Anglo-Saxon Naming - for those wanting an authentic name

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Good ones!

I took out my copy of Campbell's Old English Grammar, and apparently these different outcomes of i-mutated éa are not spelling variants but dialexical differences: íe (later í, ý) is West Saxon, while é is Kentish and Anglian. Should've known!

(Though Late West Saxon also had é from unmutated(!) éa before c, g and h and after c, g and sc.)
 
Gah. Well, at least *naudiz should still be a good example (although *raukiz should work too, since that ea should be mutated. But IM CONFUS).

Man, late OE phonology is fascinating, but it's so frustrating.
 
I had no idea it could get this complicated.

Thanks for spending the time to look into it for me.
 
Think nothing of it. Eadric and I actually enjoy this kind of stuff. :smile:

What matters here is that now you have all the info you need and the justification to keep your current name if you are so inclined. And also that we got to talk some Old English, I guess.
 
Éadríc said:
Too generic?! Excuse me while I gasp for air!

*gasps*

Maybe Saxger (or its Anglo-Saxon equivalent Seaxgár) did not appeal to you, but surely there are fine Anglo-Saxon names to choose from? (See the list at the top of the opening post.)

As for Horvakre: I should have known better when you said it meant 'hair-fair' as an ironic statement about your bald head. For unless you are using some dialect I am not familiar with, hor in the Scandinavian languages does not mean 'hair', but 'adultery, fornication'. (It is related to English whore, Dutch hoer.) The proper Danish/Norwegian/Swedish word for 'hair' is hår, while the proper Old Norse term for '(the) hair-fair' was (inn) hárfagri.

The Old English term for such a thing was not attested, but on the basis of the English surname Fairfax, it was probably fægerfeax. Compare the name of Gandalf's horse in the Lord of the Rings: Shadowfax, which literally means 'shadow-hair'.

You could be Seaxgár fægerfeax, if Anglo-Saxon names don't scare you.
Click to expand...
Too bad Tolkien didn't use an older form of Shadow for that horse. Scædufax, perhaps? And isn't 'fax' direclty cognate to 'vacht' ? :razz:
 
Well, the thing is: the Old English you see in textbooks is actually Old West Saxon, which was the dominant dialect of the time. Only the Old English dialect that Tolkien used was Old Mercian, for he had grown up in Birmingham, which lies in what was once Mercia. On top of that he also had his own preferred spelling.

And so if the name Shadowfax had appeared in Old English form in The Lord of the Rings, I think it would have been Sceadufax (or maybe even Scadufax), instead of standard, West Saxon Sceadufeax.

As for Modern English fax, it's cognate to Middle Dutch vas, which did not make it into the present. Modern Dutch vacht is of the same root, but with a different suffix.
 
Tolkien often used modernized spellings, in part to make Rohirric names more accessible, in part to represent Rohirric names as they were used in the Common Tongue. See "Halifirien", which is halig-firgen, or "holy mountain".
 
Would this be the correct way to write this name?

Wulfnóþ Godwines sunu

I know that -es is added to the end of a father's name, but when the name already ends in -e, is it acceptable to just add an s?
 
Hi!

I looked in the list in order to choose authentic a saxon name and one of my favourite is Æþelmund. I read somewhere that Æthel means something like "noble" or "glorious", and that the signification of the word mund was connected with the sense of "protection", or the "hand". So the name could mean something like "noble-hand", or "noble-protector".

Is that correct? Is the the anglo-saxon word mund related to the german Mund or not?

Thanks in advance
 
Yes, "noble-protector" would be correct. Although the etymological meaning of mund is "hand", in Old English that sense seems to be restricted mostly to poetry, "protection" being its most common meaning (often with a specialized legal sense). It is the same word as German Mund, but only in its specialized historical legal sense (Proto-Germanic *mundō), which is etymologically a different word from and not related to Mund as in "mouth" (Proto-Germanic *munþaz).
 
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