ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 3273 http://www.s-gabriel.org/3273 ************************************ 19 May 2008 From: Ursula Whitcher Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked whether is an appropriate name for a Geatish man living between 500 and 1000. In earlier correspondence, you mentioned that you were particularly interested in a seventh century name. Before we begin, we'd like to apologize for the amount of time this letter has taken. We hope this information is still useful to you. The Geats were a Germanic tribe living in the area now known as Sweden. We'll discuss the best seventh-century Geatish form of your name first, and then suggest a form appropriate for c. 1000. is the name of a Geatish warrior in the Old English poem 'Beowulf'. Old English corresponds to Old Swedish and Old West Norse . (Here represents the symbol o-ogonek, an 'o' with a backward-comma-shaped hook hanging from the bottom.) [1] However, none of these Norse forms is appropriate as early as the seventh century. We believe that is a reasonable reconstruction of the seventh-century form of . [2] We believe would have been pronounced roughly \AY-bhoorR\. Here \AY\ rhymes with . The sound \bh\ is used in Spanish 'wolf' and 'grape'. It is the sound made by positioning your lips to say a \b\, but relaxing them slightly so that the air escapes; this sound does not occur in English. The \r\ represents a trilled 'r' as in Spanish or Italian. We have used \R\ to represent the sound of a retroflex American English 'r'. ('Retroflex' simply means that the tongue is curled up and back. Unfortunately, this isn't the only common way of producing an 'r' sound in U.S. speech: some Americans make a very similar 'r' sound, so-called 'bunched-r', with a very different tongue movement.) You can approximate the name's pronunciation by \AY-bhoorzh\, where \zh\ is the sound of the 's' in and the in ; the /R/ pronunciation actually developed from an earlier /z/ pronunciation. A seventh-century Geatish name would have been recorded using runes. You can find several versions of the futhark, or runic alphabet, here: http://www.arild-hauge.com/enruner.htm Notice that these tables identify each rune with a name or 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. Runic practice in the sixth and seventh century was not standardized; we believe that one possible spelling of might use the runes labelled *ehwaR, *berkana, *uruR, and *raidu from 'Norwegian-Germanic Runes to ca. 500 AD' and the rune from any of the next three futharks on the page referenced above. [6] Most seventh-century runic inscriptions do not include bynames of any sort. Thus, if you are particularly interested in a seventh-century Geatish persona, we recommend that you use a single given name. The spelling 'England-farer' is a scholarly normalization based on thirteenth-century practice. Some form of this byname is probably appropriate by the late tenth or early eleventh century: we found literary references from a later period to a tenth-century Icelandic <{TH}o/rir englandsfari> and an eleventh-century Norwegian man also called <{TH}o/rir englandsfari>, as well as runic inscriptions with forms of the name from c. 1000 and c. 1000-1050. [7,8] We believe is a reasonable runic spelling of the byname around 1000; the same spelling might also be plausible as early as the ninth century. For this period, the futhark labeled "Norwegian-Danish Runes from the 800's" is a reasonable choice. The most common runic spelling of your given name around the year 1000 is . Thus, is a reasonable runic spelling of your name for c. 1000. This name would have been pronounced roughly \YOH-ver ENG-glahnts FAH-ree\. If you have any questions, or would like more information about any part of this report, please don't hesitate to write to us again. Talan Gwynek, Aryanhwy merch Catmael, Ari Ansson, and Elizabeth Turner de Carlisle contributed to researching and writing this report. For the Academy, Ursula Georges 19 May 2008 References: [1] "Lexikon o"ver urnordiska personnamn" (WWW: Institutet fo"r spra*k och folkminnen), pp. 36 ff. http://www.sprakradet.se/images/NA/pdf/urnord.pdf [2] The starting point is the reconstructed Proto-Germanic */eBuraz/. Over a period of several centuries this developed into classical Old Norse by way of a sequence of sound changes. We know what changes occurred, and for the most part we know in what order they occurred, but their absolute timing is quite uncertain. Various scholarly estimates exist, but they're necessarily quite imprecise. [3,4] We've taken such estimates into account in reconstructing as a possible seventh century form of the name, and we've also relied heavily on the evidence of the Blekinge inscriptions, which date from about the right period and are unusually extensive. [5] Both lines of approach suggest that most of the relevant sound changes had not yet occurred by the seventh century, and in the end we have incorporated only the loss of vowels in unstressed syllables and the change of Proto-Germanic */z/ to the sound denoted by /R/. [3] Gordon, E.V., _An Introduction to Old Norse_ (Oxford: At the University Press, 1971), 274. [4] Haugen, Einar, _Scandinavian Language Structures: A Comparative Historical Survey_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). [5] Uppsala University Department for Scandinavian Languages, "Samnordisk runtextdatabas" (WWW: Uppsala universitet, 29 Oct 1997). http://www.nordiska.uu.se/forskn/samnord.htm Runestones DR 357 (Stentoften), DR 358 (Gummarp), DR 359 (Istaby), DR 360 (Bjo"rketorp). [6] Cf. the Stentoften runestone, "Samnordisk runtextdatabas" DR 357, which uses a 24-rune futhark. An image may be found at: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Stentoftenstenen.jpg [7] Lind, E.H., _Norsk-Isla:ndska Personbinamn fra*n Medeltiden_ (Uppsala: 1920-21), s.vv. , . [8] "Samnordisk runtextdatabas" U319, U1181, U978.