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Greetings from the Academy of S. Gabriel!
You asked about documentation for the name <Colgrim> or <Colgrym>, which you thought might be a Saxon name found in Arthurian legend.
The name <Colgrim> is recorded 1086 in in Domesday Book, where it also occurs as <Colegrim>. [2] <Colgrim> is an Old English spelling of the Old Norse name <Kolgrímr>. (The slash stands for an acute accent over the preceding letter.) This Western Scandinavian name was apparently brought to England from Iceland; in Lincolnshire it was used in the Anglicized forms <Colegrim> and <Colgrim> at least from the middle of the 11th century through the end of the 12th century. [3]
Because of its Scandinavian origin, this name would have been most at home in the Danelaw in the period 1000-1200. The Danelaw was the eastern half of England between the Tees and Thames rivers, where the names and customs of the Scandinavian invaders had taken root most firmly. Lincolnshire is in the centre of this region.
Although the name seems to be originally Scandinavian, there is a connection with both Saxons and Arthurian literature. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th century 'Historia Regum Britanniae' one of Arthur's opponents is a 'Saxon duke' called <Colgrin>. [5] Later in the same century Wace of Jersey composed a French retelling of Geoffrey's work and used <Colgrim> as the name of a cousin of Octa, an early Anglo-Saxon king. [4, 6]
By the 12th century it was usual for people to have not only a given name, but also a byname, at least in official records. This was an extra name used to identify a person more precisely. It was commonly just the name of the person's father. For example, if your father's name had been <Ingolf>, you might have been known as <Colgrim Ingolf>. This seems to have been the spoken form. In a Latin record this might have been left in this form, or it might have been partly or completely Latinized:
<Colgrimus Ingolf>, with the given name Latinized;
<Colgrimus filius Ingolf>, with the Latin <filius> 'son';
<Colgrim filius Ingolf>, with <filius> but no Latinization of the names themselves; or
<Colgrimus filius Ingolfi>, with both the given name and the father's name Latinized.
For the father's name you could use any given name found in that part of England in the 11th and 12th centuries. Here is a list of some that seem to have been moderately common in Lincolnshire; most are of Scandinavian origin. [3] Pronunciations are indicated between backslashes. With one exception these names form Latin patronymics the same was <Ingolf> does, e.g., <Colgrimus filius Dolfini>. The exception is <Hacon>, which forms <filius Haconis>.
Aschel \AHS-kel\
Anketil \AHN-ket-til\
Brand \BRAHND\
Dolfin \DOLE-fin\
Gamel \GAH-mel\
Grim \GRIM\
Hacon \HAH-kone\
Haldan \HAHL-dahn\
Hamund \HAH-mund\, where \u\ has the sound in <put>
Harald \HAH-rahld\
Ketel \KEH-tel\
Ketelbern \KEH-tel-bairn\
Colsuan \KOLE-swahn\
Orm \ORM\
Siward \SIH-wahrd\
Suan, Suein \SWAHN\, \SWANE\
Toke \TOH-keh\
Toli \TOH-lee\
Thorald \THOR-ahld\
Turstan, Thorstan \TUR-stahn\, \THOR-stahn\
Ulf \ULF\ (with \u\ as in <put>)
Ulfkel \ULF-kel\ (with \u\ as in <put>)
Wigot \WIH-got\ (with \o\ as in <or>, not as in <got>)
Occasionally a man was identified by his mother's name; in this connection the names <Gunnild> and <Sigerith> seem to be the most common. In the fully Latinized forms they make <filius Gunnilde> and <filius Sigerithe>. They are pronounced roughly \GUN-nild\ and \SEE-yeh-rith\, where again \u\ is as in <put>.
The other moderately common type of byname is locative, i.e., naming a place of origin. These are always recorded in the form <de X>, where X is the place-name, e.g., <Colegrim de Nortun>. Any 11th or 12th century Danelaw place-name would be appropriate. A good source for them is reference [1], which is available in many libraries.
Arval Benicoeur also contributed to this letter. We hope that this information has been helpful and that you'll write again if you have any further questions.
For the Academy,
Talan Gwynek
[1] Ekwall, Eilert. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names (Oxford: At the University Press, 1989).
[2] Feilitzen, O. von. The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book (Uppsala: 1937).
[3] Fellows Jensen, Gillian. Scandinavian Personal Names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire (Copenhagen: 1968).
[4] Flutre, Louis-Fernand. 'Table des noms propres avec toutes leurs variantes figurant dans les romans du moyen age ecrits en francais ou en provencal et actuellement publies ou analyses' (Poitiers: Centre d'Etudes Superieures de Civilisation Medievale, 1962).
[5] Geoffrey of Monmouth. History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. by Sebastian Evans, revised by Charles W. Dunn (New York: Dutton, 1958).
[6] Harvey, Paul, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1944).