Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1970, Blaðsíða 177

Faroese Bird-Name Origins
185
Iceland, where it is called drúði, also sæsvala lit, ‘sea swallow’,
a name as plain as any that could be given. These things
speak emphatically in favour of the conclusion that the sense
of ON haftyrðill was ‘little auk’.
Miiller’s bárufjatla
This apparently now lost name was reported in the last
century from Suðuroy by H. C. Miiller as “bárufjalla”,
certainly to be normalised as bárufjatla, cf. FBN, 61.
The name is a transparent compound: bára ‘wave’, fjatla
approx. ‘walker’, the latter element being elsewhere inde-
pendently recorded as a noa name for the crow. In FBN,
61, fjatla was provisionally explained as ‘hopper’ and the
essential correctness of this conjecture has since become
apparent. Whereas the first edition of Jacobsen-Matras, Før-
oysk-Donsk Orðabók, quoted for the verb fjatla the senses
‘forvikle; famle’, the second edition added ‘have en hoppende
el. trippende gang’, a more primitive meaning with direct
relevance for the bird name, so that the noun f jatla is literally
the bird with the hopping or tripping gait.
According to Miiller, bárufjatla meant ‘Sclavonian grebe’.
But the name must originally have denoted the stormy petrel,
since a term ‘wave-walker’ is incomprehensible as a name for
a grebe, or indeed for any other seabird in our area, except
the petrel. D. A. Bannerman, Birds of the British Isles, viii,
42, quotes “The birds untiringly followed the rising and fall-
ing of the water — — now going down into a hollow, and
now rising with the wave until the edge broke and curled
over, when the little feet were let down with a gentle tripping
movement as if trying to get a footing on the treacherous
deep”. We already know that this habit of ‘walking’ on the
water gave rise to another Suðuroy petrel name bukari, see
Fróðskaparrit, xvi, 102—3.
It is scarcely possible to comment definitively on the
misapplication of the petrel name to the grebe. There is no
13 — Fróðskaparrit