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Warmest greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel.
You asked whether the feminine Old Norse name <Fritha> is suitable for a Viking persona in the period 700 - 900. You also asked whether its appearance on the Kirk Michael Cross is sufficient documentation.
The Old Norse feminine name <Fri{dh}a> occurs at least from the late 10th century to the 15th century. [1] (For an explanation of the {dh} please see note [3].) The earliest example that we can find is the Kirk Michael Cross inscription that you mentioned, which is from the period 980-990. [2] (This incription would be adequate documentation for registration.)
The name itself may well be older, however, since the sources for such early names are very limited. It seems quite possible that it was already in use by the end of your period.
The Kirk Michael Cross inscription is runic; in transliteration it reads
<fri{th}u>. (For an explanation of {th}, see note [4].) This is in the
accusative case, the grammatical form used for direct objects and the
objects of some prepositions. The nominative case, which is used for the
subject of a sentence and is the basic form of the name, is <fri{th}a>.
It is pronounced roughly \FREE-dha\, where \dh\ represents the sound of
<th> in <this> and <then>. In your period you would most likely use runes
rather than Roman letters to write your name; you can find them pictured
on the web at:
or at
http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/Runefonter/Gullskoen-e.html
Around two hundred years after your period, the Norse adopted the Latin alphabet. Spelling varied considerably; modern scholars often list names in "normalized" spelling. This scholarly practice is based on the Old Icelandic of the sagas. Incidentally, the normalized spelling is <Frí{dh}a>.
You'll probably also want to have a byname, a second name that distinguishes you from other women named <Fritha>. (If you choose to register your SCA name with the College of Arms, you'll have to have one.) Family ties were very important, and the most common kind of Norse byname was the patronymic, which identifies you as your father's daughter; <fri{th}a fri{th}kairs tutir>, for instance, would be a runic version of the name whose normalized Old Norse spelling is <Fri{dh}a Fri{dh}geirs dóttir> "Fri{dh}a daughter of Fri{gh}geirr". (The slash represents an acute accent over the preceding vowel.)
Here are some other patronymics that you could use. The first column gives the father's name in its normalized spelling. The second column is the patronymic, using the same spelling. The last column is a direct transliteration into Roman letters of a possible runic spelling. <Fre{dh}leifr>; <Fri{dh}leifsdóttir>; <fri{th}laifs tutir> <Fri{dh}mundr>; <Fri{dh}mundardóttir>; <fri{th}mutar tutir> <Fri{dh}rekr>; <Fri{dh}reksdóttir>;<fri{th}riks tutir> <Fri{dh}i>; <Fri{dh}adóttir>; <fri{th}a tutir>.
We've used names beginning with <Fri{dh}-> because it was common for a child to be given a name that incorporated part of the name of one or the other parent. We've been careful to choose only those with fairly early attestations; all but <Fri{dh}rekr> and <Fri{dh}i> go back to at least the tenth century, and those two are attested from the eleventh century. [1, 2].
In your period simple descriptive nicknames were also common. Red hair, for instance, was noteworthy and might make you <Fri{dh}a hin rau{dh}a>, or transliterated into runes <fri{th}a hin rau{th}a>. (It's pronounced roughly \FREE-dha hin ROW-dha\, where \ROW\ rhymes with <cow>.
We can help you with a patronymic or a nickname. If you are interested, please write us again and let us know what you want your byname to mean.
The research and commentary for this letter was contributed by Talan Gwynek, Arval d'Espas Nord, Lindorm Eriksson, and Livia Montgomery.
Sincerely
Naitan de Yerdeburc
[2] Version 8.90 of the computer program and database _Rundata_ by Uppsala University Department of Scandinavian Languages, inscription BR OLSEN;217B $ Available at http://www.nordiska.uu.se/samnord.html
For this inscription Rundata reference the following publication:
"Page, Ray, 1983: The Manx rune-stones, In: _The Viking Age in the Isle of Man. Selected papers from The Ninth Viking Congress, Isle of Man, 4-14 July 1981._ Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London".
[3] The symbol "{dh}" represents the letter "edh", which is pronounced like the <th> in modern English <this>. To form this letter, make an ordinary <d> with the ascender curled over a bit to the left, like a backward <6>. Then make a small horizontal stroke through the curled-over ascender.
[4] The symbol "{th}" represents the runic letter "thorn". Though often pronounced like the <th> in <thin>, in the names in this letter it has the sound of edh as described in note [3]. It looks like a combination of lower-case <p> and <b>: one loop with both an ascender and descender.