Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1982, Page 99

Faroese Bird-Name Origins
107
There are three European species of swan: 1) the mute swan,
2) the whooper swan, 3) Bewick’s swan. On the evidence of
their present geographic range, all three may be taken as having
been known in the traditional areas of Germanic speech, i.e.
South Scandinavia and North Germany, where Pr.Gmc.
'-'swanaz is presumed to have acquired its recorded meaning.
However, only the mute swan is actually resident in these areas,
the other two being simply winter visitors. Bewick’s swan is a
somewhat silent bird, but the whooper is noisier and it has
been assumed that this species motivated the name, cf. e.g.
Kluge, Etym. Wb. d. deut. Sprache13 ’Schwan’. It seems, how-
ever, surprising that a visiting species rather than a resident
should have been responsible for the name. Indeed, in the
present case it is hardly credible, for how could a word clearly
meaning sound, noise or the like be applied to name birds, the
most familiar species of which was mute? We note, too, that
Pr.Gmc. ''swanaz reflects a Proto-Indo-European word with
the sense of sound in general; it is clearly not associated with
any particular sound, such as the nasal trumpeting of the
whooper. These circumstances persuade us that the name was
not motivated by any call, but by a unique peculiarity of the
mute swan. Its flight is characterised by a metallic throb of
the wings, and this ’music’ is, in favourable conditions,
audible over a mile away, cf. H. F. Witherby et al., Handhook
of British Birds, iii, 168. And naturally we wonder if it was
not this same peculiarity which was ultimately responsible for
the concept ’swan song’, handed down from Classical Antiquity.
We next consider Pr.Gmc. "'swanaz in relation to the other
traditional Germanic swan name seen in ON álpt etc. f., com-
parable to OEng. ielfetu {., and further to OHGer. elbiz, older
albiz m. These words are, in their turn, to be compared with
Slavonic forms, as Russ. lebed’ m.f. or, in an older variety,
Slov. labód f. (Vasmer, Russ. etym. Wb.). The foregoing names
are plausibly referred to a root seen in Lat. albus ’white’, also
in Greek alphós ’dull-white leprosy’ (Liddell & Scott), the bird
being thus called after its resplendent white plumage. It can
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