ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 1392 http://www.s-gabriel.org/1392 ************************************ From: "Brian M. Scott" 16 Jan 1999 Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You wrote to us asking our opinion of the name for a woman of mixed Norse and Irish parentage in the period 900-1000. Here is what we found. is an Irish name well known in your period, pronounced roughly \MEHV\. [1] Although much more popular later in Ireland, it is still a fine choice for your era. is an Old Norse name meaning 'Dagr's daughter'. [2, 3] (The slash stands for an acute accent over the preceding letter; this accent was very often omitted in writing.) It is pronounced \DAHGS DOAT-tihr\, with \OA\ is as in and \ih\ like the in . The Norse and Irish were in close cultural contact in the 10th century and certainly did borrow names from each other. However, a person's name would always have been written or spoken in just one of the two languages at a time. For instance, the Norse borrowed the Irish name as , and the Irish borrowed the Norse name as . [1, 4] The son of a man named Cellach might have been called in Norse and in Irish, but he would always have been one or the other, not some mixture of the two. Similarly, you will need to stick to a single language if you want an authentic name. In your letter you specified Norse. is already Norse, but requires some modification, since its Irish spelling is completely incompatible with Norse spelling conventions. Unfortunately, there is no record that the Norse borrowed the name , so we cannot be sure just how they would have adapted it. We can guess that they would have respelled it more or less phonetically according to their way of representing sounds, since this is what they seem to have done with the Irish names that they did borrow. However, the exact nature of this respelling would be guesswork on our part: educated guesswork, but guesswork none the less. Fortunately, it turns out that they already had a very similar feminine name, , which they might very well simply have substituted for the Irish . (Here {ae} stands for the -ligature, the letter formed by squeezing the and the together so that a single vertical line serves as the righthand edge of the and the lefthand edge of the .) This name is pronounced \MEHV-@\, where <@> stands for the sound of the in or . It is a rare name, but it does occur once quite early in Iceland and therefore seems a plausible Norse adaptation of in your period. [2] In short, we think that a woman of mixed Norse and Irish parentage who was called in 10th century Ireland and whose father's name was might well have been called in Old Norse. The name would have been pronounced roughly \MEHV-@ DAHGS DOAT-tihr\. You can write this name in several ways. The genuine Norse representation for your period is in runes. You can find four versions of the futhark, or runic alphabet, at the following site: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/1568/ Any of the last three versions, i.e., the younger futharks with sixteen runes each, would be appropriate. You'll notice, however, that there are no runes corresponding to some of the letters in the name, like the and the . Just as our letter represents different sounds in the words and , the Norse used one rune to represent more than one sound. The name would actually have been written with the runes corresponding to the spelling . You have to be a little careful here, however, because there are two a-runes and two r-runes in the younger futhark. The s in your name should be written with the 10th rune, and the should be written with the 5th rather than the 16th rune. (Note that this spelling is valid only when you write the name in runes; it should not be used with Latin letters.). You may want to write the name as if you have to explain it to someone who doesn't read runes, since this is the standard scholarly form. Finally, there may be times, as in e-mail, when runes and even the -ligature are inconvenient or simply unavailable. At such times the best approximation would be . Lindorm Eriksson, Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn, and Arval Benicoeur also contributed to this letter. We hope that it has been useful and that you will not hesitate to write us again if any part of it has been unclear or if you have other questions. For the Academy, Talan Gwynek and Giles Leabrook. __________________________________________________ References: [1] O/ Corra/in, Donnchadh and Fidelma Maguire. Irish Names (Dublin: The Lilliput Press,1990); s.nn. Medb, Amlai/b. [2] Lind, E.H. Norsk-Isla"ndska Dopnamn ock Fingerade Namn fra*n Medeltiden (Uppsala & Leipzig: 1905-1915, suppl. Oslo, Uppsala and Copenhagen: 1931); s.nn. Dagr, M{ae}va. [The is an a-umlaut, and the is an with a small circle directly above it.] [3] Fleck, G. (aka Geirr Bassi Haraldsson). The Old Norse Name, Studia Marklandica (series) (Olney, Maryland: Yggsalr Press, 1977); p.17. [4] Fellows Jensen, Gillian. Scandinavian Personal Names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire (Copenhagen: 1968); s.n. Kjallakr.