Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1971, Síða 115

Faroese Bird Name Origins
(H)
By W. B. Lockwood.
Glibbari ‘yxnmg shag’
This apparently now forgotten name was reoorded in Hestur
by Jakøb Jakobsen, w’ho compared it with Norw. glibba
‘sl'Uge i sig’ (Faroese Bird Names, 27). Bird names in -ari are
uncommon in Faroese; we otherwise know only of bukari
‘stormy petrel’ and jarmari ‘great shearwater’, from buka
‘strike’, jarma ‘bleat’. As formations of this sort are likely to
be reoent in Faroese, it may be that a Faroese verb *glibba is
still in use locally awaiting a collector.
Havhestur ‘fulmar’
The provenance of this term, also Norw. havhest, has not
been definitively explained. In FBN, 53, it was suggested that
the name cøuld owe its origin to superstitious beliefs, but I
was unable to make more than a guess at the motivation. I
believe the matter can at last be elucidated.
The fuknar’s voioe has been deadt with in detail by J.
Fisher, The Fulmar, 1952. It has a considerable range, de-
pending on the given situation, and Fisher quotes, on pp. 326
—7, observations of previous naturalists. The earliest (1767)
declares that “the voice is sbrill, and brought out with a
certain snorting”, while a later source (1883) refers to the
bird’s “thin, whinnying voioe”. Snorting and whinnying are,
of course, primarily associated with horses. One may there-
fore consider that the name havhestur lit. ‘ocean hor9e’ was