ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2141 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2141 ************************************ From: "Brian M. Scott" 7 Dec 2000 Greetings from the Academy of S. Gabriel! You asked for help constructing an Old Norse place-name meaning 'windy district', offering as a starting point based on your own research. (Here {dh} stands for the letter edh, sometimes called a crossed-d.) You were also interested in sources that might help you continue your research, and we responded with a short list of sources that we might use together with some preliminary comments on the name . In this report I'll summarize what we've found, including both our original information and what we've learned since. There are indeed Old Norse nouns 'wind; air' and 'district; country (as opposed to 'town')'. [1] However, the juxtaposition is ungrammatical. is the nominative case of the word for 'wind', i.e., the form that it would take as the subject of a sentence. In a compound it would lose the ending <-r>; examples are 'wind-bag, bellows', a compound of 'wind' and 'bag, sack', and 'window', literally 'wind-eye', a compound of and 'eye'. [2] Thus, on purely grammatical grounds we can say that the compound, had it existed, would most likely have been 'wind-district'. We find no evidence that there actually was such a compound, but it does not appear to violate any requirements of Old Norse grammar. The next step is to ask whether it is at all likely to have been used as a place-name. The term is found as the second element of a number of Old Norse place-names, and its descendants in modern Swedish and Norwegian are also found. In Iceland, for instance, there is a district called 'Fleetdale District', referring to a river valley; the name is found already in Hrafnkels saga, which was probably written late in the 13th century. [3, 4] Norway has a (where stands for an with a slash through it); the name, which is found as in 1389, refers to a local lake named . [5] (Here {ae} stands for the a-e-ligature, the letter that looks like an and an squeezed together so that they share a single upright between them.) In Sweden the place-name is in record in 1231; the name refers to the village of Bara. [6] The next question is how and its modern descendants are used: with what kinds of first elements are they typically combined? Although the term was used throughout Scandinavia, it had slightly different meanings in different areas, and these differences are to some extent reflected in the local usage. In Sweden it generally denoted an administrative or legal jurisdiction. In Iceland, on the other hand, it was generally used as a purely geographical term for a district comprising a valley, fjord, or countryside bordered by mountains or within a river basin. [3] Thus, it is not too surprising that in Sweden the first element is usually an older place-name, as in the example of above: presumably this is usually the name of the administrative centre of the district. A variation on this theme is the use of a term referring to the inhabitants of a particular place is used instead of the place-name itself, as in Swedish 1231 (from 'people from O"stra Torn'). (Here stands for o-umlaut, an with a pair of dots directly above it.) [6] In Iceland and Norway, on the other hand, we not uncommonly find names of streams, their valleys, and bodies of water as first elements, as in the examples already mentioned. Finally, in the Icelandic saga literature the term is also used to refer to foreign regions. In the sagas of the apostles, for instance, we find , , and for Galilee, Campania, and Cappadocia; in all of these 'region' has simply been added to an Old Norse form of the existing place-name. [3] Clearly none of these types is a good model for a hypothetical meaning 'wind(y) district'. Moreover, 'wind; air' seems to be very rare in Scandinavian place-names. For instance, we found only five Norwegian place-names that even appear to start with this element, and in four of them it turns out to derive ultimately from the verb 'to wind, turn, swing', describing a fjord, a neck of land, a valley, and a stream. (Note that all of these refer to the type of topography often called a in Iceland.) The one possible exception is , which may mean 'windy inlet' but may also mean 'winding inlet'. [7] We did find a pair of Scandinavian place-names in England that contain Old Norse 'wind; air', and . Both are in Cumberland, and both derive from Old Norse 'windy hut', probably referring originally to an exposed temporary shepherd's shelter. [8] This does not appear to be a good model for a name of any of the types that we've seen. Finally, there is an Old Norse place-name , but it is 'Wend-land', the country of the , or Wends, i.e., the Slavic inhabitants of the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. [9] Our conclusion from these data is that a place-name meaning 'wind(y) district' is unlikely. However, either or would be quite plausible as the name of an Icelandic district lying along a fjord or a river valley, respectively. The first assumes the existence of a (winding) fjord named ; just such a name may be the basis for the Norwegian place-name , which may mean 'Vindi isthmus'. The second assumes the existence of a (winding) stream named , as seems to have been the case at in Norway. [7] These names would be pronounced \VIN-d@-HEH-rahdh\ and \VIN-dar-HEH-rahdh\ respectively, where \dh\ stands for the sound of in and , and \@\ stands for the sound of in and . (There is a bit more stress on \VIN\ than on \HEH\ in both names.) Hartmann Rogge, Lindorm Eriksson, Arval Benicoeur, and Adelaide de Beaumont also contributed to this letter. We hope that it is useful and that you will not hesitate to write again if you have any further questions. For the Academy, Talan Gwynek 7 December 2000 ===== References and Notes [1] Zoega, Geir T. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1910); s.vv. , . Another, older, Old Norse dictionary [3] has the second word as , where the slash stands for an acute accent over the preceding vowel, but this seems to be an error: all of our more recent sources agree with Zoega that the word has short , not long , in Old Norse, though in modern Icelandic it is . [2] Ibid. s.vv. , . (This last, just as a matter of interest, is the source of the modern English word .) [3] Cleasby, R., G. Vigfusson, & W. Craigie. An Icelandic-English Dictionary (Oxford: At the University Press, 1975); s.v. . [4] Gordon, E.V. An Introduction to Old Norse (Oxford: At the University Press, 1971); p.59. [5] Sandnes, Jo|rn, & Ola Stemshaug. Norsk Stadnamnleksikon. 4th ed. (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 1997), ISBN 82-521-4905-7; s.n. . [6] Pamp, Bengt. Ortnamnen i Sverige. 5th ed. Lundastudier i nordisk spra*kvetenskap, serie B, nr. 2 (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1988); ISBN 91-44-01535-6. [Here stands for an with a small directly above it.] [7] Sandnes & Stemshaug, op. cit. s.nn. , , , . [8] Ekwall, s.nn. , . [9] Zoega, op. cit. s.v. .