THE VIKINGS
AND THEIR VICTIMS:THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES
By

GILLIAN FELLOWS-JENSEN
READER IN NAME STUDIESIN THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

The Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecturein Northern Studies
delivered at University College London
21 February 1994

PUBLISHED FOR THE COLLEGE BY THE
VIKING SOCIETY FOR NORTHERN RESEARCHLONDON© UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON 1995
REPRINTED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
1998

ISBN: 0 903521 39 3

THE VIKINGS
AND THEIR VICTIMS:THE VERDICT OF THE NAMESI

N the Dorothea Coke memorial lecture delivered in 1986,
Professor R. I. Page, that silver-haired master of silvertongued vituperation, had to admit that he had been at a loss
as to how to translate without resort to obscenity one of the many
more or less obscene descriptions employed by the late tenthcentury English chronicler Æthelweard of the late ninth-century
Viking invaders.1 The rather colourless result arrived at: A mostvile people, was included in the title of his lecture on the radically differing views about the Vikings that were held by early
historians. It is not, of course, surprising that the victims of Viking
attacks considered their aggressors to be pagan barbarians, capableof every kind of deed of shame, nor that inscriptions on runestones in Scandinavia raised to the memory of Vikings who had
died in action in the west praise the dead men as models of valour,
liberality and loyalty.
Among the many inscriptions commemorating Swedes whodied in England discussed by Professor Sven B. F. Jansson in
his Dorothea Coke memorial lecture in 1965, for example, isthat on the stone at Transjö in Småland, which was raised in theeleventh century by Gaut to his son Ketil, who is said to havebeen ‘among men the most un-dastard’ (SRSm 5). 2 Ketil’s
English enemies may not have shared the opinion of his father
but there certainly were Englishmen in the eleventh century who

1 R. I. Page, ‘A Most Vile People’: Early English Historians on The Vikings(London, 1987), p. 1.
2 Sven B. F. Jansson, Swedish Vikings in England. The Evidence of the Rune
Stones (London, 1966), p. 9. References in the present paper to rune-stones in
Sweden are to the series Sveriges Runinskrifter (Stockholm, 1900– ) with thefollowing abbreviations: SRSm = Småland, SRSö = Södermanland, SRU = Uppland.

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THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

could acknowledge the heroism and ﬁdelity of the Vikings, evenwhile describing the atrocities they had suffered at their hands.3
The English must have been only too conscious of the Scandinavian element in the population of their country. They knewthat new waves of invading Vikings had sometimes received support from their fellow-countrymen already resident in the Danelaw.
An English defeat in East Anglia in 1009, for example, is ascribedto the fact that a man called Þurcytel Myran hea– fod instigatedthe ﬂight from the ﬁeld of battle, leaving this in the possessionof the Danes.4 Þurcytel is an anglicised form of a typically
Scandinavian personal name, Þorketil, while Myran hea– fod ‘mare’s
head’ is an English by-name, perhaps a translation of Scandinavian*merarho≈fuð, and almost certainly derogatory. Eleventh-century
Englishmen also knew, however, that men bearing Scandinavian
personal names could remain true to the English cause even in
the face of Danish attack. The East Anglian levies whose defeat
was brought about by Þurcytel ’s infamous ﬂight were actually
under the command of a man with the Scandinavian name Ulfcytel
who had a long record of valiant behaviour in command of English
forces and actually died ﬁghting the Danes in yet another battle
which was lost because of treachery among the English.5
With the passage of the centuries, Englishmen would seemto have forgotten the Viking contribution to the population of
the country. The early seventeenth-century English antiquarian
Richard Verstegan, whose Dutch descent made him very conscious of the Saxon origin of the English and whose view of the
procreative ability of the Danes was hardly ﬂattering, was of theopinion that the Danes ‘had so little time of quiet settling themselves in England, that they could leave but few of their posterity there’.6 As access to early accounts of the Viking raids became
more general with their publication in the nineteenth century in
3 Page, ‘A Most Vile People’, pp. 26–27.
4 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC) E, s. a. 1009; here and below quoted from
C. Plummer and J. Earle (eds), Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel (Oxford, 1892).
5 ASC D, s. a. 1016.
6 R. Verstegan, Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities. Concerning
the most noble, and renowned English Nation (Antwerp, 1605, reprinted London,
1653), pp. 237–38 in the printing of 1653.

4

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

the Rolls Series and elsewhere, English historians began once
again to pay more attention to the events of the Viking period
and their signiﬁcance for the composition of the population ofEngland. I am convinced that it is the knowledge that many of
the invaders became our ancestors that has caused twentiethcentury English historians to temper their language when describing the onslaughts of the Vikings.
In Scandinavia, a more wholeheartedly positive, not to sayromantic, view of the Vikings has prevailed, based mainly on
the Latin chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus and the magniﬁcentvernacular sagas of Iceland. In recent years the three major exhibitions that have been devoted to the Vikings and the accompanying catalogues have served to enhance their image not onlyin their homelands but also in some of the lands that suffered
most grievously at their hands a thousand years ago.7 At the sametime, detailed research on the written sources and the employment of scientiﬁc methods in archaeology have contrived to bringabout a revolution in Viking studies everywhere and to provide
a more balanced and rounded picture of the life and times of theVikings. Systematic studies of place- and personal names havemade their own signiﬁcant contribution to this new evaluation.
When King Alfred defeated the Danish king Guthrum atEdington in 878, a peace-agreement was concluded between themrequiring that Guthrum, who was to remain king of East Anglia,
should recognise Alfred as his overlord and that he and thirty ofthe most honourable men in his host should receive baptism.
Alfred stood sponsor for Guthrum, who received the Christianand English name Athelstan.8 It would not, however, seem tohave been normal for humbler Danes who were baptised in England
to have assumed new names together with the new faith. If it
had been so, then it would have been much more difﬁcult formodern scholars to exploit the evidence of personal names and7 Cf. J. Graham-Campbell and D. Kidd (eds), The Vikings (London, 1980); E.
Roesdahl et al. (eds), The Vikings in England (London, 1981); E. Roesdahl and
D. M. Wilson, From Viking to Crusader, Scandinavia and Europe 800–1200(Copenhagen, 1992).
8 ASC A, s. a. 878.

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THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

place-names as a source of information about patterns of Danish settlement there. There are still two major problems involved,
however. The ﬁrst was noted many years ago by J. R. R. Tolkien
in connection with the name of the above-mentioned East Angliancommander Ulfcytel, whose career shows that ‘it could not beassumed that a man who bore a “Danish” name was (in whole orin part) of Scandinavian “blood” or language, or even of Danish
sympathies’.9 It is normally difﬁcult and sometimes impossible
to know whether a man with a Scandinavian name who held
land in England in the eleventh century, for example, was a follower
of Cnut or his sons who had been granted the land in return forhis services or a descendant of the Danes who had partitioned
eastern England between themselves at the end of the ninth century.
The second problem is concerned with the dating of the coining of the Scandinavian place-names in England. For the majority of the settlement names in the Danelaw, the terminus antequem, that is the date before which they must have been coined,
is 1086—the date of the compilation of Domesday Book, in which
they make their ﬁrst written appearance. In most cases it can be
difﬁcult to push this date back any further and there is in fact
evidence that some of the place-names recorded in Domesday
Book are unlikely to have assumed the forms in which they occur
in that source earlier than in the ﬁrst half of the eleventh century. There survive a few pre-Conquest documents recording grants
or conﬁrmations of grants by Cnut to some of his housecarls.10
An original document dated 1024, for example, records the grantof Portisham in Dorset to Orc, Cnut’s minister (S 961),11 andthis grant and Orc’s status are conﬁrmed by a surviving declaration of Edward the Confessor, that can be dated to between 1053
and 1058, to the effect that Urk, his housecarl, is to have hisrights over the shore at this place (S 1063). In a grant of Edward
9 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘English and Welsh’, in Angles and Britons, ed. H. Lewis(Cardiff, 1963), pp. 1–41, at pp. 9–10.
10 Noted by K. Mack, ‘Changing Thegns: Cnut’s Conquest and the English
Aristocracy’, Albion 16:4 (1984), pp. 375–87, at p. 376.
11 All references to Anglo-Saxon Charters are cited according to the S-number
accorded to them in P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List andBibliography (London, 1968).

