Blue Fire - Theatre Etymology - Part 18

When something is amazing in the theatre, these days, people just tend to say it was amazing or give other similar adjectives. However, back in Victorian days, there was a term for anything amazing, astounding, or sensational. If an audience had never seen anything like what they had seen on stage before, they called it blue fire.

The current definition of blue fire is compositions of various combustible substances, as sulfur, niter, lampblack, etc., the flames of which are colored by various salts, as those of antimony, strontium, barium, etc. This is exactly where the theatre term originated. A mixture containing sulfur was ignited in order to create an eerie blue glow on the stage. The audience had never seen anything like it before, so then any special effect was dubbed blue fire.

The word blue might have come from the Middle English word blewe which comes from the Anglo-French word blew, bl(i)u, or bl(i)ef meaning livid or discolored. It may also have come from the Old French word blo or blau (French bleu) which came from Germanic word blǣwaz. This can also be compared to the Old English word blǣwen which is a contraction of blǣhǣwen meaning deep blue. It may also have come from the Old Frisian word blāw, the Middle Dutch word blā(u), the Old High German blāo (German blau), or the Old Norse word blār.

The word fire might have come from the Middle English or Old English word fȳr which probably came from the Old Norse word fūrr, the German word Feuer, or the Greek word pŷr.

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