Anglo-Saxon Names

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Basic Information:

Includes "Old English" names.

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Sources:

Old English Name Articles at Academy of St. Gabriel "Medieval Names Archive" - https://www.s-gabriel.org/names/engoldenglish.shtml
Archive of St. Gabriel reports - http://www.panix.com/~gabriel/public-bin/archive.cgi
Database of medieval names (from the Medieval Names Archive) - http://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/names/database/

English Name Articles at SCA College of Arms Website - http://heraldry.sca.org/laurel/names.html#england%7Chttp://heraldry.sca.org/laurel/names.html#england

IGI Searches, batches beginning with C, J, K, M (except M17 and M18), or P are acceptable - http://familysearch.org

Dictionaries

Old English/Anglo-Saxon on Omniglot - http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm
Anglo-Saxon runes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - http://www.bosworthtoller.com/node/62883 - Some towns are listed for locative bynames.

• Bosworth Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary online - Anglo-Saxon to modern English
• Google eBook - searchable by modern English

A Handy Poetical Anglo-Saxon Dictionary based on Groscopp's Grein.. 1885 (Google books) - https://books.google.com/books?id=H99ZAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA119&lpg=PA119&dq=hild-stapa&source=bl&ots=0FCz_MqNsJ&sig=gMN8H52eB3wBWvdSZOR5swYLvi4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiqgKiv4ozVAhUh4YMKHQr9CGsQ6AEIKTAB#v=onepage&q=hild-stapa&f=false

Old English Translator - http://www.oldenglishtranslator.co.uk - translate Modern English words to Old English, including locations. For example entering "Evesham" into the search box will result in entries for the Old English spellings of "Eofesham" and "Euesham."

Anglo-Norman Dictionary (at the Anglo-Norman Hub) - http://www.anglo-norman.net/

Name Sources

The First Thousand Years of British Names - http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/tangwystyl/british1000/

The Domesday Book Online - Home - http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk/
In-process index of the personal names from the Domesday Book - http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/constanza/domesdaynames.html .
Open Domesday (map): http://www.domesdaymap.co.uk/ The names are normalised, but each one will take you to an image of the place(s) in the manuscript where it appears.

The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE) - http://www.pase.ac.uk/index.html - searchable database of Anglo-Saxon names. Use % as the wildcard symbol.

Anglo-Saxon Charters

• At the British Library - https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2018/07/anglo-saxon-charters-online.html
• ASChart - http://www.aschart.kcl.ac.uk/ - with XML markup
• The Electronic Sawyer: Online catalog of Anglo-Saxon Charters - https://esawyer.lib.cam.ac.uk/browse/index.html

Old English Bynames (G. Tengvik, Uppsala, 1938)

Some Old English Occupational Bynames - http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/Stars/OE_Occupational_Bynames.htm

"Peasant Bynames from Late-Eleventh-Century Bury St Edmunds (Old English, Latin, and Old French)": http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/Stars/Peasant%20Bynames%20from%20Late-Eleventh-Century%20Bury%20St%20Edmunds%20(Old%20English,%20Latin,%20and%20Old%20French).htm

Searle's Onomasticon Anglo-Saxiconum https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/RLkEAAAAIAAJ?gbpv=0 is not a great source. By precedent, "Searle in general should not be relied upon as the sole source of documentation for an Old English name." [Aug. 2008 Cover Letter] See the full precedent under precedents below for details -

Placenames

Compound Placenames in Old English

Appendix A: Patterns That Do Not Need Further Documentation by Language Group

http://heraldry.sca.org/sena.html#AppendixA (as of 12 October 2013)

English/Welsh

	Double Given Names	Locative	Patronymic	Other relationship	Descriptive/ Occupational	Dictus	Double Bynames	Order
Old English	No	Phrase (æt or of X)	Marked, unmarked		Rare	Yes; using Cognomento		given+byname

Notes:
Old English: Patronymics take form of X sunu/sune or Xdohtor (X is father's name in genitive); they must match the given name's gender. Alternately, they may follow the Latinized patterns. Locatives use æ/ or of followed by the placename in dative form. See the introduction to Reaney and Wilson A Dictionary of English Surnames for more details.