6

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

to the same man dating from 1044, it was actually thought necessary to explain that Orc had borne this name from infancy
according to the custom of his own race (S 1004). This showsthat Orc was not of English birth.12 His name is not a common
one. The Orcus who is recorded as holding two hides of land in
Merton in Surrey both in 1065 and 1086 (GDB 30rb; 1/5)13 canhardly be identical with the housecarl who had received a grantin 1024 but he may be one of his descendants. The name is probably a Scandinavian by-name referring to a man from Orkney,
although the only certain occurrence of it outside England is ina patronymic in a runic inscription in Maeshowe in Orkney andthis instance of Orkasonr might conceivably just be a play on
the name Orkahaugr for Maeshowe.14
There are, of course, many other records of grants made by
English kings to men with Scandinavian names but the grant to
Orc and grants to a housecarl called Boﬁ of land in Horton in
Dorset (S 969) and one called Thurstan of land in Chalkhill in
Middlesex (S 1121) are particularly interesting because they reﬂect
the transfer of land into the hands of men who can be assumed
to have been of Scandinavian birth long after the original Danish
partitions of land and outside the areas of dense Scandinavian
settlement. These grants probably had a strategic value for the king.
The Scandinavian loanword in English húskarl, which was
originally only used of the members of Cnut’s þingamannalið
later came to be used of other of the king’s retainers and also of
those of other great landowners,15 for example Auti huscarle comitis
Algari in Bedfordshire (GDB 213rb; 23/20). The word húskarl
was also taken into use as a personal name in England. Men
12 Noted by F. E. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs (Manchester, 1952), p. 576.
13 References to Domesday Book take the form of GDB for Greater Domesday Book and LDB for Little Domesday Book plus folio identiﬁcation and thenumber ascribed to the relevant entry in the Phillimore edition or for Lincolnshire in C. W. Foster and T. Longley (eds), The Lincolnshire Domesday and theLindsey Survey, Lincoln Record Society Volume 19 (Lincoln, 1924).
14 M. P. Barnes, ‘Norwegian, Norn, Icelandic or West Norse? The Languageof the Maeshowe Inscriptions’, Festskrift til Ottar Grønvik på 75-årsdagen den
21. oktober 1991, ed. J. O. Askedal et al. (Oslo, 1991), pp. 70–87, at p. 74.
15 Cf. D. Hofmann, Nordisch-Englische Lehnbeziehungen der Wikingerzeit,
Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana XIV (Kopenhagen, 1955), § 342.

7

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

called Huscarl(e) held land in Surrey (GDB 36ra (2×); 21/6.7)
and Cambridgeshire (GDB 195rb; 14/64). In addition, the name
was taken over to Sweden, presumably by members of Cnut’sarmy who did not wish to remain in England. A particularly interesting Swedish family erected a pair of runestones at Lingsberg
in Uppland in the ﬁrst half of the eleventh century (SRU 240–41).16
Three brothers named Dan, Huskarl and Svein set up both stones,
one, in company with their mother Holmfrith, in memory of theirfather Halfdan, the other in memory of their father’s father Ulfrik,
who is said to have taken two gelds in England. The gelds inquestion were the tributes paid by Viking chieftains and by Cnut
to their troops after successful campaigns in England. Some of
the men took their payment and returned home with it, for example to Uppland, to become prosperous farmers who would becommemorated by the erection of rune-stones. One of them, Alli,
took no chances and erected a stone in Vasby to himself while
he was still alive, boasting that he had taken Cnut’s payment(SRU 194). What makes the Lingsberg stones particularly interesting, however, is the nature of the personal names borne bothby the men commemorated and by their descendants. Grandfather Ulfrik, the geld-taker, bears a name which is of very rareoccurrence in Scandinavia17 and which does not seem to havebeen borne by any of the Danish settlers in England. The cognate Old English personal name Wulfrıc,– however, is of very
common occurrence in England, being borne by many of the
pre-Conquest tenants in Domesday Book.18 I should like to suggest that the geld-taker was actually called Wulfrıc– and that thisname has been scandinavianised on the Swedish rune-stones.
The problem then is to determine the original nationality of Ulfrik.
It is perhaps most likely that he was a man of mixed descent,born in the Danelaw. His son was given a typically Danish name,
16 The Lingsberg stones have been discussed recently by Helmer Gustavson,

Runstenar i Vallentuna (Vallentuna, 1991), pp. 88–93.
17 Cf. Danmarks gamle Personnavne (DgP) (Copenhagen, 1936–64), col. 1528;
SRU 241; M. Olsen et al., Norges innskrifter med de yngre runer (Oslo, 1941–90), III. 146.
18 O. v. Feilitzen, The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book
(Uppsala, 1937), pp. 323–24.

8

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

A rune-stone erected in the first half of the eleventh century at Lingsberg in
Uppland by three brothers named Dan, Huskarl and Svein in memory of theirfather’s father Ulfrik, who had taken two gelds in England (SRU 241; copyright:
Marit Åhlén, Runverket, Stockholm);9 cf. pp. 8–9.

A rune-stone erected in the first half of the eleventh century at Lingsberg in
Uppland by the same three brothers, Dan, Huskarl and Svein, together with
their mother Holmfrith, in memory of their father Halfdan (SRU 240; copyright:
Marit Åhlén, Runverket, Stockholm); cf. pp. 8–9.

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

Halfdan, an original by-name meaning ‘half-Dane’ that was ofcomparatively frequent occurrence in the Danelaw, where it wasoften particularly appropriate.19 The Uppland Halfdan marrieda woman with a typically Swedish name, Holmfrith,20 but theirthree sons were all given names with links to the Danelaw or
Denmark. The name Dan, of course, may simply have been selected
as a variation on Halfdan but it seems certain that Huskarl must
reﬂect grandfather Ulfrik’s career in England, while the third
name, Svein, which is of common occurrence all over Scandinavia, has the same meaning as Huskarl and thus ﬁts stylisticallywith the other names of this family.21 The fact that it was thename of Cnut’s father, Svein Forkbeard, makes it also appropriate for a family with some of its roots in the Danelaw.
Another Uppland-family whose personal names reﬂect close
links with the Danelaw is that of Ulf of Borresta. A rune-stone
in Yttergärde records that Ulf took three gelds in England (SRU344). Ulf’s eldest son was called Ulfketil (SRU 100, 160–61).
There are a few other occurrences of the name Ulfketil in runicinscriptions in Sweden (SRU 479, 633) but it is otherwise ofcomparatively infrequent occurrence in Scandinavia. It was borneby one of the original settlers in Iceland whose nationality is
doubtful22 and is not found elsewhere in the West Scandinavian
area. The ﬁrst recorded instance of the name in Denmark is theowner’s name ulfkil inscribed in runes on a walking-stick witha dragon’s-head handle found in Lund in Scania and dated by its
ornamentation to c.1050.23 This ornamentation is related to boththe English Winchester style and the Scandinavian Ringerike
19 Feilitzen, Personal Names of Domesday Book, pp. 283–84; G. Fellows Jensen,

Scandinavian Personal Names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire (SPNLY), Navnestudier
7 (Copenhagen, 1968), pp. 126–28.
20 M. Lundgren and E. Brate, Svenska Personnamn Från Medeltiden (Uppsala,
1892–1915), p. 108; A. Janzen (ed.), Personnavne, Nordisk Kultur VII (København,
Oslo, Stockholm, 1947), p. 79.
21 Noted by E. Wessén, Nordiska namnstudier. Uppsala Universitets Årskrift
1927 (Uppsala, 1927), pp. 13–14.
22 E. H. Lind, Norsk-isländska dopnamn och ﬁngerade namn från medeltiden(Uppsala, 1905–15), col. 1053.
23 Roesdahl and Wilson, From Viking to Crusader, item 19; E. Moltke, Runesand their origin. Denmark and Elsewhere (Copenhagen, 1985), pp. 472–73.

