Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 552

Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 552

This report is available at http://www.s-gabriel.org/552

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

Greetings,

Here's the information we found about "Orin the Fayre."

We couldn't find any conclusive information about "Orin." It's a rare modern name but we couldn't find the source--it could come from the Hebrew word for "tree," it could be a variation of "Aaron," or it could be a modern English form of the Irish name "Odhrán" ("á" represents an accented "a"). However, we weren't able to find any medieval examples or "Orin."

"Fair," with many variant spellings, is a reasonably common English name. We recommend using "Fayre" or "le Fayre," since "the" is actually quite rare in written English names. If any article is used in an English name, it's usually the French "le" and not the English "the." It's likely that "the" was used in spoken English, but we have no way to be sure.

There are a couple of possibilities for you.

You could use the Irish name "Odhrán Fionn" (pronounced "Oran Finn,") which means "Odhrán the Fair" in Irish.

You could also use a different name with "Fayre" or "le Fayre." The closest name to "Orin" that we found was "Orm" or "Orum," which was used in the 1100's. Another possiblities is "Arnold," which was used from 1100 to the present day.

Here's a recap of the possible names we can suggest:

"Orm le Fayre" or "Orum le Fayre" would be reasonable English names for the 1100's.

"Arnold le Fayre" would be a reasonable English name from 1100 to about 1400. "Arnold Fayre" would be appropriate from about 1300 to 1600.

"Odhrán Fionn" would be a reasonable Irish name until about 1100.

If you'd like to look at other possiblities, there are thousands of names in various lists in the Academy Library at

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

Talan Gwynek, Arval Benicoeur, Walraven van Nijmegen, Zenobia Naphtali, Alison Macdermot, and Tangwystl verch Morgant Glasvryn contributed to this letter.

We hope this has been helpful, and that we can continue to assist you.

In service,
Alan Fairfax
Academy of S. Gabriel