ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2498 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2498 ************************************ 26 Feb 2002 From: (Josh Mittleman) Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked whether <Olaf Knutssen> or <Knut Knutssen> is an appropriate name for a man in Norway during the mid-Viking period. This letter is a brief answer to your question. <Knut> is a late-period form of an Old Norse name best spelled <Knu/tr>. The slash represents an acute accent mark on the preceding letter. The final <-r> is a grammatical ending, indicating that this is the nominative form of the name. (The nominative form of a name is the one used in the subject of a sentence or in direct address.) The final <-r> is barely pronounced, just a lightly voiced trill, not a separate syllable. We have found several examples of the name in the period you want to re-create [1]: Knvtr bondi aa Knvtzst{o,}dum, 10th century Knu/tr a/ Ho/li, c.1000 Gv{dh}mvndr prestr Cnvts son, c.1140 {TH}orgri/mr Knu/ts son, 1184 The symbol {o,} represents an <o> with a backward-comma-shaped hook hanging from the bottom. {dh} stands for the letter edh, written as a backward <6> with a crossbar on the upper limb; and {TH} is the letter thorn, written as a lower <p> with a vertical stroke that extends upward as far as it does downward. The last two examples show two versions of "Knut's son"; but the spelling we recommend is <Knu/tz son> [3]. <O/la/fr> is an equally good given name for your period; note the grammatical ending here as well [2], so we can recommend either <Knu/tr Knu/tz son> or <O/la/fr Knu/tz son> as excellent Viking names. They were pronounced \KNOOT(r) KNOOTS sohn\ and \OWE-lahv(r) KNOOTS sohn\. In both pronunciations, \oh\ stands for the vowel in <more>, and \(r)\ for a lightly voiced trill. In your period, the Viking wrote with runes. In this letter, we've recommended standard scholarly Roman-alphabet spellings; but you may prefer to write your name authentically. We can't show you runes here, but you can see several versions of the runic alphabet on the web: http://www.arild-hauge.com/enruner.htm The one labeled Norwegian-Danish Runes from the 800s is a good choice. Notice that these tables identify each rune with a Roman letter. We will use that labeling in this letter to give you the runic spelling of your name. We should stress that this is a modern scholarly convention, not a notation that would have been used in our period. In that system, the two names we've recommended can be spelled <knutr knuts sun> or <knutR knuts sun> and <olafR knuts sun> or <ulafR knuts sun>. Following the lead of the web page, we're using <r> here to represent the 5th rune and <R> for the 16th. We hope this brief letter has been useful. Please write us again if you have any questions. I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by Aryanhwy merch Catmael, Talan Gwynek, and Lindorm Eriksson. For the Academy, Arval Benicoeur 26 Feb 2002 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - References [1] Lind, E.H., _Norsk-Isla:ndska Dopnamn ock Fingerade Namn fra*n Medeltiden_ (Uppsala & Leipzig: 1905-1915, sup. Oslo, Uppsala and Kobenhavn: 1931), s.n. Knu/tr. [2] Aryanhwy merch Catmael, "Viking Names found in the Landna/mabo/k" (WWW: privately published, 1998). http://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/names/landnamabok.html. [3] Lind consistently uses <z> after dental consonants; since the root <Knu/t-> ends in <t>, he has <z> here. \z\ normally represents the sound \ts\. Lind's citations show <z> as perhaps the most common variant, especially in the earlier ones; <zs> also occurs, as do <Knuz> and <Knuzs>. There are of course also spellings with <s>.