9

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

style. The name Ulfkil was also borne by a moneyer and goldsmith working in Lund in the eleventh century. Two silver brooches
have been found bearing the inscription ulfkililudan, to be translated
as ‘Ulfkil in Lund, Denmark’.24 It is quite possible that both thewalking-stick and the moneyer and goldsmith came to Lund fromthe Danelaw. I have earlier been tempted to believe that many ofthe moneyers’ names on eleventh-century Danish coins, someof which have been shown by Kristian Hald to be typical of theDanelaw,25 may simply have been copied from coins from theDanelaw that were being employed as models in Denmark but
the inscription on the silver brooches does rather suggest that amoneyer by the name of Ulfkil had come from the Danelaw andestablished himself as a goldsmith in Lund, for the addition of
the distinguishing Dan, short for Danmark, to his trademark
suggests a man who was conscious of the necessity of distinguishing the place of manufacture from London.
The name Ulfketil may well have arisen in the Danelaw inthe tenth century and spread out from there to the various countries of Scandinavia.26 One of my reasons for making this suggestion is that this name has a greater tendency to survive in its
uncontracted form Ulfketil in the Danelaw than have names such
as Asketil and Thorketil. These latter names came into competition there with the contracted forms Askil and Thorkil, which
seem to have developed in Denmark about the year 1000 and tohave arrived in England with the followers of Cnut.27 Anotherreason for assuming a Danelaw origin for the name Ulfketil isthat it is recorded much earlier and more frequently in Englandthan in the Scandinavian homelands.
There are several reasons why the Vikings may have wished
to return home. The Chronicle of Ramsey Abbey, a late twelfthcentury compilation, relates how bishop Æthelric of Dorchester,
24 M. Cinthio, ‘Myntverk och myntare i Lund’, Kulturen (1990), pp. 48–53.
25 K. Hald, ‘Om Personnavnene i de danske Møntindskrifter’, Studier tilegnede
Verner Dahlerup (København, 1934), pp. 182–87; G. Fellows Jensen in The
British Numismatic Journal (BNJ) XLI (1973), pp. 186–89.
26 G. Fellows-Jensen, ‘Of Danes—and Thanes—and Domesday Book’, People
and Places 500–1100, ed. I. Wood and N. Lund (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 113–21.
27 Cf. E. Björkman, Zur englischen Namenkunde (Halle, 1912), p. 9.

10

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

wishing to compensate the abbey for a bell he had cracked bybad ringing when a young monk there, granted it early in theeleventh century lands which he had bought from two unnamed
Danes, who had left England because they were afraid of being
murdered by their labourers or otherwise inconvenienced, andfrom another unnamed Dane, with whom he, in an unsportsmanlike manner, had driven a hard bargain while the latter was drunkand incapable.28 Other Danes, of greater courage and with better heads for drink, remained in England. Not all of them had
actually received grants of land there. Some men must have usedtheir share of the gelds to buy land. There is, however, only one
surviving documentary record of the sale of land to a Dane. In
the ﬁrst decade of the eleventh century, King Æthelred II sold
six hides of land in Oxfordshire to a man described as a Danecalled Toti in return for a pound of gold that Æthelred needed inorder to be able to pay the Danegeld (S 943). Toti is stated tohave acted on the advice of his kinsman Celi. The name Celi
would seem to be a short form of an English compound name inCeo– l- and this suggests that Toti had married into an English
family. Another Dane who married into a wealthy English family in the early eleventh century is the Ðurcil hwıt– a or ‘the white’
who was a participant in a lawsuit about land in Herefordshire
which was being conducted some time between 1016 and 1035.29
His wife bore the English name Leo– fﬂæd and the couple still
held property in the county at the time of the Norman Conquest(GDB 180rb; 1/11 and 187rb; 29/2.3, etc.). We do not know for
certain that Thurkil had ﬁrst arrived from Denmark in the eleventh century but the contracted form of his name suggests that
this was so. The same is probably true of the Þurkil who, withhis wife Aþelgit (Old English Æþelgy–þ), made a grant of land in
Norfolk to Bury St Edmunds shortly before the Conquest (S1529).30 Toti and the two Thurkils would seem to have been able

28 W. D. Macray (ed.), Chronicon Abbatiæ Rameseiensis, Rolls Series 83(London, 1886), pp. 135–44.
29 J. Insley, ‘Some Scandinavian personal names in South-West England’,Studia anthroponymica Scandinavica 3 (1985), pp. 23–58, at p. 46.
30 D. Whitelock, Anglo-Saxon Wills (Cambridge, 1925), XXXVI.

11

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

to marry into English landed families, presumably because thegelds they had taken had made them wealthy men. Anothercontemporary Thurkil, on the other hand, chose to marry a woman
with the Scandinavian name Thurgund (Þorgun). He is the man
known as Thurkil of Harringworth (in Northamptonshire), whois described in one entry in Domesday Book for Huntingdonshireas Turchillus danus (GDB 203vb; 2/8) and is known to have received at least one of his estates as a grant from Cnut.31 Afterthe Conquest, probably at the time of Sven Estridsen’s invasionin 1069, Thurkil abandoned his lands in England and went over
‘to the Danes who were his kinsmen’. This means that in spiteof his own and his wife’s bequests to Ramsey Abbey,32 it is unlikelythat he is to be identiﬁed with the thane called Tóki who held
lands in Cambridgeshire and who may have been the father ofa Godwine who held lands in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk.33 A
Dane with a Danish wife and Danish sympathies would hardly
have been likely to select such a characteristically English nameas Godwine for his son. In addition, although Tóki was an accepted short form of the name Thurkil, I am not aware of evidence for both forms being used in formal documents of one
and the same man in the Viking period.
We have now seen that the men who are known to have comefrom Scandinavia to serve under Cnut varied in their behaviour
after taking the geld. Ulfrik and Ulf of Borresta went to Sweden
to make their fortunes. Ork, who may have come from Orkney,Boﬁ and Thurstan received grants of land from Cnut, perhaps inlieu of geld, and settled in England to enjoy their rents fromthese. Toti bought land from King Æthelred, perhaps with moneythat he had acquired upon marriage to a kinswoman of Celi’s,rather as Thurkil hwıta– seems to have acquired lands in Herefordshire by his marriage to Leo– fﬂæd and another Thurkil lands in
Norfolk on his marriage to Æþelgy–þ. Thurkil of Harringworth,
31 D. Whitelock, ‘Scandinavian personal names in the Liber Vitae of Thorney
Abbey’, Saga-Book 12 (1937–45), pp. 127–53, at p. 140 n. 4.
32 C. Hart (ed.), The Early Charters of Eastern England (Leicester, 1966),
nos 46, 325.
33 C. Hart, The Danelaw (London, 1992), pp. 636–40.

12THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

however, married a woman with the Scandinavian name Þorgun,
who may have come over from Denmark to be with him.
Most often the only evidence we have for the holding of landby men with Scandinavian personal names is the presence of
place-names containing such names. Place-names consisting ofa Scandinavian personal name compounded with Old English-tun– are referred to as Grimston-hybrids from a commonly occurring but unfortunately atypical compound.34 Some of theseplace-names occur well outside the area where Danes are known
to have settled at the end of the ninth century and these seem
unlikely to have been coined before the eleventh century. This is
the case for example with Farmeston, Grimston, Gripston andOldstone, which cluster together in South Devon and containthe names Farman, Grím, Grip and Ulf,35 or the isolated Thruxton
in Hampshire, which contains the contracted name-form Thurkil.36
It was the fact that East Garston in Berkshire certainly contains
the name of Esgar, the staller of Edward the Confessor, who
had held the estate in 1065, that led Margaret Gelling in her
review37 of my book on settlement names in Yorkshire to question the interpretation of the Grimston-hybrids put forward byKenneth Cameron in 1971 on the basis of material from the East
Midlands38 and accepted in the main by me. Cameron had argued
that they were partially scandinavianised versions of names borneby old-established English villages. He assumed that the names
encapsulated the names of the Vikings who had taken over these
settlements at the end of the ninth century. It is true that thedemonstrably favourable situations of the villages with Grimstontype names, their high status and general prosperity, combine tosuggest that most of them were old-established settlements, but
34 Cf. G. Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Settlement Names in Yorkshire (SSNY),
Navnestudier 11 (Copenhagen, 1972), p. 203.
35 J. E. B. Gover et al. (eds), The Place-Names of Devon, English Place-Name
Society Vols VIII–IX (Cambridge, 1931–32), pp. 316, 323.
36 R. Coates, The Place-Names of Hampshire (London, 1989), p. 162.
37 In Notes and Queries (April, 1975), pp. 144–46, reviewing SSNY.
38 K. Cameron, ‘Scandinavian Settlement in the Territory of the Five Boroughs:
The Place-Name Evidence, Part Three: The Grimston-hybrids’, England before
the Conquest, ed. P. Clemoes and K. Hughes (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 147–63.

