Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 229

Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 229

This report is available at http://www.s-gabriel.org/229

Some of the Academy's early reports contain errors that we haven't yet corrected. Please use it with caution.

Later research turned up additional information relevant to this report. See the end of the letter for details.

Greetings,

Here's the information we have on "Morgan Blackwood" as a Scottish woman's name.

In order to put your name in context, we wanted to provide some background information. During the period you checked off (1000-1400), there were a number of languages spoken in Scotland. The most important for our purposes are Gaelic (a language spoken in Scotland and Ireland) and Scots (a language closely related to English).

"Blackwood" is a Scots name. It's found in George Black's book, under "Blackwood." Because this is a standard SCA reference, a reference to Black will suffice as documentation. Because "Blackwood" is Scots, a woman named "Blackwood" would have had a Scots first name as well.

"Morgan" is probably the most misunderstood name in the SCA--one of our members has written a five-page article on the variations and their origins. The short answer is that "Morgan" wasn't used by Scottish women. For more information, look on our Web site at

http://www.itd.umich.edu/~ximenez/s.gabriel/docs/morgan.html

There is a Gaelic name "Muirgen" (pronounced roughly "MEER-yin") which was used by both men and women. Although we only have examples of the name from Ireland, an early medieval Gaelic-speaking Scotswoman could have used this name. The only problem is that Gaelic and Scots names weren't normally combined together--you can use "Muirgen" or "Blackwood," but not together.

Most Gaelic speakers were identified with their father's name--if you wanted a Gaelic persona, you could use something like "Muirgen ingen <father's name>." There are actually a number of other factors, but we won't go into them in detail unless you would like to use this name.

Scots speaking people had names which were similar to English names. We have several lists of Scots womens' names on our Web page; while they're not all dated to your period they'll be a good start. "Margaret" was one of the most popular Scots names and "Margaret Blackwood" would be an excellent Scots name.

Effric neyn Kenyeoch vc Ralte, Evan da Collaureo, and Tangwystl verch Morgant Glasvyrn contributed to this letter.

We hope this has been helpful, and that we can be of further assistance.

In service,
Alan Fairfax
Academy of S. Gabriel


Correction, 3 Jan 2003, Arval: Revised the paragraph on Muirgen to make it clear that it is an early-period name. See Ó Corrain and Maguire s.n. Muirgen.