Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1976, Qupperneq 69

Faroese Bird-Name Origins (VI)
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connection, we should mention another German stork name,
Adebar or Odebar, going back to late Old High German times
and conjectured to mean ‘fortune-bearer’, cf. F. Kluge, Etym.
Wórterbuch der deutschen Sprache (any edition) ‘Adebar’. If
this conjecture is correct, the tradition in question could be of
early medieval age. We ourselves, however, following H.
Suolahti, Die deutschen Vogelnamen, 370, regard this inter-
pretation (which goes back to Grimm) as untenable. One could
perhaps argue that such notions could not arise until the stork,
which by nature nests in trees, came into intimate contact
with man by taking possession of his roof-tops. This seems to
imply fairly substantial buildings and these could hardly have
existed in Germany until the beginning of medieval times. At
any rate, a medieval (as opposed to a very ancient) date is in
line with the fact that similar beliefs were, according to the
Hwb. d. deut, Aberglaubens, loc. cit., unknown to the Romans.
New names
The publication of J. H. W. Poulsen, Føroysk-donsk orda-
bók. Eykabind (1974), has made accessible a number of new
names of interest here.
We begin with two new root words, apparently isolated in
Faroese. First: frebbi ‘old puffin (with very broad beak)’, also
in a figurative sense ‘boaster’. On this evidence the word has a
basic meaning ‘big beak’ and appears to be an expressive for-
mation, but we have not identified a possible cognate. Second:
válkur quoted as a local term for an unspecified species of
‘small gull’. The name will not be ancient, and the word itself
has already been recorded, albeit in a very different sense,
by Svabo, Indberetninger, 894 f.: Paa Hovedet, naar en Pige
staaer Brud, legges en Krands, bestaaende af glimrende Blom-
ster og Baand, og kaldes V a a 1 k u r. This word can hardly
by anything else than Low Ger. walk ‘tuft of hair, etc.’, a term
borrowed as valk into Danish (also Swedish) and Norwegian,
and developing a wide semantic range, cf. Torp, Nynorsk etym.