ANSTEORRAN COLLEGE OF HERALDS Collated Commentary on IloI 1198 Unto the Ansteorran College of Heralds does Perronnelle Charrette de La Tour du Pin, Retiarius Pursuivant, make most courteous greetings. For information on commentary submission formats or to receive a copy of the collated commentary, you can contact me at: Charlene Charette 15910 Valverde Drive, Houston, TX 77083 281/277-4055 (11am-10pm) [email protected] Commenters for this issue: Steppes – Attending and assisting with the commentary were: Da’ud ibn Auda (al-Jamal); Alasdair MacEogan (Wakeforest); and Borek Vitalievich Volkov (Eclipse). [Comments labeled as "I" are from Da’ud.] Gawain of Miskbridge (Midrealm) – Green Anchor Herald Bjornsborg – Ælfwyn æt Gyrwum, Agrippina, Eleanor d'Eresby, Emily Penrose Blackwell, Marcus Blackwell, Melicent Tallant, M.J., Valencia de Avicenna, and Ysfael Bryndu. Bryn Gwlad – Commenters this month were Gwenllian ferch Maredudd, Mari Elspeth nic Bryan, Daniel de Lincolia, and others who Daniel was too air-headed to note. Below, "I" refers to Daniel. Items for which we had no comments and found no conflicts have been omitted. Conflicts were checked against the 7th edition Ordinary. References used include O Corrain & Maguire's Gaelic Personal Names; Black's The Surnames of Scotland; Woulfe's Irish Names and Surnames; Bardsley's A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames; MacLysaght's Surnames of Ireland; De Felice's Dizionario dei Nomi Italiani; Bahlow's Deutsches Namenlexicon (English trans); A Pictorial Dictionary of Heraldry as Used in the SCA; and various Laurel precedents. Shadowlands – Magnus von Lubeck Aryanhwy merch Catmael – Opinicus Pursuivant Talan Gwynek – Fause Lozenge 1. Alexander Peregrine (Steppes) Resubmitted Device; Name Passed Kingdom 09/98 Proposed Blazon: Argent, on a pile gules in chief a fleur-de-lys argent, overall a chevron counterchanged. Steppes [Device] Since the chevron is (a) an ordinary, and (b) not "over" the fleur, it probably ought to be blazoned before the tertiary charge. Argent, a pile gules, overall a chevron counterchanged, in chief a fleur-de-lis argent. Bjornsborg [Device] We all thought it was a great-looking piece of armory. By our count, it cleared the earlier conflict. Bryn Gwlad [Device] Clears the old conflict. A question was raised as to whether overall charges can themselves be charged. Recent registrations: Basilla la Mercière (10/93): Azure, a swan within a bordure argent, overall on a chief nebuly Or, three leaves vert; Canterbury, Archbishopric of: Azure, an episcopal staff Or and overall on a pallium argent fringed Or four crosses formy fitchy sable; Edward de Horncastel (3/98): Argent, a bend sinister sable, overall on a double-headed eagle gules a cross of Cleves Or; at this point I stopped. None of those had any comment in the LoAR about charging an overall. Thus, this could be seen as pile primary and chevron overall, or chevron primary and pile overall. I think that if there's a conflict either way, it would have to be returned ("you can't blazon your way out of a conflict"). Talan Gwynek [Device] I’m not even sure that the original return was justified, since the chevron is arguably the primary charge. I’d be inclined to blazon this Argent, a chevron gules surmounted by a pile counterchanged charged in chief with a fleur-de-lis argent. 2. Beorhtlic Folcwineson (Northkeep) New Name; New Device Proposed Blazon: Per pale azure and argent, three cubit arms conjoined in pall each maintaining a smith's hammer and a bordure counterchanged. Bjornsborg [Name] Confirmed the pages cited in Searle. [Device] I didn't see any conflicts. Bryn Gwlad [Name] Mari: Assuming of course that the formation parallels Old Norse ... p. xxix of Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader shows the declension of "wine" as belonging to the group that makes its genitive singular "wines", though it seems from the note that the word originally belonged to another declension. The other genitive is "sunu". Talan Gwynek [Name] The forename is cannot be justified. The argument is a little complex, so I’ve presented it in some detail. Unfortunately, of necessity I’ve had to omit a good deal of supporting background information based on extensive experience with Old English names, information without which the full force of the argument may not be apparent. Searle is very hard to use without some expert knowledge. Here he’s simply wrong: there is no Old English (OE) deuterotheme -lic. The Germanic name elements properly called themes are based on nominal and adjectival roots: ælf ‘supernatural being’ and beorht ‘radiant’ are examples of the two types. So-called dithematic names contain two of these themes, a prototheme ‘first theme’ and a deuterotheme ‘second theme’. Originally these were used to form meaningful compounds, like Old Germanic