13

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

the presence of such names in Berkshire, Devon and Hampshireis in itself an indication that the Scandinavian personal names
are not necessarily those of ninth-century Danish settlers. The
same point had, in fact, been made a few years earlier by Bill
Nicolaisen in respect of the Grimston-hybrids occurring in SouthEast Scotland.39
It is undoubtedly correct that the Grimston-hybrid names which
occur outside the Danelaw proper are most likely to be young
English formations involving the names of eleventh-century orlater tenants, but I am still inclined to believe that the majorityof the Grimston-type names in eastern England are unlikely tobe young manorial names. This is partly because many of thepersonal names in the Yorkshire names are of extremely rareoccurrence in the Danelaw, for example, Skurfa in Scruton, Nagli
in Nawton, and Galm in Ganton. The disparity between the bodyof personal names in the Grimston-hybrids in Yorkshire and the
Scandinavian personal names recorded independently in thatcounty is in marked contrast to the situation in southern Scotland, where most of the Scandinavian personal names compoundedwith -tu n– are numbered among the comparatively limited rangeof Scandinavian personal names that occur in the earliest Scottish
charters.40
The Grimston-type names in East Anglia, like those in Yorkshire, would seem for the most part to contain personal namesthat had been borne by Danes who took part in the original partitionof land or their descendants rather than by eleventh-century
immigrants. As in Yorkshire, many of the personal names involved are of rare occurrence in the Danelaw, for example suchotherwise unrecorded names as *Fullmóð in Fulmodeston,*Holmvér in Hollverston, *Gabbi in Gapton, and *Naﬂi in
Naughton, and names such as Guðvér in Guston, Ísleif in Isleton,
Api in Apton, Hadd in Hadeston, Jarp in a lost Jerpestuna, Narﬁ

39 W. F. H. Nicolaisen, ‘Scottish Place-Names: 29, Scandinavian personalnames in the place-names of South-East Scotland’, Scottish Studies 11 (1967),
pp. 223–36.
40 G. Fellows-Jensen, ‘Scandinavians in Southern Scotland?’, Nomina XIII
(1989–90), pp. 41–59, at p. 47.

14

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

in a lost Naruestuna, Runi in Runton, Þránd in Thrandeston, andÞjalﬁ in Thelveton, none of which is recorded independently in
the Danelaw. Even more striking, however, is the predominanceof anglicised forms of the Scandinavian personal names. Until
about the year 1000, it had been the custom for English scribes
to represent the names of invading Vikings in forms that were
linguistically adapted to assimilate them with English names orwords and it would seem to be such anglicised forms that cameinto general use among the mixed population of the Danelaw.
The anglicised form Þorcytel of Þorketil is an example of thispractice. After about 1000, however, a new attitude developedin England towards Scandinavian personal names, perhaps reﬂecting the increased prestige of things Danish associated withthe reigns of Cnut and his sons. Scandinavian personal names
began to be recorded in English sources in forms approximating
more closely to the forms current in the Scandinavian homelands. Since the Grimston-hybrids in East Anglia contain many
anglicised forms of Scandinavian personal names, it is clear thatmany of the names were coined before the year 1000. Compound
names in Ás-, for example, appear as anglicised Oslac and Osmund
in forms of Aslacton (Oslactuna LDB 150v; 4/56) and Osmondiston(Osmundestun LDB 176v; 9/48) in Norfolk. Þorgeir is anglicised to Thurgar in Thurgarton (Ðurgartun 1044x1047; S 1055)
in Norfolk, and Þorstein is anglicised to Thurstan in Thurston(Thurstanestun’ LDB 348v; 8/33) in Suffolk, Thuxton(Turstanestuna LDB 121v; 1/86) in Norfolk and two lost
Turstanestunas (LDB 317r; 6/153 and 340r; 7/83) in Suffolk.
The name Ketilbjo≈rn is anglicised to Cytelbeorn in forms of
Kettlebaston (Kitelbeornastuna LDB 369r; 14/114) in Suffolk,
while another indication of the archaic nature of the Scandinavian
personal names in the East Anglian Grimston-hybrids is theuncontracted form of the name Þorketil in the lost Turchetlestuna(LDB 420r; 36/6) in Suffolk. Although the reservation needs tobe made that some names of the Grimston-type may contain thenames of eleventh-century immigrants, the presence in othersof rare personal names and archaic forms of names suggests thatthe original Danish partitions of land in East Anglia and elsewhere in the Danelaw must have involved the same kind of15

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

assumption of lordship over a pre-existing estate as do the postConquest manorial names. Presumably the land would havecontinued to be cultivated by the Englishmen living there. The
Danish lords would merely have exacted services and dues fromtheir English vassals.
Among the property owners with Scandinavian names whose
dealings are recorded in wills and charters from the eleventh century
there are, however, some whom I am inclined to treat as descendants of Danes who had settled in England over a century before.
This is sometimes because of the form assumed by their names.
At some time between 978 and 1016, for example, a man calledÆrnketil and his wife Wulfron/Wlfrun made a will leaving property in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire to Ramsey Abbey, where
their son Athelstan became the fourth abbot (S 1493).41 The namesof the mother and son are purely English: Wulfrun– and Æþelstan– ,but the father’s name is a partially anglicised form of Scandinavian
Arnketil, with Scandinavian arn replaced by Anglian ærn andthe uncontracted form of the second element. He is more likely
to have been a descendant of the original settlers in the Danelaw
than a Dane newly arrived with Svein Forkbeard’s army. Similarly, the fact that the Thurketel with property in Flegg in Norfolk who made his will between 1020 and 1050 (S 1528) had adaughter called Alfwen (Old English Ælfwynn) suggests either
that he was of English descent or that he had been married to an
Englishwoman, while the fact that his nephews bore the names
Ketel, Swegn and Alemund (Old English Alhmund) shows theintegrated nature of the relationship between the native English
and the descendants of the Danes in eleventh-century Norfolk.42
The rubric to the will notes that this Thurketel had the Scandinavian
by-name Heyng (hæingr ‘salmon’) and an account of the miracles of St Edmund written by an Anglo-Norman author Hermann
records an anecdote related to Hermann by Thurketel’s daughter Ælfwynn to the effect that Thurketel had been employed by
Svein Forkbeard to collect a tax but on the death of Svein had
41 C. Hart (ed.), The Early Charters of Northern England and the North Midlands(Leicester, 1975), no. 116.
42 Whitelock, Anglo-Saxon Wills XXV.

16

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

paid the money back.43 He was thus a man who was trusted by
the invaders and presumably also by the natives. It must be
signiﬁcant that his lands lay in the island of Flegg, where thepresence of numerous Scandinavian place-names in -bý points
to the survival of an enclave of Danes here after most of theVikings had been driven out of East Anglia by the English in 903.
That the assumption that men bearing uncontracted forms ofnames in -ketil in the eleventh century had been born in England is reasonable is shown by some cases where the name of
their father or mother is known. A woman called Wulfgy–þ withproperty in East Anglia, sister of E— adwine and Wulfrıc– and widowof Ælfwine, made her will in 1046 (S 1535).44 In this she refers
to her sons Elfkitel, Kytel and Wulkitel and her daughters Gode,
Bote and Ealgiþ, the last name reﬂecting variation on Wulfgy–þ’s
own name, while the sons bear anglicised forms of the
Scandinavian names Alfketil, Ketil and Ulfketel. Elfkitel and
Wulkitel reﬂect variation on the names of the father Ælfwine,
mother Wulfgy–þ and mother’s brother Wulfrıc.
– This is clearly an
English family whose eleventh-century naming-traditions included a name-element introduced by Danish settlers in the ninth
century.
Property had certainly passed into Danish hands long before
Cnut’s grants in the eleventh century. Attention has frequently
been drawn to the two early tenth-century charters which referto land having been bought from the ‘pagans’.45 In 926 a thaneof King Athelstan received a grant of land at Chalgrave andTebworth in Bedfordshire, just on the English side of the Danelaw
frontier, which he had bought with his own money from the pagans
at the order of King Edward (S 396), while in a charter of identical phrasing and date, Uhtred received lands at Hope and Alford
in Derbyshire (S 397). It is clear that Edward had been encouraging his thanes to buy estates on the edges of the Danish territory in preparation for his campaign of reconquest. It is noticeable
43 Noted by Whitelock, Anglo-Saxon Wills p. 180.
44 Whitelock, Anglo-Saxon Wills XXXII.
45 First by F. M. Stenton in Types of Manorial Structure in the Northern Danelaw(Oxford, 1910), pp. 74–75.

