Forlorn hope

Meaning

A hopeless or desperate enterprise.

Origin

Lack of hope must have been a commonplace feeling amongst the English in the 19th century as they coined a variety of phrases to express it - 'not a hope in Hell', 'some hopes', 'what a hope' etc. To that list we might add 'forlorn hope'; but that would be an incorrect addition as it turns out.

'Forlorn' derives from 'forlese', which just means 'lose', so 'forlorn hope' just means 'lost hope', which is the way it was understood in the 19th century, as it is now. That's not how it was in the 16th century, when a forlorn hope wasn't a world-weary feeling but a robust and gung-ho band of soldiers.

Each troop in the British Army had a hand-picked group of soldiers, chosen for their ferocity and indifference to risk (and occasionally by using that tried and tested army method of "I want three volunteers. That's you, you and you."). They were the army's 'attack dogs' who risked all in reckless death or glory raids on the enemy.

The Anglo-Norman terms 'avant-garde' and 'reregard', were adopted into English as 'vanguard' and 'rearguard' in the 14th century. They were the names of the forces that attacked from the front and protected the rear respectively. It seems reasonable to expect a group called the 'avant-garde' to be the first into battle but before them came the 'Forlorn Hope'. These soldiers, also called the 'forlorn boys' or 'forlorn fellows', were given little hope of survival by their peers. Lord Byron summed up the mind-set of the troop in the epic poem The Siege of Corinth, 1816:

The foremost of the fierce assault.
The bands are rank'd; the chosen van
Of Tartar and of Mussulman,
The full of hope, misnamed "forlorn,"
Who hold the thought of death in scorn,

The first mention of them in print is found in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, 1577:

Fortie or fiftie forlorne boies.

Soon afterwards, the method of attack was described in John Dymmok's A Treatise of Ireland, circa 1600:

Before the vantguarde marched the forelorn hope consisting of 40 shott and 20 shorte weapons, with order that they should not discharge vntil they presented theire peeces to the rebel breasts in their trenches, and that sooddenly the shorte weapons should enter the trenches pell mell.

The choice of the name 'Forlorn Hope' for a group of soldiers who had little chance of survival seems straightforward and intuitive. Again, things aren't as they seem. The term was originally Dutch and the equivalent combative groups in Holland were called the 'Verloren Hoop', literally 'lost troop'. A bit of impromptu mistranslation amongst the British military turned this into 'Forlorn Hope'. The British Navy went a step further and their wildmen were known as the 'Flowing Hope'. Added to the 'Forlorn Hope' was the 'Rearlorn Hope'. These performed the same task whenever the rearguard was called on to retreat.

Although the original meaning of 'forlorn hope' is largely lost to us now, it was still in use in 1920 when John Galsworthy wrote in The Forsyte Saga:

"And round Crum were still gathered a forlorn hope of blue-bloods with a plutocratic following".

The figurative meaning of 'forlorn hope', which describes someone in a hopeless plight but without any mention of warfare, overlapped with the original meaning for some years. In 1768, in Narrative of Travels in Patagonia, John Byron described the predicament of being forced to leave a group of his colleagues behind to certain death on an inhospitable island:

We saw them a little after, setting out upon their forlorn hope, and helping one another over a hideous tract of rocks.

As time progressed, a forlorn hope was thought of as something one experienced rather than something one belonged to. The 'rearlorn hope' took no such linguistic journey and has stayed exclusively within the army.