ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 820 http://www.s-gabriel.org/820 *********************************** ************************************************* * * * NOTE: Some of the Academy's early reports * * contain errors that we haven't yet * * corrected. Please use it with caution. * * * ************************************************* From: "Brian M. Scott" 26 Apr 1998 Greetings from the Academy of S. Gabriel! You asked about as a possible 9th century Old Norse or Icelandic name. In particular you wanted to know how it would have been written and pronounced. You also expressed an interest in the name . is a later form of the Old Norse name . [1] Here the slash represents an acute accent over the preceding vowel, and {dh} represents the letter 'edh' or 'eth', which is described in note [2]. Its pronunciation as reconstructed by scholars is a bit hard to describe; it might be roughly represented \RAHGHN-freedhr\, but this still needs some explanation. (Since you asked specifically about pronunciation, we've gone into more detail than usual; unfortunately, this means that we have to get a bit technical.) The \GH\ represents the voiced counterpart of the \kh\ sound represented by in Scottish and German . It is made by saying the \kh\ sound while your vocal cords are vibrating. It takes a bit of practice to slide directly from this to the following \N\ without turning it into \RAH-ghun\. The \dh\ stands for the sound of in . The only remaining tricky bits are the s. The first two were probably lightly trilled like a Spanish . The final one was a different sound, much more like the \r\ used by most Americans, which is made with the tip of the tongue curled up and over near the roof of the mouth. If you raise the tip of the tongue without curling it over, you get the \zh\ sound of the in . In your period the final of was probably a sound midway between these two. [3, 4] An ordinary \r\ sound is probably pretty close, provided that you keep it short and try to minimize any connecting vowel between it and the preceding \dh\ sound. (This sound, which occurred only at the ends of words, turned into the other \r\ sound soon after your period.) is the so-called normalized form of the name, the form generally used by scholars. It's based on the forms most commonly found in the early Norse literature, which dates from the 12th century. In your period your name would have been written in runes if it was written at all. The futhark (runic alphabet) used at that time had only 16 letters, so different sounds often had to be represented by the same letter. In particular, there was only one rune for and . On the other hand, it did have distinct runes for the two -sounds. Representing the runes by their standard transcriptions into Roman letters, your name would have been written in runes. [5] You can find the runes discussed and pictured at these Web sites: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/1568 http://gonzo.hd.uib.no/Runefonter/Gullskoen-e.html (The second site also has a runic font that you can download.) Note that there is no distinction between upper- and lower-case runic letters; in the transcription the represents the fifth rune of the futhark, while the stands for its last rune. The is the tenth rune, not the fourth one. The {th} is the third rune, called 'thorn'. There are almost no recorded bynames from your period. However, the few that are known from memorial stones are similar to the bynames known from 11th - 13th century sources. Moreover, some of the people mentioned in these sources probably lived as early as the 10th century, so we think it probable that many of these later bynames were already in use in your period. Among them we found two that can be translated 'the Fair', and ; better yet, each is said to have been used in the 10th century. [6] (Here {ae} stands for the ae-digraph, in which the and are combined in a single letter.) In fact, is related to the English word . These bynames are pronounced \in FAHGH-ra\ and \in VEH-na\. Their runic spellings (as transcribed into Roman letters) are and . To sum up, both and would be reasonable ninth-century Old Norse names meaning 'Ragnfrid the Fair'. They would have been written in runes as and , respectively. Finally, we didn't quite find , but we did find and as medieval spelling variants of . [1] These are sufficient to show that (pronounced \RAHNG-reedh\ would also be a plausible medieval spelling, but it appears to be at least 300 years too late for your period. We hope that this answers your questions (and doesn't tell you more than you really wanted to know!) and that you will write again if anything isn't clear. Lindorm Eriksson, Fridrikr Tomasson, and Arval Benicoeur assisted with this letter. For the Academy, Talan Gwynek ===== Notes and References: [1] Lind, E.H. _Norsk-Isla:ndska Dopnamn ock Fingerade Namn fra*n Medeltiden_ (Uppsala & Leipzig: 1905-1915, sup. Oslo, Uppsala and Kobenahavn: 1931). [The is an a-umlaut; stands for an with a small circle directly above it.] [2] The letter 'edh' which is pronounced like the in the modern English is sometimes described as a 'crossed-d'. To form this letter, make an ordinary with the ascender curled over a bit to the left, like a backward <6>. Then make a short horizontal stroke through the curled over ascender. [3] Gordon, E.V. _An Introduction to Old Norse_ (Oxford: At the University Press, 1971). [4] Haugen, Einar. _Scandinavian Language Structures: A Comparative Historical Survey_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). [5] Uppsala University Department for Scandinavian Languages, _Rundata_, software pre-release version 8.84 (test) (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala universitet, 1990), 'So: 2', 'So: 141', 'U 115$', 'U 148', 'U 155$', 'U 337', 'U 338', 'U 346#', and 'U356. (Here stands for o-umlaut, an with two dots above it.) [6] Lind, E.H. _Norsk-Isla:ndska Personbinamn fra*n Medeltiden_ (Uppsala: 1920-1921).