|
Greetings from the Academy of S. Gabriel!
You asked about the meaning and history of the feminine name <Morwen>, with especial reference to Scotland. Unfortunately, its history and origin are obscure, and our answer is both complicated and somewhat inconclusive. As we'll explain, the name's ultimate origin may be either Welsh and Cornish or Old English. It may even be a combination of both, since there is a distinct possible that two or more names have been conflated.
The personal name has no apparent connection with Scotland, however, though it is occasionally confused with the Scottish place-name <Morven> (Dunkling s.n. Morven). This is in turn a corruption of <Morvern>, from Gaelic <Morbhairn> 'sea-gap', which appears in 1476 in the form <Morvarne> (Watson, 123).
As a personal name, <Morwen> or <Morwenna> is Cornish and Welsh, the name of an early virgin saint; the Cornish parish of Morwenstow is named after her. This place-name, which occurs as <Morwennestohe> in 1273, means 'Morwen's holy place'. William of Worcester, writing in 1478, Latinized her name to <Morwinna> and thought that she was buried there. (Padel s.n. Morwenstow)
As <Morwenna> the name has been used in modern times in Cornwall; we don't know how old this use is, but two sources seems to imply that it goes back to the Middle Ages (Dunkling, loc. cit.; Bice, 4). However, we have no early citations of the name in connection with a demonstrably historical person, and the actual etymology of the name is obscure.
In Cornish legend Morwen was one of the 24 sons and daughters of king Broccan of Breconshire. King Broccan is better known as the 6th century Welsh king Brychan Brycheiniog, whose numerous offspring are listed in a number of early Welsh genealogies. (Welsh and Cornish are very closely related; Breconshire, or Brycheiniog, is just across the Bristol Channel from Cornwall.) A version of this list that appears in an early 14th century life of Saint Nectan gives her name in the Latinized form <Morewenna>. However, the names in this version differ substantially from those in most other versions (Bartrum, 14-19, 29), and there is reason to think that some of the names in this list have been influenced by Old English feminine names.
For example, the same list gives <Merewenne> as the name of another daughter of Brychan. Local tradition holds that the Cornish parish of Marhamchurch, which is in record as <Marwenecherche> 1275 and 'church of <Sancta Merwenna> alias <Marwenchurch>' 1400, was named after her. However, there was also an Anglo-Saxon saint <Mer(e)winna> or <Mer(e)wenna>. She is a historical person, a 10th century abbess of Romsey in Hampshire, and it is thought that Marhamchurch may actually be named for her (Padel s.n. Marhamchurch; Boehler, 100).
There are four Old English feminine names that might be involved in the confusion. Boehler (98, 100) classifies extant citations under the three normalized forms <Marwen>, <Merwen>, and <Mer(e)wyn>. Seltén (II:122) and Ekwall (54) give the normalized form <M{ae}rwynn>, which in Boehler's spelling would correspond to <Marwyn>. [Here the slash represents an acute accent over the preceding vowel, and '{ae}' is the a-e-digraph, also called 'aesc'.] There is some disagreement among authorities as to the correct assignment of the extant documentary spellings to these theoretical forms, and it's possible that there was already some confusion in late Anglo-Saxon times. Boehler takes the name of the abbess of Romsey to have been the one represented by the standard form <Mer(e)wyn>, but the extant citations show some peculiarities.
In several of them the second half of the name appears as <-wenna>. This is an unusual spelling of the Old English element <-wyn(n)> at the dates concerned; we found no other examples through the 11th century. It is a normal Latinization of the (unrelated) Welsh and Cornish element <-(g)wen>, however. On the other hand, the Old English citations uniformly give the first part of the name as <Mer(e)->, which is very rare as a Welsh name element; <Mor-> is much more common. Thus, <Mer(e)-> suggests an Old English origin, but <-wenna> is more in keeping with a Welsh or Cornish origin.
At this point it does not seem possible to say which is the original language; it may even be that a Welsh/Cornish name and an Old English name have become inextricably mixed. The fact that Welsh <Mor-> and Old English <Mere-> are related to each other may have contributed to the confusion. (The name elements are related to identical common nouns, Welsh <mor> 'sea' and Old English <mere> 'a pool', which are both cognate with Latin <mare> 'sea'. This relationship may still have been recognized as late as the 10th century.)
To sum up, <Morwen> is a modern Welsh form of a name whose ultimate origin may be Welsh/Cornish, Old English, or even a combination of the two. In the form <Morwenna> it has been considered and used as a Cornish name, and it appears in an old Cornish place-name. It is sometimes confused with a Scottish place-name, <Morve(r)n>.
Heather Rose Jones and Sharon L. Krossa also contributed to this letter. We hope that it has been useful and would be happy to try to answer any further question that you might have.
For the Academy,
Brian M. Scott
Bartrum, P.C., _Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts_ (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1966).
Bice, Christopher, _Names for the Cornish_ (Padstow, Cornwall: Lodenek Press, 1975).
Dunkling, Leslie, _Scottish Christian Names_ (Stirling, Scotland: Johnston & Bacon Books, 1988).
Ekwall, Eilert, _Early London Personal Names_ (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1947).
Padel, O.J., _A Popular Dictionary of Cornish Place-Names_ (Penzance, Cornwall: Alison Hodge, 1988).
Seltén, Bo, _The Anglo-Saxon Heritage in Middle English Personal
Watson, William J., _The History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland_ (London: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd., 1926).