ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2530 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2530 ************************************ 06 May 2002 From: Ursula Whitcher Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked whether the name would be appropriate for a Viking man living between 800 and 1050 AD. Here is what we have found. is a later form of the name , which appears in runic inscriptions from your period and in later records of people who lived in your period. [1, 2] (The slash, '/', represents an acute accent on the previous letter.) The final <-r> is a grammatical ending. The name was pronounced as one syllable, \ROELV(r)\. Here, \OE\ represents the vowel in the word . The first \R\ is trilled or rolled with the tip of the tongue, as in Spanish or Italian. [4] The pronunciation of the \(r)\ changed during your period, but you can roughly approximate it with an ordinary American \r\ sound. However, you should try to keep this sound very brief; the name is only one syllable. Similarly, is a later form of the name , where represents the letter 'o' with a backward-comma-shaped hook hanging from the bottom. This name appears in the same sources from your period. [1, 3] A man named whose father was called would have been known as . The name changes to because of a requirement of Norse grammar; the change is similar to the addition of <'s> in the English phrase . We believe would have been pronounced \ROELV(r) AH~S-byar-nar sohn\. Here \AH~\ represents a nasalized \AH\ sound. Of course, in your period, the Norse wrote in runes. You can find several versions of the futhark, or runic alphabet, on the web: http://www.arild-hauge.com/enruner.htm The futhark labeled Norwegian-Danish Runes from the 800's is a good choice. Notice that these tables identify each rune with a Roman letter. Following this labelling, the name could be written in runes as . Note that and are different runes; is the fifth rune, and is the last one. There are also different runes. We've used to stand for the nasal , the sixth rune; the other s are the tenth rune. (We should stress that the representation of runic spelling we've used here is a modern scholarly convention, not a notation that would have been used in our period.) I hope this letter has been useful. Please write us again if any part of it has been unclear or if you have other questions. In particular, we believe that a name closer to could have been used in later medieval Scandinavia; if you'd like to investigate that possibility, please contact us again. I was assisted in researching and writing this letter by Talan Gwynek, Aryanhwy merch Catmael, and Arval Benicoeur. For the Academy, Ursula Georges 6 May 2002 References: [1] Friedemann, Sara L. (aka Aryanhwy merch Catmael), "Viking Names found in the Landna/mabo/k" (WWW: privately published, 1998) http://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/names/landnamabok.html [2] Lena Peterson, "Nordiskt runnamnslexikon" (WWW: Institute for Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research, 2001) http://grimnir.dal.lu.se/runlex/index.htm s.n. [3] Peterson s.n. [4] If you want to approximate the period pronunciation a little more closely, you should know that the initial \R\ is actually a little different from the Spanish and Italian models, because it's voiceless: the vocal cords aren't vibrating during its production. In other words, the sound is related to Spanish and Italian \R\ in the same way that \s\ is related to \z\, \kh\ to \gh\, \t\ to \d\, etc.