Skaþaleubaz ‘justice-lover’. By attested OE times, however, the themes had become combinatorial elements capable of being combined without regard to their semantic content, as in the name Friðhild ‘peace-battle’. (Examples are from Roger Lass, Old English: A historical linguistic companion, 205f.) There were still some restrictions: the deuterotheme determined the gender of the name, so that any name with deuterotheme -hild had to be feminine; some themes were used only as protothemes, some only as deuterothemes, and some as both; alliterative compounds were avoided; and so on. But these aren’t relevant to the present submission. Beorht was indeed an OE name theme, common both as prototheme and as deuterotheme (Ström, Old English Personal Names in Bede’s History, 8); -lic, however, is not a theme at all, but rather a mere grammatical element used to create adjectives. Its descendant can still be seen in the -ly of seemly. (The adverb-forming -ly of such words as quickly and bravely is a related but distinct element. The most common way of forming an adverb from an adjective in OE was to add the suffix -e: wid ‘wide’, wide ‘widely’, gelic ‘similar’, gelice ‘similarly’, and so on. Because the adjectival suffix -lic was extremely common, there were a great many adverbs in -lic-e, and as a result this compound suffix was reinterpreted as a single adverbial suffix; see Lass, 207.) The names ending in -lic are therefore not dithematic at all but rather simple adjectives. At -lic, for instance, Searle lists a name Tunlic; this is simply tunlic ‘rustic’. Searle also mentions the feminine Cwoemlicu, which as usual he’s normalized; Boehler (Die altenglische Frauennamen, 12) gives the actual citation as Cuoemlicu and notes that this is an adjectival name from the Old English adjective ge-cwemlic ‘suitable, pleasant, nice’. (The hyphen is not part of the word; rather, it indicates that the word is found both with and without the prefix ge-.) The submitter found Stronglic and Stranglic; these are the adjective stranglic (and its dialect variant stronglic) ‘strong, stout, robust; severe’. These are not the only adjectival OE personal names; another, not containing the adjective-forming suffix -lic, is Hwita ‘white’. The simplex (i.e., not dithematic) name Beorht may itself be an example, since the word means simply ‘radiant’. However, since it is a genuine OE name theme, it might also be a short form of a dithematic name like Berhtuulf. At any rate, the question is (1) whether there is an OE adjective beorhtlic, and (2) whether it is a reasonable hypothetical OE name. The answer to (1) is easy: there is indeed an adjective ge-beorhtlic ‘brilliant, clear, shining, splendid’. In purely structural terms Beorhtlic is formed from ge-beorhtlic essentially just as Cuoemlicu is formed from ge-cwemlic. However, this doesn’t settle (2) because the examples are not really parallel. Cwem-, unlike Beorht-, is not a genuine name theme; so far as I can discover, it occurs in personal names only in the adjectival name Cuoemlicu. (Tun and strang are also not genuine OE name themes.) Beorht, on the other hand, was a very common name theme and a common adjective meaning ‘bright, shining, brilliant, light, clear’. The adjective complex ge-beorhtlic is essentially a doublet of the simplex beorht, covering pretty much the same semantic territory. Thus, the hypothetical name Beorhtlic would have occupied the same niche as the well-attested name Beorht. Obviously we don’t know everything about OE personal naming. We do know, however, that dithematic names are much the most common sort in the record, with adjectival names very much in the minority. Among these it appears from the paucity of examples that names in -lic were especially rare. Finally, we have no example of the use as a personal name in its own right of a purely adjectival derivative of an already adjectival name theme. In view of these considerations, case for a personal name Beorhtlic is weak to non-existent. (I don’t know what to make of the submitter’s statement that the sound of the name is important; does he know that it’s pronounced – very roughly, of course – as \BAIRKHT-leech\?) Folcwineson has a few problems of its own. There is an OE prototheme Folc-, but according to von Feilitzen (The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book, 257 n. 1), genuine OE compounds containing it are early and rare. It’s not entirely clear exactly how to interpret von Feilitzen’s ‘early’, but considering both OE history and the entries in Searle, I’d say that it probably doesn’t extend beyond the 8th c. Thus, in the early 9th c. the submitter might possibly be the son of a Folcwine, but after that it’s quite unlikely. At this point someone is likely to point to the almost two pages of apparent examples of Folc- names in Searle, many from the 9th - 11th c.