[ANSTHRLD] AEgil for Sunnrifa

Christie Ward val_org at hotmail.com
Wed Aug 15 11:16:33 PDT 2001


Cyniric said:
>  Yes Magnus, but it is a geographic compound alluding to a place thought
>to be owned by an individual like Cerdicesford.

But AEgeles- could refer to a bunch of things:

(1) It could be a person's name, as Cyniric suggests.  If so, then I'd
expect some confirmation in one of the wills, charters, or tax records.

(2) It could be a short-form name.  There's good documentation available,
for instance, of quite a few Old Norse pet-names, or short-forms (for
example, Brynja for Brynhildr).  Given the fact that somehow the Old Norse
textual materials preserve this type of information on names, I'd certainly
expect that the larger corpus of Old English texts would similarly,
somewhere, record short forms, and I'd want to see that additional
documentation.

(3) It could be a nickname.  Somebody built a farm there whose nick-name was
"aegel", and the farm became known by the nick-name.  Fellows-Jensen has a
bunch of examples of placenames in the Danelaw area that follow this
pattern.  Some of the nicknames did at some point come into usage as regular
names as well, but not all and not always.  Again, I'd expect to see some
further documentation of this a sa real name if this were the case from
wills, charters, or tax records.

(4) It could be an adjective, possibly derived from the "ae(dh)el" word,
meaning "noble".  The place name then would be "Noble's Tharp".  Or it might
have some entirely different derivation, but still be an adjective
describing the place instead of the person, or commemorating the person
using a word that is not a name.

There are probably even more possibilities that I can think of off the cuff
like this.  At any rate, the ones I've listed here are more than enough to
show why the place name alone is not sufficient documentation.  For the
element to represent a name, you'd have to find documentation of it in use
indisputably as a name elsewhere.

I think that in general the usage of a name in a place-name is most useful
in dating the name, not in proving thata word is or is not a name.  Once you
have documentation that a given name as, in fact, a name, the placename info
provides one way of dating when that name was current.

In looking for AEgil for the client, I'd suggest contacting St. Gabriel's,
or else consulting Lind.  Rundata might also provide some clues.

::GUNNORA::

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