metal beer adverts from a time just beyond living memory. They set their pints down and settle into their seats. Chair legs squeak across the wood floor. Friendly banter echoes off the walls. One man grabs his glass and raises it, casting a knowing gaze at his friends. Without speaking everyone knows what to do. They take up their glasses, raising them into the air. The first to raise his glass proclaims Cheers! and the rest repeat the incantation. The gathering has now officially begun.
Sharing a drink has for millennia been a ritual where identities, relationships, and social boundaries have been constructed and performed. From oath-sworn war leaders sharing a drink with their lords in ancient times, to toasting a bride and groom at a reception, or grabbing a drink with your mates, we have since time immemorial participated in our own personal form of this universal custom. It’s a way of acknowledging who we are, who we’re with, and what we mean to one another. And we all share in the invocation that consummates this ritual.
Cheers. Skål. Salud. Sante. Prost. Zum Wohl.
To health. To life. To well-being. May it benefit you.
Different words, different languages, different times. One sentiment that invokes a connection among those present and a wish for good fortune. But how did this tradition start?
The word cheers carries with it an ancient meaning but is itself a new addition to the English language. It appeared only after the First World War. Before that English speakers used different words to capture the sentiment to which we raise a glass. There was then no single term, but a variety of sayings that reinforced relationships among the drinkers. The famous Victorian author Thackeray has a character invoke “Your health and my service to you” in The History of Pendennis (1850). In Bleak House (1853) Dickens has his character Matthew Bagnet toast his wife with “Here’s toward her!” to which she then replies “And Wishing Yours!” as she nods at everyone present.
To understand the origin of cheers we have to go back one thousand years to a time when Vikings controlled large parts of England and Old Norse words were reshaping the English language.
Beginning in the ninth century, Scandinavian peoples settled and conquered territory across parts of England and, eventually, northern France. Their culture and language remain with us today in every conversation we have. Even basic pronouns like they/them/their come from the Norse þeir/þeim/þeira.
The Old Norse greeting ves heill brings us closer to our story.
Ves heill means be well or be in good health. English speakers had a remarkably similar greeting: Wæs hāl, from which we eventually get the word wassail.
We can find the greeting in Beowulf, one of the oldest surviving works of English literature. It’s about a Scandinavian leader who fights monsters. Beowulf journeys from what is now Sweden to Denmark and greets King Hrothgar with Wæs þū, Hroðgar, hāl (Be well, Hrothgar).
But it wasn’t yet a toast.
By the twelfth century, Danish-speaking peoples were using ves heill much as we use “cheers” today. Among English speakers, the closely related wæs hāl developed into wassail and became part of a call-and-response toast:
Wassail! - Be well!
Drinkhail! - Drink well!
The first documented version of this is from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, published in 1136. In it, Monmouth tells a story where the Saxon princess Rowena presents a cup to the British king Vortigern. She kneels before him and proclaims Lauerd king, wassail. King Vortigern doesn’t know what she’s talking about so an interpreter explains, telling the King he should take the cup, answer Drincheil! (drinkhail), then take a drink.
The irony of this story is that it’s set in the 5th century and earlier descriptions of the exchange between the princess and king don’t mention the drinking invocation at all. It seems that Monmouth took a bit of creative licence and mistakenly assumed what must have by then already seemed like an ancient drinking call-and-response ritual.
Wassail was certainly a widespread and very English tradition in the twelfth century. In a humorous poem written by Nigel of Canterbury in 1180, an ambitious donkey named Burnellus travels to Paris to study the Liberal Arts. Observing the students gathered there from the nations of Europe, Burnellus judges that the English are generous, intelligent, and admirable, but these positive traits are ruined by their terrible habit of travelling from tavern to tavern in Paris while constantly shouting Wassail! Drinkhail!
The invocation, it seemed, had become so much fun that it hijacked the whole ritual. By the 1600s, wassail had become a verb: wassailing, meaning revelry and carousing. In a scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the characters Hamlet, Horatio and Marcellus are outside a castle waiting for a ghost. Suddenly, they hear trumpets blaring and cannon fire from inside the castle. Horatio asks what the noise means. Hamlet explains that King Claudius is inside drinking and partying.
The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse, Keeps wassail and the swaggering upswing reels.
Hamlet continues, explaining that every time the king drinks the noise is a response to his toast. He laments that this kind of behaviour makes other nations take the Danes for drunkards (though written by the Englishman Shakespeare, Hamlet takes place in Denmark).
In the centuries that followed, to go wassailing meant the kind of revelry you’d find on a rowdy pub crawl.
Wassailing became part of a broader Christmas culture with roots stretching back to pre-Christian midwinter celebrations. Christmas in medieval Europe was a season of hospitality, feasting, role reversal. Masters might serve servants for a day. And then there were the Lords of Misrule, temporary masters of Christmas festivities appointed to preside over feasting, games, drunkenness, and the playful overturning of social norms. The idea was essentially a medieval version of what happens at the Christmas party stays at the Christmas party.
Even Christmas carols were different. Medieval caroles weren’t hymns, but secular songs and dances performed in alehouses and the halls of large households. Sometimes the singers took them door to door.
The respectable Victorians were less enthusiastic about the drunken chaos of the old wassail. During the nineteenth century, wassailing increasingly became associated with a more wholesome Christmas tradition: going from house to house singing songs. Gone were the Lords of Misrule. The old drunken revel had been transformed into something much closer to Christmas caroling.
If wassailing was out of fashion, Victorians had to keep up the age-old call-and-response drinking tradition in a less licentious manner. So, they returned to the original meaning. Gone were the rowdy calls of Wassail! Drinkhail! They were replaced by spontaneously worded wishes for good health like those captured by Thackeray and Dickens.
But how did we get to cheers?
Like wassail, cheers had been on a long semantic journey. It began centuries ago as a word for facial expression or countenance. From there it became a state of mind (like gladness) and eventually a word for encouragement (as in three cheers!). By the late Victorian era it became a greeting, cheer-o, that morphed into the boisterous greeting cheerio!
It was a word that captured well-wishes and encouragement to keep one’s chin up during hard times, all bundled together in a modern greeting. It was a perfect word for its day, the post-WWI era of European hardship. Cheerio found its way into the pub, where it was replaced by the punchy monosyllabic expression of friendship we know today.
Cheers.
I imagine soldiers returning from the trenches, gathered around a table with family and friends from whom they had long been separated. They raise a glass, look each other in the eye and say cheers!
It’s a word that combines “your health,” “my service to you,” and “here’s to…” into a simple invocation that captures one thousand years of tradition.