κήρ

κήρ (ker, "KAYR") lives, in the record, almost entirely inside Homer. Of its 104 occurrences across 20 works, the Iliad holds 45 and the Odyssey 33 — three-quarters of the whole life of the word in the two epics alone. After them the tail is thin and scattered: Psalmi (4), then Euripides's Electra (2), Philoctetes (2), Republic (2). This is a word that belongs to the battlefield and the death-song, and only visits everywhere else.

The lexica disagree in a way that is itself the story. Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) glosses it flatly "heart" (κῆρ, the seat of feeling, beside καρδία, kardia, "heart"), and Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) does the same — "heart," cross-referenced to καρδία. But Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) records the other κήρ, calling it "un terme d'un contenu très riche" ("a term of very rich content") that "participe à la fois aux notions de destin, de mort et de démon personnel" — that shares at once in the ideas of destiny, of death, and of a personal demon. Two words wear one spelling: the heart within, and the Kēr without — the death-doom that comes for a man.

The citable passages fall on the second side. The plurals give it away: κῆρες (keres) at Iliad 11.332 and κῆρας at Iliad 12.113, κῆρές at Euripides, Electra 795 — the Kēres, spirits of death, hunting in the plural. The singular κὴρ stands at Iliad 1.228 and again at Aeschylus, Agamemnon 206–210.

Etymology is treated by all three authorities — Beekes (s.v. κήρ, p. 736), Chantraine (p. 540), and Frisk (p. 875) — though the brief carries no single reconstructed root for the death-word, only their pointers to it.

When one spelling holds both the heart that feels and the doom that arrives, which one did a Greek hear first?