ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 945 http://www.s-gabriel.org/945 *********************************** ************************************************* * * * NOTE: Some of the Academy's early reports * * contain errors that we haven't yet * * corrected. Please use it with caution. * * * ************************************************* From: 20 May 1998 Greetings, Here's the information we can give you on "Roric Lightning Spear," and your coat of arms, which we have blazoned, "Per bend embattled gules and sable, a spear palewise and in sinister chief a cross formy argent." We've included a lot of information, since we're not entirely sure what you'd like to do. We'll talk about "Roric" first and "Lightning Spear" second. You mentioned that you found "Roric" in Ireland and in Sweden. It sounds like you've run into a problem with history books--they often modify the forms of their names to fit modern patterns. "Roric" was used as a name not only in Sweden, but in countries all over Europe-- we found examples in Norway, Iceland, Denmark (1), England, (2) Germany, (3), and France (4), "Roric" would be an appropriate name for any of these countries from about 800 to 1100. There are several Irish names which appear to be related to . As far as we can tell, the most likely candidate is (pronounced \ROY-drig\). (5) You could use as an Irish equivalent of . We found no name equivalent to "Lightning Spear" in any language, and our research suggests that it is extraordinarily unlikely. Medieval descriptive bynames tended to be more prosaic and straightforward, not dramatic and poetical. A spearman might have been called by a byname meaning "spearman", "quick", "strong", or even (in some languages) "strong spear", but not "lightning spear." We haven't looked them up because we weren't sure which language you wanted to use. We did find an equivalent to in Irish, but we found the actual name in many other languages. We would be happy to look up appropriate names in any of the languages we mentioned above. We encourage you to look into these other possibilities; the SCA has a disproportionate number of Irish and Scots, while Continental France and Germany (which were the centers of European civilization in the period between 800 and 1100) are largely neglected. Talan Gwynek, Arval Benicoeur, Christer Romson, Zenobia Naphtali, Evan da Collaureo, and Margaret MacDuibsidhe contributed to this letter. Let us know what language or languages you'd like to pursue, and we'll look for given names that might be what you're looking for. In service, Alan Fairfax Academy of S. Gabriel (1) Lind, E.H., _Norsk-Isla:ndska Dopnamn ock Fingerade Namn fra*n Medeltiden_ (Uppsala & Leipzig: 1905-1915, sup. Oslo, Uppsala and Kobenahavn: 1931). (2) Searle, William George, _Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum_ (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1897). (3) Morlet, Marie-Therese, _Les Noms de Personne sur le Territoire de l'Ancienne Gaule du VIe au XIIe Siecle_, three volumes (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1972). (4) Forstemann, Ernst Wilhelm, _Altdeutsches Namenbuch_ (Nordhausen, Germany: F. Forstemann, 1856-72). (5) O'Brien, M. A., ed., Corpus Genealogiarum Hiberniae (Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1976).