The winged celts may be generally described as those in which the flanges are short and have a great amount of lateral extension. When these wings are hammered over so as to form a kind of socket on each side of the blade, one of the varieties of the palstave form is the result. The other and more common variety of the palstave form has the portion of the blade which lies between the wings or side flanges and above the stop-ridge cast thinner than the rest of the blade, thus leaving a recess or groove on each side into which the handle fitted. I have already made frequent use of the term palstave, and it will be well here to make a few remarks as to the origin and meaning of the word. The term palstave, or more properly paalstab, comes to us from the Scandinavian antiquaries. Their reason for adopting the term was that there is still in use in Iceland a kind of narrow spade or spud, which is known by the name of paalstab, and which somewhat resembles these bronze instruments. Woodcuts of two of these Icelandic palstaves are given in the _Archæological Journal_,[247] from drawings communicated to Mr. Yates by Councillor Thomsen, of Copenhagen. They are here by permission reproduced. The derivation of the term suggested in a note to the Journal is that _paal_ comes from the Icelandic verb _pula_, or _pala_, to labour, so that the word means the “labouring staff.” But this appears to me erroneous. _Pul_, indeed, signifies hard, laborious work; but _pæli_ (_at pæla_) means to dig, and _pall_ (_conf._ Latin _pala_ and French _pelle_) means a kind of spade or shovel. The word, indeed, survives in the English language as _peel_, the name of a kind of wooden shovel used by bakers for placing loaves in the oven. The meaning of the term would appear, then, to be rather “spade staff” than “labouring staff,” unless the word labouring be used in the sense of the French _labourer_. Mr. Thoms, in a note to his “Translation of Worsaae’s Primeval Antiquities of Denmark,”[248] says that the “term Paalstab was formerly applied in Scandinavia and Iceland to a weapon used for battering the shields of the enemy, as is shewn by passages in the Sagas. Although not strictly applicable to the (bronze) instruments in question, this designation is now so generally used by the antiquaries of Scandinavia and Germany, that it seems desirable, with the view of securing a fixed terminology, that it should be introduced into the archæology of England.” The term had already been used in 1848 in the “Guide to Northern Archæology,”[249] edited by the Earl of Ellesmere, and has now, like celt, become adopted into the English language. I have not been able to refer to the passage in the Sagas mentioned as above by Mr. Thoms, but whatever may be the original meaning of the word palstave, it is applied by northern antiquaries to all the forms of celts with the exception of those of the socketed type.[250]