Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1965, Blaðsíða 84
KEMP MALONE
Qmð and Hinn
IN 1932 I printed a paper about the tribal name Amothingas found
in line 85 of the Old English poem Widsith, where it occurs in
the dat. pl. form Amothingum.1 2 I connected the name with the Nor-
wegian island-name Qmð, recorded thrice in Heimskringla and
listed, besides, in a thula devoted to eyja heiti.~ In other words, I
identified the Amothings as the men of QmS. This connection of
mine found favor with F. Holthausen, who adopted it in his etymo-
logical dictionary of 1948, though without mention of me.3 For the
convenience of the reader let me summarize what I said in 1932 be-
fore going on to what I now have to add.
Tribal names in -ingas (OE) or -ingar (Icel.) may be based either
on personal names or on place-names. As is generally agreed, they
make a very old Germanic type, and the th (the pre-classical spelling
replaced in classical OE by the runic letter þ) gives the name even
more of a Germanic look. If in truth Germanic, Amothingas has
short initial a, since the vowel of the second syllable did not undergo
1 “Two Noles on Widsith” Modern Language Notes XLVII (1932), 367—
370.
2 See F. Jónsson, Den norsk-islandske Skjaldedigtning (Copenhagen 1912—
15), A I, 690, and B I, 679.
3 F. Holthausen, Vergleichendes und etymologisches Wörterbuch des Alt-
westnordischen (Göttingen 1948), 358. — As late as his fifth ed. (1929) of
Beowulj Ilolthausen had explained the form as “wold fiir Amoringum ver-
schrieben” (p. 203). Ile presumably saw my explanation either in the paper
cited above or in the London ed. (1936) of my Widsith, reviewed by him in
Beiblatt zur Anglia XLVIII (1937), 33—34. See now the Copenhagen ed.
(1962), 128.