Ember: What Survives the Fire

The word ‘ember’ has carried its quiet heat through centuries of language. In Old English it was ‘ǣmyrge’, in Old Norse ‘eimyrja’ - both meaning a live coal. The word travelled through Germanic and Norse speech, took on its unhistorical ‘b’ in the fifteenth century, and still glows today in the embers of fires and the phrases we use for fading warmth or memory. Across Europe its relatives - French ‘braise’, Spanish ‘brasa’, German ‘Glut’, Scandinavian ‘glød’ - keep the same image alive. What begins as the residue of flame has become a symbol of endurance, the small light that remains when everything else has burned away.