Cimmerian, n. and a.
(sɪˈmɪərɪən)
Also 6–7 Cym-, 7 Cymm-, Cim-, 20 Kimm-.
[f. L. Cimmeri-us (Gr. κιµµέριος) pertaining to the Cimmerii + -an.]
A. n. One of the Cimmerii: a. A member of a nomadic people of antiquity, the earliest known inhabitants of the Crimea, who overran Asia Minor in the 7th century b.c.
| 1588 Shakes. Tit. A. ii. iii. 72 Your swarth Cymerion. 1797 Encycl. Brit. V. 9/1 [The Cimbri] are said to have been descended from the Asiatic Cimmerians. 1886 Encycl. Brit. XXI. 577/1 The Cimmerians reached Asia Minor through Thrace. 1902 Encycl. Brit. XXV. 720/1 The Phrygian power was broken in the 9th or 8th century b.c. by the Cimmerians, who entered Asia Minor through Armenia. 1950 H. L. Lorimer Homer & Monuments ii. 52 The description of the country of the Kimmerians..would suit their settlements on the north coast of the Black Sea. Ibid. v. 286 The conflict between Kimmerian and Scyth in South Russia. |
b. One of a people fabled by the ancients to live in perpetual darkness.
| 1871 Bryant Odyss. xi, There the people dwell, Of the Cimmerians, in eternal cloud And darkness. |
B. adj. a. Of or pertaining to the ancient Cimmerii or their territories.
| 1862 Chambers's Encycl. III. 35/1 The Cimmerian Bosporus (Strait of Yenikale). 1886 Encycl. Brit. XXI. 577/1 The Dniester was the grave of the Cimmerian kings. 1917 E. Pound in Poetry (Chicago) Aug. 251 To the Kimmerian lands and peopled cities..came we. 1950 H. L. Lorimer Homer & Monuments v. 306 The result of Kimmerian and Scythian invasions. 1959 Chambers's Encycl. III. 573/2 Cimmerii were a people who in the Homeric tradition dwelt beyond the ocean in perpetual darkness... They..were penned by the Scythians in the Crimea..and in the Taman peninsula; the ancient ‘Cimmerian Bosporus’ was the strait between these two lands. |
b. Of or belonging to the legendary Cimmerii. Hence, proverbially used as a qualification of dense darkness, gloom, or night, or of things or persons shrouded in thick darkness.
| 1598 Marston Pygmal. Sat. ii. 142 That such Cymerian darknes should inuolve A quaint conceit, that he could not resolue. 1632 Milton L'Allegro 10 There under ebon shades..In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell. 1781 Gibbon Decl. & F. III. 206 The proverbial expression of Cimmerian darkness was originally borrowed from the description of Homer (in the eleventh book of the Odyssey). 1801 Helen Williams Sk. Fr. Rep. i. xviii. 229 The Cimmerian night of the middle ages. 1880 E. Kirke Garfield 15 A dense fog..shrouded the lonely mountain in Cimmerian darkness. |
Hence Ciˈmmerianism, dense darkness (of ignorance, etc.); † Ciˈmmerianize v. trans., to make totally dark.
| 1630 J. Taylor (Water P.) Peace of France Wks. iii. 111 Ded., The Leathean Den of obliuious Cimerianisme. 1824 Blackw. Mag. XVI. 292 The awful cimmerianism of the philologer and classical critic of the Edinburgh Review. 1600 Tourneur Trans. Metamorph. (1878) 187 This blacke Cymerianized night. |