[ANSTHRLD] arms - your thoughts

Tim McDaniel tmcd at panix.com
Wed Aug 20 12:13:18 PDT 2008


Rearranging for causality, trimming for clarity.

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, Tostig wrote:
> > Engenulf wrote:
> > vscribe at ansteorra.org wrote:
> > > That begs another question .... what was the intent of the
> > > namers of our Kingdom for our Kingdom's "Persona"? I.E. Is the
> > > name Ansteorra supposed to be Celt or Welsh or ... what?
> >
> > I thought it was supposed to be Anglo Saxon....
>
> Latin for "Lone Star".

Welsh is a Celtic language.  "Celtic" in a medieval context refers to
a collection of cultures, so "Celtic languages" refers to a collection
of languages (some only distantly related), though for all I know
early Celtic culture was much more unified and scholars might refer to
their language as such.

(BTW, I was surprised to learn that "Celt" is basically a
way-post-period concept.)

A dictionary says that "Anglo-Saxon" can refer to the language as well
as the culture, but I think (at least in the SCA) "Old English" is
more common.

"Ansteorra" is Old English: "an" = "one", "steorra" = "star".
<http://www.northvegr.org/lore/oldenglish/index.php>
Cheer up -- that dictionary suggests we could have ended up Antungol.
I think a Latin form would be something along the lines of
"sola stella".

I heard that Halley's Comet in 1066 was referred to in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle as "an steorra", but I don't see it in
<http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1992acm..proc..385M>.  The best I see
is "an selcuth steorra" (is that 'a new star'?) in AD 1097 and "an un
gewunelic steorra ('a strange star', perhaps in the sense of
'wonderful'?) in AD 1106 ... ah, AD 1110: "an steorra".

Danihel de Lindocollino
-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com



More information about the Heralds mailing list