|
Greetings from the Academy of S. Gabriel!
You asked for the definition of the word <skraeling> as it would have been used by the Norse in the 9th and 10th centuries.
The word actually occurs only in the plural, as both <Skr&lingjar> and <Skr&lingar>, but we can infer from the attested forms that the Old Norse nominative singular would have been <Skr&lingr>. (The symbol <&> is used here to represent the ae-digraph, sometimes called the 'ash'.)
The earliest instance of the word that we have found is in the _Libellus Islandorum_, written between 1122 and 1133 by Ari Thorgilsson. Ari dates the settlement of Greenland to 986, shortly after its discovery by Eiríkr inn Raudhi 'Erik the Red'. (Here the slash stands for an acute accent over the preceding vowel, and <dh> represents the letter 'edh' or 'eth'. [4]) He goes on to say that the settlers found broken kayaks and stone tools of the kind used by the people who inhabited Vinland, whom the Greenlanders called <Skr&lingar>. [2, p.35]
In his notes on another passage, Gordon has an extended discussion of the word. [2, p.217f] It is likely that the Greenlanders had not yet seen Eskimos when they made their first voyages to Vinland; and since Vinland seems to have been a bit too far south for Eskimos, it is likely that the term was first applied to American Indians. It is certain, however, that the term was also applied to the Eskimos found further north and in Greenland. For this we have not only the evidence of the Icelandic Annals, which record the 14th century attacks of the <Skr&lingar> on the Norse settlements in Greenland, but the evidence of the south Greenland Eskimos themselves. Hans Egede, who published a dictionary of Greenland Eskimo in 1739, said that the Eskimos of south Greenland called themselves <Karaleq> and claimed to have got the name from the former Norse inhabitants. This word <Karaleq> is apparently from an unattested <Sakaraleq>, which according to Gordon is the form that <Skr&lingr> would probably have taken in south Greenland Eskimo.
The etymology of the word is uncertain. In modern Norwegian a <skr&ling> is 'a sickly, puny person, a weakling'. [3] In a somewhat similar vein, Old and modern Icelandic have a verb <skr&lna> 'to shrink, to shrivel, to dry up', originally 'to be shrivelled by the sun'; its root is <skr&l->. [1] It is probably not possible to recover the exact sense intended by the Norsemen in the late 10th century, but it seems likely that the name <Skr&lingar> was an uncomplimentary reference to some perceived weakness or scruffiness of the Indians and Eskimos. In this connection it is perhaps also significant that Old Norse words beginning <skr&-> by and large have negative connotations: <skr&fa> 'a coward', <skr&kja> 'to screech', <skr&ma> 'to scare away'. [1] Such consistent sound symbolism suggests that the word <Skr&lingar> is likely to have been felt as somewhat pejorative irrespective of its literal sense.
The previous paragraph is based on the resources directly available to us. A bit of searching turned up confirmation of our general conclusions in the form of an article in the OLDNORSENET List Archive at <http://www.hum.gu.se/arkiv/ONN.01/1021.html>. We have not been able to check the references cited, but we think that they are trustworthy and have been accurately summarized by the poster. In brief, his sources add the following information. The word <skr&ling> means 'poor creature, poor wretch' in Nynorsk. [5] In Shetland there is a word <skreling> 'weak', and at least one major Norwegian dictionary takes 'weak, powerless persons' to be the original sense of the name <Skr&lingar>. Finally, it appears that Dutch <schraal> 'meagre, dry, bad' is related, along with a term from German sailors' speech, <schral> 'weak, unfavorable' (referring to the wind).
To sum up, <Skr&lingr> was the Norse name for an Eskimo and probably also for an American Indian; it cannot have been used before the late 10th century, when the Norsemen first encountered these people. It almost certainly had negative connotations and may have meant something like 'poor wretch, weak fellow, sun-shrivelled person'. However, there is no explanation in the written sources, which in any case were first set down over 125 years after the fact, so it is unlikely that we can ever be certain just what the term implied when it was first used.
Christer Romson, Heather Rose Jones, and Josh Mittleman also contributed to this letter. We hope that it has been useful and that you will write again if anything is unclear.
For the Academy,
Brian M. Scott
References and Notes:
[1] Cleasby, R., G. Vigfusson, & W. Craigie, An Icelandic-English Dictionary (Oxford: At the University Press, 1975).
[2] Gordon, E.V., An Introduction to Old Norse (Oxford: At the University Press, 1971).
[3] Scavenius, H., & B. Berulfsen, eds., McKay's Modern Norwegian-English English-Norwegian Dictionary (Gyldendal's) (New
[4] The letter 'edh', which is pronounced like the <th> in modern English <they>, is sometimes described as a 'crossed-d'. To form this letter, make an ordinary <d> with the ascender curled over a bit to the left, like a backwards <6>. Then make a small horizontal stroke through the curled-over ascender.
[5] There are two official Norwegian languages. One developed during the centuries when Norway was ruled from Copenhagen; it is based partly on written Danish, though it contains a great many native Norwegian elements as well, and is often called Dano-Norwegian. The other, called Nynorsk 'New Norse', was created in the 19th century as a more genuinely Norwegian alternative. Roughly speaking, it was intended to be the language into which Old Norwegian might have evolved without Danish influence, so it was based on the most conservative Norwegian dialects.