SC - spelling please

[Ted Eisenstein]

On 2/5/01 10:57 AM sca-cooks at ansteorra.org wrote:
.
>... I was elevated to a Baron of the Court.  I
>was in shock for the rest of the event.
>Hej!
>Baron? Olaf of Trollhiemsfjord
>who is wondering what the rank would be in Norse.

Congratulations indeed.  Gerek says the term is basically the same 
"barun" (with accent acute on the u), but wasn't adopted until 1277 (in 
Norway).

The Edda (1233) mentions barons in England, and gives "lendr ma(dh)r" 
(dh=edh ð in HTML) as the Norwegian equivalent.  Another older office 
that might equate is hersir, undoubtedly the model for Norman barons.  
Hersir as a title was slowly superceded by lendir ma(dh)r in Norway, but 
is considered the same thing and was used interchangably in some periods. 
 The terms go(dh)i and hof(dh)ingi are also possibilities.

To quote from the footnotes of Gerek's (still in preparation) book _Old 
Norse Terms for Anachronists_:  "titles are a particular problem when 
translating between Society terms which do not conform to any one 
country's usage, and Scandinavian terms which represent the systems of 
several different countries with their own individual and usually 
completely different systems (particularly Iceland (the principal source 
for ON terminology) which was a form of republic until 1262), which also 
varied over time.  At one point in Norwegian history, the scale of rank 
ran something like konungr, jarl, hersir, holdr, buandi, but even here 
this is just an approximation.  Hersir probably originally referred to an 
independant ruler, not liegemen of a konungr, king -- later it appears to 
have become a liegeman below a jarl and above a holdr.  A holdr is a kind 
of higher yeoman like the statesman of Westmoreland i.e. the owner of 
allodial land.  A hersir or lendr maor held land in fee from the king in 
later times."

By the way, the Norwegian barons of 1277 were addressed as "Herra" lord, 
the same as knights.  In other words, you would be Herra Olafr a 
Trollheimsfir(dh)i barun (a=a acute, O=O acute, dh=edh, u=u accute).

If you wanted to use the form "baron of the court", it would be "barun 
hir(dh)ar".

Now, wasn't that a LOT more than you wanted to know, 8-)?

For food content... Gerek has all sorts of Norse food terms collected 
too!  Foodstuffs, techniques, equipment, etc.

Chimene (& Gerek)