17

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

that although the estates involved had certainly been in Danish
hands, they do not bear Danish names.46 Athelstan seems to havefollowed the same policy as his father Edward, for in a charterof 934 granting the district of Amounderness in Lancashire to
the church of St Peter at York, Athelstan states that he himself
had bought this land ‘with no little money’ (S 407). He does not
say explicitly from whom he had bought this quite extensive
territory but it was presumably from the Vikings who had settled there. I have argued that Amounderness was held at the
beginning of the tenth century as a block by a man called Agmund,perhaps the Scandinavian Agmund hold who was killed in a battle
against King Edward in 910, and that the name Amounderness
is a compound of the Scandinavian personal name Agmund with
an Old English term her– ness meaning ‘district subject to authority’.47 It is just possible that the great hoard of silver found at
Cuerdale had been buried by men coming from York and intending to settle in Amounderness, the southern frontier of the
major area of Viking settlement west of the Pennines.48 Athelstan’s
aim in buying this land and granting it to the church at York waspresumably to prevent it from again becoming a place of refuge
for Vikings who might be tempted to launch an attack on English
territory.
Although the Viking presence in Amounderness in the earlytenth century is conﬁrmed by the Scandinavian inﬂuence on theﬁeld-names of the area49 and such settlement names as Ribby,
Westby, Sowerby and a lost Aschebi (GDB 301vb; Y2), Scandinavian place-names do not lie as thick upon the ground here ason the other side of the Pennines. The map showing the distribution of place-names in -bý reveals how scattered such names
46 Noted by P. H. Sawyer in Kings and Vikings. Scandinavia and Europe AD
700–1100 (London, 1982), p. 103.
47 G. Fellows-Jensen, ‘Amounderness and Holderness’, Namn och Bygd 78(1990), pp. 23–30.
48 G. Fellows-Jensen, ‘Scandinavian place-names of the Irish Sea province’,
Viking Treasure from the North West, ed. J. Graham-Campbell (Liverpool, 1992),
pp. 31–42.
49 F. T. Wainwright. ‘Field-names of Amounderness Hundred’, Transactionsof the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire XCVII (1945–46), pp. 71–116.
Reprinted in F. T. Wainwright, Scandinavian England (Chichester, 1975), pp. 229–79.

18

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

are in Lancashire as compared with in the Danelaw. What thismap does not reveal, however, is the complete absence from
Lancashire of place-names in -bý whose ﬁrst element is a
Scandinavian personal name, a name-type which is extremelycommon in the Danelaw proper. I have explained this absence
as a reﬂection of the chronological development of the Danish
settlement in England.
A study of the areas where the invading Danes only stayed
for short periods, for example the sites of their winter-quarters,
has revealed that they showed no tendency to interfere with thelocal place-names in these cases.50 In areas where they settled
more permanently, however, they sometimes gave the settlements
they seized completely new names, for example 47 Kir(k)bys,
indicating the presence of a church, and a handful of Derbys,
probably referring to a deer-park. The only one of these places
for which an earlier name is recorded is the borough of Derby.
In an entry for the year 871 in the late tenth-century chronicle
compiled by the vituperative Æthelweard, the borough is referred
to as a ‘place known as Northuuorthige which is called Deoraby
in the Danish tongue’.51 By the time of the compilation of Domesday Book, Derby is the only name to survive for this place (Derby
GDB 280rb; B4). It seems likely that the reason why Derby aloneof the boroughs was given a Danish name was that the Danes inthis outlying area of the Danelaw may have kept together forprotection near the borough and thus been in a position to change
its name.52 The Danish name I take to refer to a deer-park, perhaps sited at Darley whose English name means ‘deer clearing’,
but it is just possible that it reﬂects the Latin name Derventio of
the fortiﬁed Roman site of Littlechester, on which the Danes
may well have established their military headquarters.53 The quasi50 G. Fellows-Jensen, ‘Scandinavian inﬂuence on the place-names of Eng-

land’, Language Contact in the British Isles, ed. P. S. Ureland and G. Broderick(Tübingen, 1991), pp. 337–54.
51 A. Campbell (ed.), The Chronicle of Æthelweard (London, 1962), p. 37.
52 G. Fellows-Jensen, ‘Scandinavian settlement in the Danelaw in the light ofthe place-names of Denmark’, Proceedings of the Eighth Viking Congress, ed.
H. Bekker-Nielsen et al. (Odense, 1981), pp. 133–45, at p. 141.
53 Fellows-Jensen, ‘Scandinavian inﬂuence’, p. 347.

19

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

appellatival names Kirkby and Derby would seem to have been
imposed upon pre-existing English settlements from above by
Danish authorities in connection with the introduction of aparochial organisation and the exploitation of forest areas. Oneof the duties owed by the thanes of West Derby Hundred in Lancashire at the time of the compilation of Domesday Book, forexample, was that of making enclosures and deer-hays there (GDB
269vb; R1/40a).
There does not seem to be evidence in England for the kindof toponymic upheaval at the hands of the Vikings that was
bemoaned by the monks of the abbey of Saint-Florent-lès-Saumur
in Normandy in about 1055.54 They complained that the estates
they had owned in the Cotentin had lost their names as a resultof the Viking settlement. Changes of name would naturally havemade the administration of property extremely difﬁcult for absentee
landowners and it is possible that the desire to make it difﬁcult
for former owners to lay legal claim to their property was one of
the motives that led the Vikings both to substitute Scandinavian
names for the existing names of some settlements and to destroy the records of the monasteries they attacked. The destruction caused by the Vikings in Normandy and the extensive
renaming that took place in some areas there can be illustrated
by comparing the distribution of the places with names in the
Scandinavian generic -toft, which would seem to have had thesense ‘site of deserted settlement’,55 with that of the Gallo-Romannames in -a–cum, one of the commonest and most widespreadname-types in the region.56 Areas in the Pays de Caux, the Cotentin
and the Bocage where names in -a–cum are very rare are marked
by concentrations of names in -tot, undoubtedly evidence that
the Vikings had changed the names of many settlements.57
54 Cf. L. Musset, ‘Les destins de la propriété monastique durant les invasions
normandes (IXe–XIe s.). L’exemple de Jumièges’, Jumièges: congrès scientiﬁque
du xiii centenaire (Rouen, 1955), pp. 49–55, at p. 52.
55 B. Holmberg, Tomt och toft som appellativ och ortnamnselement (Uppsala,1946), map 13.
56 F. de Beaurepaire, La Toponymie de la Normandie, Méthodes et applications, Cahiers Léopold Delisle 18 (Paris, 1969), ﬁg. 5.
57 G. Fellows-Jensen, ‘Scandinavian place-names and Viking settlement in
Normandy. A review’, Namn och Bygd 76 (1988), pp. 113–37, at p. 125.

