The word grimalkin has just the right blend of the foreign and the sinister about it that, even if you don’t know what it refers to, you’re pretty sure it isn’t good. In the most common usage a grimalkin is a witch’s familiar, a demon in the form of a cat or other small animal that was given to the witch by the devil as a part of her pact with him. However, the word grimalkin, or greymalkin, is actually a combination of the words grey and malkin; the latter of which is a diminutive form of the female name Maud or Matilda which is an esoteric slang term for a cat. By the very definition a grimalkin is an old cat, likely female, whose temperament couldn’t be improved by all the catnip in the world. So why the mystical connotations?
That explanation requires a small history lesson, and reference to some works of literature. The word grimalkin first showed up in print in the year 1570 where it was used by William Baldwin in his story “Beware the Cat.” Now you have to keep in mind that the mid to late 1500s was the last huzzah of the Burning Times, where witch hunters were checking all the lists provided in the Malleus Maleficarum in order to make sure they didn’t suffer any witches to live. So the popular term for an aged, ill tempered she cat that might have more than normal malice on her mind easily fed into the idea of a witch’s familiar, something which held on all the way to the Salem Witch Trials in America. Indeed the term was later used by Shakespeare in the 1600s in the play Macbeth. However, if you dig back into the oral traditions, you find even more information.
Cats, since perhaps the dawn of time, have been thought of as easily connected to the supernatural world. In Scotland this tradition continued, and often the word grimalkin was used to refer to a faery cat. This strange beast was a relic of the time of the Tuatha De Danann, and there were legends that said it dwelled in the Scottish highlands. Of course the legends varied from place to place, with the description and motivations of the phantom feline always changing, but all of the different versions mixed together to create a malicious form of folklore that fed into the many legends of cats.
Today the word grimalkin is rarely used, but when it is it tends to be part of the fantasy fiction or role playing genres of entertainment. The legend of the strange cat lives on, though modern tale tellers have given her quite a number of different masks by now.
“Grimalkin,” by Anonymous at Reference
“Grimalkin,” by Anonymous at the Online Etymology Dictionary