Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1977, Blaðsíða 1

Some traces of Gaelic in Faroese
By W. B. Lockwood
Grímr Kamban
.... ‘Sva er sagt at Grimr kamban bygði
fyrstr manna Færeyiar’ (AM 61 fol.) ....
There has never been any serious doubt about the Gaelic
character of the sobriquet Kamban. True, F. Jónsson, Aarbøger
f. nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie (1926), 239, argued that
Grímr Kamban flourished around 800, admittedly an early
date for an Irish cognomen. But one will prefer a later date,
corresponding to the settlement of the Faroes about 825, see
Fróðskaparrit^ps:, 47f. In any case, the name could hardly be
more obviously Gaelic. It represents a 9th-century derivative
noun ''cambán from camb ‘crooked, bent, twisted’, a formation
comparable to, e. g. becán ‘paululus; pauxillum’ — from
bec ‘little’, the meanings thus basically ‘little fellow’ or ‘little
thing’ — cf. R. Thurneysen, Grammar of Old Irish, 175.
We may note, incidently, that our sample derivative was
borrowed into Norse as Bekan ‘Little Fellow’.
It goes without saying that '''cambán was no nonce word,
but must have been a well established lexical item understood
by allj — otherwise there would have been little point in the
nickname. But what doe^. this name actually mean? As far as
we can see, it has hitherto been regarded as sufficient to note
the Gaelic connection and then assume an allusion to some
infirmity, as lameness. By the analogy of Bekan above,
Kamban could appear to have a meaning something like ‘Lame
2 — Fróðskaparrit