20

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

Changing of names in England would seem on the whole tohave been a more gradual process. With the passage of time, theDanes began to detach specialised units from the old English
estates and give them names in -bý whose speciﬁcs indicatedtheir function or their topographical situation, for example
Hunmanby in the East Riding of Yorkshire (Hvndemanebi GDB
326rb; 21E/1) ‘the settlement of the houndsmen’, Sowerby in
the North Riding (Sourebi GDB 305ra; 4N/1) ‘the settlement onsour ground’, and Asterby in Lincolnshire (Estrebi GDB 351ra;
14/52) ‘the eastern settlement’. This type of name occurs not
only in the Danelaw proper but also across the Pennines in Cumbria
and Lancashire and even across the Irish Sea in the Isle of Man,
where we ﬁnd Dalby ‘the settlement in the valley’. It would also
seem that the name-type was carried back across the Irish Sea
from Man to Wirral and south-west Lancashire, where we ﬁnd
Raby (Rabie GDB 263rb; A14) and Roby (Rabol [sic] GDB 269va;
R1/2) ‘the boundary settlements’. The areas of Scandinavian
settlement in Cheshire and southern Lancashire were recoveredby the English before about 930 and were not subjected to further
Scandinavian naming. In the Danelaw proper, however, the tenthcentury defeats suffered by the Danes at the hands of the English seem to have made it more difﬁcult for the Danish leaders
to retain control over their landsmen and these began to split up
the large estates into small independent units to which they marked
their rights of ownership by giving them names consisting of
their own forenames plus -bý, for example Swaby (Suabi GDB
349ra; 13/3) in Lincolnshire, containing Sváﬁ.
Most of these Scandinavian personal names contained inplace-names in -bý in England are names that are well known
from the Scandinavian homelands but some few of them would
seem to have been coined on English soil. Among the names
which are not recorded in Scandinavia there are compound names
such as *Ketilfrøð in Killerby (Chiluordebi GDB 310va; 6N52)
in the North Riding of Yorkshire, derivative names such as *Tyði
in Tithby (Tiedebi GDB 288ra; 10/57) in Nottinghamshire, but
ﬁrst and foremost, by-names, for example *Slengr ‘idler’ in
Slingsby (Selvngesbi GDB 305vb; 5N48) in the North Ridingof Yorkshire.
21

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

There are also a number of personal names in the place-names
which probably arose in the Danelaw even though they do makeappearances in the Scandinavian homelands. I should just liketo draw attention to one such name here. The place now known
as Dromonby in the North Riding of Yorkshire was recorded in
Domesday Book as Dragmalebi (GDB 331rb; 29N9) and thisspelling shows that the speciﬁc of the name must originally havebeen a Scandinavian personal name Dragmál, originally a byname meaning ‘slow of speech’.58 It has been suggested that theman commemorated in the place-name may be identical with
the Dragmel who occurs as one of the witnesses to a charter ofKing Edgar dated 959 (S 681) and dealing with land in Howden
and Old Drax. The name Dragmál is not recorded at all in Old
West Scandinavian sources but it occurs in a Swedish runicinscription in the form trakmal 59 and it apparently forms the
speciﬁc of three Danish place-names in -torp, all now known as
Drammelstrup and situated in eastern Jutland.60 Dragmál is also
recorded as the name of the craftsman who made the early
eleventh-century reliquary cross which now stands in the cathedral in Brussels.61 This cross is made of wood with a silver covering. The inscriptions on the silver are in Old English, one of them
being a quotation from the poem known as The Dream of theRood, which is also quoted in runic script on the eighth-century
stone cross at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire.62 The inscriptions on
the Brussels cross reveal that Æþelmæ– r and Æþelwald had had
it made in memory of their brother Ælfrıc– . These three alliterating names are all English and the maker’s inscription on the arms:
DRAHMAL MEWORHTE, is in English but it seems likely that
Dragmál was a descendant of the ninth-century Danish settlers
58 A. H. Smith, The Place-Names of the North Riding of Yorkshire, English
Place-Name Society Vol. V (Cambridge, 1928), p. 169.
59 SRU 472; cf. O. v. Feilitzen, ‘Notes on some Scandinavian personal names
in English 12th-century records’, Personnamnsstudier 1964 tillägnade minnet av
Ivar Modéer (1904–1960), pp. 52–68, at p. 54.
60 Danmarks Stednavne 12 (København, 1964), p. 67.
61 J. Backhouse et al. (eds), The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art 966–1066(London, 1984), no. 75; E. Okasha, Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic
Inscriptions (Cambridge, 1971), no. 17.
62 B. Dickins and A. S. C. Ross (eds), The Dream of the Rood (London, 1934), p. 17.

22

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

in England. The use of Dragmál as a personal name may wellhave developed in the Danelaw. The earliest recorded instanceof the name is that of the witness to the English charter of 959.
This man may also have given his name to Dragmalebi, although
the place-name might well have been coined as much as half acentury earlier or later than the signing of the charter. All theoccurrences of the name Dragmál in Scandinavia are muchyounger.
There is one small group of Scandinavian personal names which
would seem to have arisen in the Danelaw. These are four bynames in -laus, indicating a lack of something, which would allseem to be derogatory. One of these forms the speciﬁc of a namein -bý namely *Bróklaus ‘without breeches’ in Brocklesby(Brochelesbi GDB 350va; 14/37) in Lincolnshire. This by-nameis also recorded independently in Lincolnshire, being borne bya pre-Conquest Domesday tenant Broclos (GDB 342va; 4/39)
and occurring as a surname there in the eleventh century (Roger
Broclaus).63 There is no way of knowing how long before thecompilation of Domesday Book the place-name Brocklesby wascoined but I would suggest that it was in the ﬁrst half of thetenth century. The earliest record of a personal name in -laus in
the Danelaw is an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for theyear 921 noting that those slain in a battle at Tempsford included
Toglos eorl ond Mannan eorl his sunu. The name Toglos has
been explained by Erik Björkman as an anglicised form of a byname Tauglaus meaning ‘ropeless, one who has no rope for his
ship’,64 although it might rather mean ‘without outer clothing’,
with reference to the word tog meaning ‘long cover hair of sheep’.65
It has been pointed out that jarl Toglos is to be identiﬁed with
the Toli comes who, according to the Liber Eliensis, had assumed
the lordship of Huntingdonshire against the will of King Edward
and who was killed at the battle of Tempsford.66 He would thus
63 Fellows Jensen, SPNLY 65.
64 E. Björkman, Nordische Personennamen in England (Halle, 1910), p. 142.
65 I. Lehiste, ‘Names of Scandinavians in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, Pub-lications of the Modern Language Association (1958), pp. 6–22, at p. 18.
66 E. O. Blake (ed.), Liber Eliensis. Camden Third Series Vol. 92 (London,1962), pp. 98–99.

23

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

have been a Dane called Tóli who acquired the by-name Toglaus
in the Danelaw. His son, who died with him, bore the Danish
name Manni, anglicised to Manna in the Chronicle. The only
other occurrence of the name Toglaus is as the speciﬁc of a
Grimston-type place-name, Toulston (Toglestun GDB 307va; 5W7)
in the West Riding of Yorkshire. This place can have passed into
the ownership of jarl Toglaus or another man of that name at the
beginning of the tenth century.
By-names in -laus are not without precedent in Denmark. The
most familiar example is the by-name of the legendary Ívar beinlausi, son of Ragnar loðbrók. Icelandic sources record the bynames dýnulauss ‘pillow-less’, goðlauss ‘godless’, matlauss ‘without
food’ and skegglauss ‘beardless’.67 Neither Broklaus nor Toglaus
is recorded in the Scandinavian homelands, however, and nor
are two other by-names in -laus which are known from theDanelaw: Serclos < *Serk-laus ‘shirtless’, the name of a York
moneyer who struck coins for Edgar, Edward and Æthelred,68
and Wadlos < * Vaðlaus ‘weedless, without clothes’, the nameof one of Cnut’s moneyers at Lincoln.69 All four of the by-names
in -laus recorded in the Danelaw would seem to have originatedas derogatory names referring to a lack of clothing. It is tempting
to compare the names with the small group of derogatory placenames in -løse which came into use for farms or ﬁelds in Denmark in the post-Viking period, for example Særløse (Særclæsæ
1272) ‘the place where the inhabitants lack shirts’,70 which throws
an interesting sidelight on the Danelaw by-name *Serklaus.
One other Yorkshire place-name which contains as speciﬁc a
Scandinavian by-name that would seem to have arisen in the
67 E. H. Lind, Norsk-isländska personbinamn från medeltiden (Uppsala, 1920–21),

col. 240.
68 Cf. Björkman, Namenkunde, p. 73; O. v. Feilitzen and C. Blunt, ‘Personalnames on the coinage of Edgar’, England before the Conquest, ed. P. Clemoes
and K. Hughes (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 183–214, at p. 204; V. J. Smart, ‘Moneyersof the late Anglo-Saxon coinage 973–1016’, Commentationes de nummis saecularum
IX–XI in Suecia repertis II (Stockholm, 1973), p. 231.
69 G. Fellows Jensen, BNJ XLI (1973), p. 188; V. Smart, Cumulative Index ofvolumes 21–40, Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles 41 (London, 1992), p. 107.
70 B. Jørgensen, Dansk Stednavneleksikon. Øerne østfor Storebælt (København,1981), p. 118.

