Valland and Frakkland, two French kingdoms

Academia, 2014

TOPONYMY. Gascony is covered with strange place names left by "mysterious people". Linguists are struggling to understand them. Maybe because they don't use the right dictionary. These place names may be Scandinavian and could reveal the extent of Viking settlements in the south of France.

2009

Onoma, 2011

This article sketches etymological, distributional and judicial aspects of placenames in the Frisian regions of the Netherlands and Germany. As a result of settlement history, a number of name suffixes is overrepresented in the Frisian regions: -haim, -ing > -ens, -werd, -werf and additionally �bull in North Friesland. The Frisian onomastic landscape is not unique in the application of these name types, but rather in the specific cocktail of the types and their high densities. Friesland�s names bear witness of a massive resettlement in the aftermath of the Great Migrations. The second part of the article shows how Frisian names are linguistically adopted and partly assimilated in the adjacent languages Dutch and German. Dutch and German exonyms for Frisian place-names show a mixture of archaic forms and superficial phonological and morphological replacement. The trend seems to be: the larger the place, the older the exonym. As Frisian has had the status of a minority language sin...

Månedens Navn, 2020

This is an English translation of a website article published by the Name Research Section, University of Copenhagen, as ‘Månedens navn’ (Name of the Month), June 2020: https://navn.ku.dk/maanedens_navn/soenderjylland/

, 2020

The purpose of this article is to show that Friesland from Roman times up to Karel de Grote can be found mainly in the Scheldt basin and even further south. Friesland may have been in northwestern Europe in the distant past, but from the third-fourth century onwards it was no longer viable there because of the rising water. The fact that every now and then a loner lived with his family on a mound (terp) did not change that general situation. It was not until the ninth-tenth century that Friesland became habitable again and that people came to settle again. But those people were no longer the same people as the Frisians who had moved south centuries before. The Frisians mentioned in the Lex Frisionum lived in what is now called French Flanders, West Flanders and Zeeland. But their trade actually covered the whole of Western Europe, as I want to show with the written sources.

Brown/A Companion, 2007

Until the fall of Calais in early 1558, England was a European country. Indeed, as late as the 1530s, Henry VIII was styling himself 'King of France'. To speak of 'England and France' in this period is thus to imply a distinction that simplifies the intricately interwoven relationship between their peoples. This chapter takes as its theme the variety of images of France that were formed and projected within late medieval England. It explores the ways in which French culture and French writing permeated 'English' culture and 'English' writing, both as an image of cultural aspiration to the English and as a source of cultural resistance. It investigates some of the ways in which English writers seemed to perceive French culture as well as how they absorbed it and responded to it.

By July 2023, I have interpreted 1,397 place names across continental Europe using Old English. Such a quantity itself surprises me to no small extent, but no one else has shown the same surprise yet. Obviously, no one believes in such a possibility, believing that my etymologies are chosen to prove my fiction about the Anglo-Saxon migrations throughout Europe. If someone thinks so, then he overestimates my imagination too much, but I would put it to better use. In principle, I understand that all sorts of unusual ideas are first of all objectionable, but it is surprising that no one has tried to independently decipher toponyms that are well known to him and do not have convincing etymologies. But the accumulation of Old English toponyms in one place could encourage others to search in the nearest area. For example, I gave my interpretations of two place names in Portugal but did not give an explanation for the name of Lisbon for several years. During this time, anyone could try to do this by looking in the dictionary of the Old English language to see how beautiful the name of this city is, but no one came up with such an idea, not even the one who deals with this issue. All this makes one think about how imperfect human is.

Notes and Queries, 2016

SCANDINAVIAN VÍNA AND ENGLISH BATTLES A minor backwater in the flow of debate about where the battle of Brunanburh, fought by King AEthelstan against Anlaf Guthfrithsson and Constantine king of the Scots in 937, is the river Vína. The battle of Brunanburh is generally accepted to be that named Vínheiðr in Egils Saga, where the eponymous hero's brother Þórólfr died. Vínheiðr in the saga is located by a river and nearby is the wood Vínuskógr, and a widespread assumption is that the river might have been named Vína, and so have supplied the first element of the places named in the saga. 1 When Egill laments his brother's death in verse, he says that the earth will grow over the grave Vínu naer 'near Vína', which is likely to be a reference to a river. 2 In discussion of these names, Campbell rejected any connection with Symeon of Durham's alternative name for the 937 battle, Weondun, on the basis that Þórólfr fought and died earlier in a battle near the Russian river Dvina (Vína) and the saga author confused the two. 3 But Matthew Townend showed that Campbell's argument was based on flawed logic because Haukr Valdísarson's Íslendingadrápa, well before Egils Saga, recorded Þórólfr's death in England fighting for King AEthelstan. He then pointed out that while the phonological correspondence and development is not flawless, Weon-could be rendered by Norse Vína. 4 In between Campbell and Townend, scholars found the possible correspondence of the names and battles compelling; indeed some writers still reconstruct Brunanburh in terms of the largely fictional account in Egils Saga. 5 The occurrence of the river name Vína in the