Appendix C: Regional Naming Groups and Their Mixes

http://heraldry.sca.org/laurel/sena.html#AppendixC

Regional Groups:	By Time Period:	Languages Included In This Group:	Can Be Combined With Groups:
English/Welsh	550-1100	Old English,Welsh, Cornish, Cumbric, etc.	Dutch French Gaelic Scandinavian
^	1100-1600	Middle and Modern English, Middle and Early Modern Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Anglicized Irish, Manx, etc.	Dutch French Gaelic

Precedents:

Precedents of the SCA College of Arms - http://heraldry.sca.org/laurel/precedents.html
Morsulus Heralds Website - http://www.morsulus.org/ (to search the LoARs and Precedents)
Use the above links to be sure any precedents listed below haven't been superseded by newer precedents.

Collected Precedents of the SCA: Anglo-Saxon/Old English - http://heraldry.sca.org/precedents/CompiledNamePrecedents/AngloSaxonOldEnglish.html

November 2022 Cover Letter - SENA Appx D update - Acceptable Transliteration Systems for Non-Latin Scripts

As proposed in Palimpsest's August 12th Rules Letter, SENA Appendix D is updated to add acceptable transliterations in Old English. The letters ð (edh) and þ (thorn) are generally interchangeable in Old English. Both may be transcribed as th or d; this need not be consistent in the same name.

We wish to thank Gunnv{o,}r Orle for her research on this issue.

The updated version of Appendix D will be available at http://heraldry.sca.org/sena.html shortly. https://heraldry.sca.org/loar/2021/11/21-11cl.html#8

August 2008 Cover Letter:

From Pelican: On Documenting Names from Searle, Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum We regularly see names which are documented from Searle, Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum. The book was intended to be a collection of attested Old English names. However, in the 100 years since its publication, the standards of scholarship have changed, which means that the book is less reliable than more recent works and that it should be used with great care. Many submitters and heralds do not know the problematic aspects of this book, so we are outlining the major ones here.

1. First, all of the headwords that Searle uses have been standardized to a normalized Old English form. As he says on p. viii of the introduction, "The names, whether Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon, or Kentish, have been arranged according to the West Saxon spelling as given in Sweet's Glossary to his Oldest English Text". Sometimes these normalized forms are identical with the documentary forms (that is, the forms as they are found in actual documents), but in general there is no way to tell whether this is the case from the entry alone. The only forms that can safely be assumed to be documentary are the secondary headwords.
2. Second, and connected to the first issue, Searle included many non-Old English names, including Continental Germanic and Old Norse names that were found in the English documents that he was using as sources, even when the bearer is known not to have been English. For instance, he lists the Continental Germanic masculine name Ebroin as an instance of its Old English cognate Eoforwine. However, the fact that Ebroin was used in the 7th C does not mean that its Old English cognate Eoforwine was also used at that time. In fact, in some cases the Old English cognate name is not attested at all.
3. Third, Searle gives many variant spellings of the individual themes, and these variant spellings should be used with care. Some of the variants that he lists are very rare, perhaps even scribal errors. Some of the variants he may have misidentified; for example, he lists bren- as a variant spelling of the theme beorn-, but none of the commenters were able to find any examples of a name using the theme beorn- where the theme was spelled bren- (Brinwen the Fair, LoAR 05/2008, East-A, q.v.). Furthermore, some variant spellings are the result of different orthographic practices in different dialects, which means that some particular prototheme variant may not be compatible with a particular deuterotheme variant even if both are individually unexceptionable. The variant spellings of themes that Searle gives may only be used if it is demonstrated that they were both used in names which are temporally and dialectically compatible.

• Given these issues, Searle in general should not be relied upon as the sole source of documentation for an Old English name. Whenever possible, any entry in his book should be corroborated with information from another source, such as Tengvik, Old English Bynames; the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England; or Sean Miller's database of Anglo-Saxon charters.

http://heraldry.sca.org/loar/2008/08/08-08cl.html

WARNING: Do not cite this page as a reference. This page is on this wiki to make the content "searchable" and easier to find. If you find the information you seek here, go to the original sources (generally linked) to verify the information and use them for your documentation. Contact the editor-in-chief, Sofya la Rus, if there are copyright concerns or other issues.  sofya at calontiri dot info