24

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

Danelaw is Ugglebarnby (Vgleberdesbi GDB 305ra; 4N1) in the
North Riding. The speciﬁc would seem to be a Scandinavian*Uglubarð ‘owl-beard’. There are a number of other instancesof this name in the Danelaw. In the forms Uglebert, Ugelberd it
occurs on coins of Eadred, Eadwig, Edgar and Edward71 and as
Vgle-/Vgelbert (GDB 301rb; 1E57.59) it is recorded as the nameof the Domesday tenant of Croom and Kirby Grindalythe in the
East Riding of Yorkshire. It also survived into the eighteenth
century as a Westmorland surname, Oglebird.72
Generally speaking, however, the Scandinavian personal names
contained in place-names in the Danelaw tend to be names thatare well known from sources in Scandinavia. It is in independent
occurrences of personal names that the full vitality of the Danelaw
nomenclature reveals itself. There is only time here for me totouch on one method of creating new names that was employedin the Danelaw. This was by taking a few of the elements usedin Scandinavia to form two-element names like Þorketil and using
these to create a great variety of new compounds. Among themore striking instances are the elements -grím, -ketil and -ulf,
which all yielded several new names, e.g. Alfgrím, Hafgrím,Harðgrím, Hundigrím, Ketilgrím, Sægrím, Ulfgrím, Grímbjo≈rn,
Grímketil and Grímvarð; Húnketil, Oddketil, Ylfketil and Ketildag;Leiðulf, Leikulf, Liðulf, Ligulf, Liulf, Starkulf, Steinulf and Þornulf.
None of these names occurs in early sources from Denmark or
Sweden and most of them are not found in West Scandinavian
sources either.73 A few of the names became popular in Iceland,
however: Oddketil in the form Oddkell, Leiðulf and Steinulf. It
is not unlikely that these names were taken to Iceland from the
British Isles rather than directly from Norway.
71 Feiltzen and Blunt, ‘Personal names’, pp. 205–06.
72 A. H. Smith, The Place-Names of Westmorland 2, English Place-Name SocietyVol. XLIII (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 125, 131.
73 Many years ago Peter Foote noted that ﬁve of the eleven names in -grím
recorded in Domesday Book are unknown from Norse sources and suggested
that the name Hafgrím, which had speciﬁc associations with the Faroes and theHebrides, may have been more at home in the British Isles than in Norway. Cf.
P. G. Foote, ‘A note on some personal names in Færeyinga saga’, Otium et Negotium, ed. F. Sandgren (Stockholm, 1973), pp. 96–108, at pp. 103, 107–08.

25

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

There would seem to be several contributory reasons for thedevelopment of so many new Scandinavian names in the Danelaw.
One prerequisite was the survival for some time at least of theDanish language there. Another condition, on the other hand,
was the release from the constraints imposed in Scandinavia by
the long-standing traditions of naming. Finally it would seemthat the relative closeness of the two languages Danish and English and of the naming practices in Scandinavia and Englandproduced a linguistic situation in which a revitalisation of the
Scandinavian nomenclature could occur. It is not, of course, without relevance for an assessment of the numbers of new namesthat many more written documents have survived from the Viking
period in England than in Scandinavia.
It is interesting to compare the situation in the Danelaw withthat in other parts of the British Isles where there was Scandinavian
settlement. In Shetland and Orkney the great problem for theassessment of the interaction between the Vikings and their
victims is that the victims seem to have disappeared almost withoutleaving any trace of their language. The new arrivals adopted
native artefacts and used the old grave enclosures and seem tohave carried on farming in much the same way as their predecessors74 but there is no way of knowing how they actuallycommunicated with the people they found on the islands. The
material culture of the natives was Pictish and the population
was probably a mixture of Picts speaking a pre-Celtic, non-IndoEuropean language, with a Gaelic-speaking minority, who may
have formed a kind of aristocracy.75 The most exciting piece of
linguistic evidence but at the same time a very puzzling one isthe cross-slab known as the Bressay stone found at Cullingsburghon the island of Bressay in Shetland. Its decoration has a numberof stylistic features in common with Pictish stones found at Papil
on Burra that have been dated to the late ninth or early tenth century and it bears an Ogam inscription which reads: CROSSCC :74 Cf. for example the evidence discussed by C. D. Morris in ‘Viking Orkney:
A Survey’, The Prehistory of Orkney, ed. C. Renfrew (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 210–47,
particularly pp. 216–21.
75 K. Jackson, ‘The Pictish Language’, The Problem of the Picts, ed. F. T.
Wainwright (Edinburgh, 1955), pp. 129–66, at p. 157.

26

THE VERDICT OF THE NAMESNAHH TVVDDADDS : DATTRR : ANN BENNISES :MEQQDDROANN.76 From this can be made out the Gaelic words
cros ‘cross’ and mac ‘son of’ and perhaps the Norse word dóttir
‘daughter’, although it seems strange that the long ó should be
represented by an a. The remaining words presumably represent
Pictish personal names and a tentative translation of the inscription would read: ‘The cross of Nachtud the daughter of An Benise
the son of Droan’. The Bressay stone and the stones at Papilshow that Pictish craftsmen survived into the period of Norse
settlement. No Pictish names would seem to have been adopted
by the Norse settlers, however, and the list of Norse personalnames in early Shetland recently compiled by Hermann Pálsson
contains comparatively few Norse names that are not recordedin early Norwegian sources and that might be thought to havearisen in the Northern Isles.77 There are, however, a few names
which occur there earlier than in Iceland or Norway, for example Dagﬁnn and Hlöðvér, the latter of which forms the speciﬁcof the place-name Lowestoft in Suffolk, while Gjafvald and Leiðolf
are names whose earliest occurrence is in the Danelaw.78 The
early use of the mythological name Freyja as an ordinary feminine name in Shetland may be compared with the employmentof Þór as a masculine name in the Danelaw. The adoption of thenames of heathen deities in everyday use as personal names reﬂects
the swift decline of the pagan religion in the face of the Christian religion of the earlier inhabitants of the British Isles.
There are several Scandinavian personal names recorded from
Orkney for which it has been possible to demonstrate links with
the Danelaw, for example Sumarliði, Kali, Langlíf, Óframm andSkotakoll. The Orkney name Óspak may have originated as a
Scandinavian substitution for the Gaelic name Gilleasbuig ‘thebishop’s servant’.79 It has been claimed by Patrick Dineen that
76 Jackson, ‘The Pictish Language’, p. 140.
77 H. Pálsson, ‘Norse Personal Names in Early Shetland’, Tools and Traditions: Studies in European Ethnology Presented to Alexander Fenton, ed. H. Cheape(Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 247–55 .
78 Fellows Jensen, SPNLY, pp. 102, 185.
79 G. Fellows-Jensen, ‘Some Orkney Personal Names’, in Proceedings of theEleventh Viking Congress, ed. C. Batey et al. (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 397–407.

