Illustration of Highlanders by a peat fire sharing a horn snuff mull, a ram's-head table mull on wheels beside them.

Sneeshin and the mull: the Scots words for snuff and its box

Ask for snuff in old Scots and you'd ask for sneeshin. The Scottish National Dictionary lists a whole family of spellings (sneeshing, snishin, snichen and more) and gives "sneising", from 1637, as the earliest Older Scots form. The Gaelic is snaoisean. The editors suggest the word began as Highland speakers' version of "sneezing tobacco".

You kept it in a mull. The dictionary's entry for sneeshin defines a sneeshin mull as "a snuff-box, orig. one which ground the snuff", and a sneeshin horn as "a snuff-box shaped from a horn". Its entry for snuff gives snuff-mill, snuff-mull and snuff-milne as spellings of the same word for the box.

A mull on the table

Allan Ramsay wrote an "Elegy on Lucky Wood", dated 1717 in the dictionary. In it he remembers late nights in her company: "To the sma' Hours we aft sat still, Nick'd round our Toasts and Snishing Mill".

A century later Walter Scott gave a character in The Antiquary (1816) the line "I could take my aith to that sneeshing-mull amang a thousand."

Ram's head and ram's horn

The Science Museum holds a snuff mull in the form of a ram's head on wheels, made in Edinburgh in 1881-82. It's about 41 centimetres wide, with cairngorm decoration and two snuff compartments under silver-gilt lids. The museum's note says the ram "was almost certainly a former regimental mascot", and that the mull was brought out for regimental dinners and other gatherings, where it "would have been placed on a table and passed around for everyone to use."

The Royal Regiment of Scotland's learning hub shows an early 19th-century ram's horn mull that is "said to have been recovered from the field of Waterloo". Its lid is inscribed "Sgt Anderson's horn". Mulls like it, the regiment notes, "would often be used for more formal officer's dinners, and would sit in the middle of the table."

Captain Robert McDowall presented a large ram's horn table mull to the Grand Committee of the Seven Incorporations of Dumfries on 20 September 1822. He was formerly of the Dragoon Guards. The mull carries an engraved plaque with the names of the Trades Deacons, and came with a rake, hammer, brush and sifter spoon for taking snuff.

Still on the shelf

Mr Snuff stocks the Sir Walter Scotts range of snuff, which shares its name with the author of The Antiquary.

Sources

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