the.com/threshold stone
The line you cross to leave one world and enter another, carved in rock.
means The flat stone laid beneath a doorway that you step over to enter a building, marking the boundary between outside and in.
from A compound of "threshold" and "stone." "Threshold" is the older puzzle: from Old English "þrescold" or "þerscwald," it clearly begins with "þrescan" — to thresh, to tread or trample grain underfoot — but the second part is murky, and scholars have argued over it for a long time. The link to threshing may recall floors where grain was trodden, or simply the doorsill as the place feet pound. "Stone" is plain Old English "stan," a word shared across the Germanic languages. Folk fancy makes the threshold a place to pause and reflect; the linguistics just remembers feet.
- Newgrange
- A 5,000-year-old carved stone marks Ireland's tomb entrance
- don't step
- Many cultures forbid treading on it, only over
- bride carried
- Tradition of lifting brides over it survives today
- liminal root
- Latin limen, threshold, gives us word liminal
- load-bearing
- Often the heaviest, most solid stone in old doorways
threshold stone at newgrange — megalithic stone at irish neolithic passage tomb, 5,000 years old, carved with triple spiral motif