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THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS

Gaelic names consisting of the word giolla ‘servant’ and the nameof a saint or the title of an ecclesiastical dignitary became popular among assimilated Danes in Ireland.80 Names consisting of
Gilla- plus a saint’s name have a similar meaning to anothergroup of Celtic names, those consisting of the element Máel‘bald, tonsured’ plus a saint’s name, e. g. Máelmuire ‘servant ofMary’. These latter names were quite common in Ireland as earlyas the seventh century, while the names in Gilla- did not become common until after the year 900, perhaps as a result of a
Danish fashion.81 One of the earliest recorded examples is Gilla
Pátraic, son of Ímar (i. e. Ívar), who died in 982, and Brian Ó
Cuív has seen the choice of this name for Ívar’s son as evidence
that the Viking settlers in Ireland owed devotion to St Patrick.
It is interesting to note that the Vikings from the Gaelic-speaking
areas carried the custom of forming personal names in Gillawith them to their other colonies in the British Isles. It is not
surprising to ﬁnd such names in Scandinavian place-names in
Dumfriesshire, where the Gaelic element was strong. Here weﬁnd Gill’Eoin in Gillenbie, Gillae, a short form, in Gillesbie,
and Gilmartin in Gillemartin beck.82 The scandinavianised form
Gilli of the short form occurs in Gilsland in Cumberland, Gilston
in the Central Lowlands of Scotland, and Gilby in Lincolnshire,
while *Gilliman, a by-name meaning ‘servant of Gilli’ is the
speciﬁc of Gilmonby in Yorkshire.83 In the same county two namesin Máel- are found compounded with -bý: Maelsuthain, scandinavianised as Melsan, forms the speciﬁc of Melsonby andMáelmuire that of Melmerby.84 There are some other personalnames in Yorkshire which were probably introduced by Vikingsfrom Gaelic-speaking areas, for example Skotakoll, a by-namewhich seems likely to refer to the Celtic form of tonsure,85
80 P. S. Dineen, An Irish-English Dictionary (Dublin, 1927), s.v. giolla.
81 Cf. B. Ó Cuív, ‘Borrowed elements in the corpus of Irish personal names

from medieval times’, Nomina 3 (1979), pp. 40–51, at pp. 46–47.
82 G. Fellows-Jensen, Scandinavian Settlement Names in the North-West (SSNNW),
Navnestudier 25 (Copenhagen, 1985), pp. 31, 126.
83 Fellows-Jensen, SSNNW, p. 126; eadem, ‘Scandinavians in Southern Scotland?’,p. 46; eadem, SSNY, p. 7.
84 Fellows Jensen, SSNY, p. 33.
85 H. Bekker-Nielsen, ‘Skotakollr’, Fróðskaparrit 18 (1970), pp. 145–50.

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THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

Bretakoll, perhaps with the same meaning,86 Glunier, which has
been explained as a Celtic adaptation Glúniairn of a Scandinavian
by-name Jarnkné ‘iron knee’,87 and such Gaelic names as Dubgillain Duggleby and Fíacc in Fixby.88 The Gaelic names occurringin Northern England have earlier been associated with settlers
referred to as Hiberno-Norse. Recent work on personal names,
however, has shown that many of these Gaelic names are more
likely to originate from the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland
or from the Isle of Man.89
The Vikings brought Gaelic personal names with them fromthe Western Isles to England but they also left some of theirown names on the islands. There are comparatively few Norseloanwords in Gaelic and Norse place-names are distributed very
unevenly over the Western Isles, being very common in Lewis
and decreasing markedly in number towards the south and theeast, probably because they were gradually submerged under astratum of Gaelic names with the revival of the Gaelic language.
Comparatively few Scandinavian personal names are recorded
in use as forenames in the Isles but many patronymics in Machave survived as surnames and Iain Crawford has argued thatthe distribution pattern of original patronymics consisting of Macplus a Scandinavian forename indicates a precise boundary corresponding with the political frontier in the twelfth century.90 In
Lewis, Harris, Skye and the adjacent mainland, the patronymics
Mac Leod, Mac Aulay, Mac Askill, Mac Railt and Mac Sween,
containing the Norse names Ljót, Ólaf, Áskil, Harald and Svein
are the most common ones, whereas to the south of Ardnamurchan
the patronymic Mac Donald, containing a Gaelic forename,predominates and Norse names are rare. The Norse names occurring
86 Fellows Jensen, SPNLY, p. 64.
87 For the translation of this and other Scandinavian by-names into Irish cf.
C. J. S. Marstrander, Bidrag til det norske sprogs historie i Irland (Kristiania,1915), pp. 45–46.
88 Fellows Jensen, SSNY, p. 12.
89 A. P. Smyth, Scandinavian York and Dublin I (Dublin, 1975), pp. 81–82;
G. Fellows-Jensen, ‘Anthroponymical speciﬁcs in place-names in -bý’, Studia
anthroponymica Scandinavica I (1983), pp. 45–60, at p. 52.
90 I. Crawford, ‘Scot (?), Norseman and Gael’, Scottish Archaeological ForumVI (1974), pp. 1–16, at pp. 2–3.

29

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMSin the Western Isles are all names that are of frequent occurrence in Norway. There is no evidence for the development of
typically Hebridean-Norse names.
The situation would seem to have been similar in Ireland. Irish
annals and chronicles contain the names of Viking leaders who
took part in raids and a few Scandinavian personal names arefound in place-names, for example Thormoth, Gunnar and Ólafin Ballyfermot, Ballygunner and Ballally,91 but these are all names
which are recorded in use in Norway and the same applies to thecomparatively few Scandinavian personal names that survived
in use in Ireland to be borne by the citizens whose names arerecorded in the late twelfth-century Dublin roll of names or theirfathers.92 Here compound names in Thor- and short forms ofsuch names are particularly common: Thorald, Thorbjor≈ n, Thorﬁnn,
Thorgaut, Thorkel, Thorstein, Tóki. Apart from the name Iarnﬁnn,
the only signs of creative vitality in the Norse nomenclature of
Dublin are provided by the by-names Utlag ‘outlaw’, borne by
Torsten and Reginaldus, and partially anglicised Vnnithing‘undastard’, borne by Philippus. This last by-name recalls thelaudatory epithet óníðingr employed by Gaut on the rune-stone
at Transjö of his son Ketil, who died in England. A Norse runicinscription on a sword-mount found at Greenmount, Co. Louth,
tomnal selshofoþ a sœrþ [þ]eta, shows that a man with the Gaelic
name Dufnall bore a Norse by-name *selsho≈fuð ‘seal’s head’.93
In the Isle of Man, on the other hand, the employment of Gaelic
by-names by the Norse kings, for example Godred Crovan (*crobhbhán ‘white handed’) and Godred Don (*donn ‘brown’), showsthat there must have been a marked Gaelic inﬂuence on the Norse
aristocracy there.94 That this inﬂuence would often seem to have
91 Fellows-Jensen, ‘Irish Sea Province’, p. 33.
92 J. T. Gilbert, Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland A.D. 1172–1320,

Rolls Series 53 (London, 1870), pp. 3–48.
93 R. I. Page, ‘Scandinavian Society, 800–1100: The Contribution of Runic
Studies’, Viking Revaluations, ed. A. Faulkes and R. Perkins (London, 1993),
pp. 145–59, at p. 155.
94 B. Megaw, ‘Norseman and native in the kingdom of the Isles’, Man andEnvironment in the Isle of Man, ed. P. Davey, BAR British Series 54 (1978),pp. 265–314, at p. 276.

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THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES

been cemented by intermarriage is shown by some of the tenthand eleventh-century runic inscriptions. The cross known as
Braddan IV was raised by a man called Þorleifr hnakki with abrother called Hafr to his son Fiak (Gaelic Fíacc), while Braddan I
commemorates ufaak : sun : krinais (Scandinavian Ófeig andGaelic Crinán).95
In conclusion it would seem that once the Vikings began tosettle in the British Isles, they intermarried with the native population and sometimes gave their children non-Scandinavian names
or names newly coined from Scandinavian material. Some ofthese names were later carried to Scandinavia. In Shetland and
Orkney Norse personal names drove out all the names employedby the earlier settlers, whether Pictish or Gaelic, whereas in theHebrides, Western Scotland, Man and Ireland, Norse names were
employed side by side and in combination with names of Gaelic
origin. Some of these Norse names have survived as forenames
or in patronymic surnames to the present day, even though theNorse language has been supplanted in all these areas by Gaelic
and/or English.
In the Danelaw, Scandinavian personal names were adopted
by the native English population in the areas of dense Danish
settlement in the ninth century and the Anglo-Danish nomenclature was continuously reinforced by the arrival of new wavesof settlers right up to the time of the Norman Conquest. The
personal names borne by the Norman conquerors, however,achieved such high prestige so quickly in England that they droveout of use names of Scandinavian origin together with native
English names. It is therefore in place-names and not in personal names that the degree and nature of the Danish inﬂuenceon the native population is most clearly reﬂected.

95 D. M. Wilson, ‘The Vikings’ relationship with Christianity in Northern

England’, The Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd series XXX(1967), pp. 37–46, at pp. 39–41; idem, ‘Manx memorial stones of the Viking
period’, Saga-Book XVIII (1970–73), pp. 1–18, at p. 17.

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