October 8, 1886.] 



SCIEJS'CE. 



331 



in the stream or current), Westra (the western 

 island), etc. The Norsemen called the Orkneys 

 the Nordreyjar ; the Hebrides, the Southern 

 Islands or Sudreyjar, a name which has been com- 

 pressed into the odd dissyllable Sodor. The two 

 sees of the Sudreyjar and the Isle of Man were 

 combined in the twelfth century, and put under 

 the Archbishop of Trondjhem, who appointed the 

 Bishops of Sodor and Man down even to the mid- 

 dle of the fourteenth century. But, more, the 

 enormous number of Norse names bears witness 

 to the fact that the Shetlands, the Orkneys, the 

 Hebrides, and the Isle of Man were not most use- 

 ful dependencies of the Scottish crown, but jarl- 

 doms attached to the kingdom of Norway. And 

 this was the case down to 1266. The test-word 

 for the Norse settlements in Great Britain is the 

 ending by. This appears in our language as byre 

 (a cow-house), and in France as bue or boeuf. In 

 the Danelagh, which lay between Watling Street 

 and the river Tees, the suffix by has pushed out 

 the Saxon ton and ham ; and to the north of Wat- 

 ling Street we find six hundred instances of its 

 occurrence, while to the south there is scarcely 

 one. In Lincolnshire alone there are a hundred 

 names of towns and villages which end in by. We 

 find this ending in hundreds of names in Jutland 

 and in Schleswig : in the whole of Germany there 

 ai'e not six. In Scotland we have the names 

 Lockerby and Canonby, both in Dumfriesshire ; in 

 England we have Grimsby, Whitby, Derby, and 

 many more ; in Wales we have Tenby, and many 

 other Norse names on the fiords that branch out 

 of Milford Haven ; while in France — that is, in 

 Normandy — we have Criqueboeuf (or crooked 

 town), Marboeuf{OY market town), Quitteboeuf (or 

 Whitby), Elboeuf (or old town), and many others. 

 The Norsemen have left their names on our 

 capes, our arms of the sea, and our islands, as 

 well as on our towns. Ness or naze is their favor- 

 ite word for cape; and we have it in Fifeness, 

 Sheemess, Foulness, Whiteness ; the Naze in Es- 

 sex ; Dungeness, or Cape of Danger ; Skipncss, or 

 Ship-Headland; Blancnez and Grisnez, on the 

 coast of France ; and a great many more. A ford, 

 or fiord, is the Norwegian name for an arm of the 

 sea up which ships can go, just as ford is the 

 Saxon name for a passage across a river for men 

 or for cattle. Both words come from the old verb 

 faran (to go), the root of which word is found in 

 far, fare, welfare, fieldfare, etc. We find the 

 Norse meaning of ford in Wexford, Waterford, 

 and Carhngford, in Ireland ; in Milford and Hav- 

 erford, in Wales ; and in Deptford (the ' deep 

 reach ' ) on the Thames, and Oxford in England. 

 Besides the Norse names for islands which we 

 find in Scotland, in Thurso and Staff a (which is 



the island of staves), we can discover many in 

 England, generally with the spelling ea or y. 

 Thus Anglesea is the Angles' Island ; Battersea, 

 St. Peter's Isle, in the Thames ; Chelsea, the isle 

 of chesel or shingle ; and Ely is the Isle of Eels. 

 But the most common form of this Norse word is 

 simply a, and it is found in greatest abundance 

 in Scotland. The Norse vikings were in the habit 

 of retiring to one of the small islets off the coast 

 during the winter months ; and, when summer 

 retiu-ned, they issued forth from them to resume 

 their piratical cruises. These small islands still 

 bear Norse .names, while the local names on the 

 mainland are Celtic. We have scores of those 

 names ending in a, as Scarba, Barra, Ulva, Jura, 

 Isla, Ailsa, Rona, etc. 



Just as we saw that ford had two meanings, — 

 one from its Norse, the other from its Saxon users, 



— so the name Wick has two meanings, each tes- 

 tifying to the different habits of the two nations. 

 With the Saxon a wick was an abode on land, — a 

 house or a village; with the Norsemen it was a 

 station for ships, — a creek, an islet, or bay. The 

 Norse vikings, or 'creekers,' lay in the vicks or 

 wicks they had chosen, and sallied out when they 

 saw a chance of a prize. The inland wicks are 

 Saxon, and the abodes of peaceful settlers; the 

 Norse wicks fringe our coasts, and were the sta- 

 tions of pirates. Of the latter kind we have 

 Wick, in Caithness ; Lerwick ; Wyke, near Port- 

 land ; Alnwick, Berwick, in Northumberland and 

 Sussex ; and Smerwick, or Butter Bay, in Ireland. 



The parliaments of the Norsemen were called 

 things, and this name they have left in several 

 parts of Great Britain. A small assembly was 

 a Housething, — a word we have in our own 

 hustings ; a general assembly of the people was an 

 Althing; and the Norwegian parliament is to this 

 day called the Storthing, or great council. These 

 things met in some secluded spot, — on a hill, an 

 island, or a promontory, — where no one could 

 disturb the members. In the Shetland Isles we 

 find the names Sandsthing, Belting, Nesting, etc., 



— the seats of local things; while the spot for the 

 general council of the island was called Tingwall. 

 In Ross-shire, too, we find a Dingwall, and in 

 Cheshire a Thingwall. In Essex the word takes 

 the softened and flattened Saxon form of Denge- 

 well. In the Isle of Man the meeting-place was 

 called Tynwald Hill; and the old Norse thing 

 (name and thing) has survived, without a break in 

 its existence, since the time of the Old Norse 

 kings, but the institution has died out in Iceland 

 and in Denmark. The Three Estates of the Isle of 

 Man meet every year on Tynwald HiU, and no 

 laws are valid in the island until they have been 

 duly proclaimed from the summit. 



