Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1975, Page 19

Faroese Bird-Name Origins
27
and lead to the bestowal of a name. But the nature of the name
given, literally denoting a cleft object, hopelessly imprecise and
only comprehensible to the initiated in the first place, betrays
its origin as a noa name.
The usage is clearly ancient, as proved by the occurrence of
the Norse word as a loan in Scots Gaelic: St Kilda súl and in
place names as Súlasgeir <S;cSúlusker ‘Gannet Skerry’, other-
wise with secondary terminations (Northern) súlair, (Southern)
*súlan attested in Eng. solan-goose. On the other hand, as the
gannet is not known to have bred in Norway, the present term
would only come into use after the Norsemen had reached
the nesting sites on the islands to the west. Such a name is not
likely to have been coined by men who only knew the bird
at sea. For them other aspects would be more impressive, such
as the angular silhouette against the sky or the hurtling dive
into the sea. A good example of a name induced by such consi-
derations is Cornish (Lhuyd) zethar lit. ‘archer’.
We apologise to Nudansk Ordbog whose interpretation be-
comes acceptable once the peculiar background has been under-
stood.
7jaldur ‘oyster-catcher’
We have twice previously discussed this problematic name
in ‘Sprachgeschichtliches zu einigen Vogelnamen nordischer
Herkunft’, Zeitschrift f. Anglistik u. Amerikanistik, III, 277
ff., and FBN, 7 f. and passim.
The forms of this West Scandinavian name may be recalled:
firstly ON tjaldr (in a pula), and secondly the modern Icel.
tjaldur (-s, -ar) m., Norw. tjeld (often spelt kjeld) m., Far.
tjaldur (-urs, tjøldur) n., further the Norn: Shetl. shalder,
Orkn. chalder, also chaldro, (dimin.) chaldrick. With the
above we have compared Icel. tildra f. ‘turnstone’, also tildri
m. (Blondal), cf. synonymous Far. tjaldursgrælingur, fjøru-
tjaldur, Norw. sandtjeld, and reckoned with the possibility
that r in ON tjaldr could have been part of the stem, as in
Faroese, and not merely a case ending as one would assume
from modern Icelandic.