Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1995, Page 71

THE FAROESE WHALE NAMES
75
now misapplied to the Fin Whale, and
DØGLINGUR. These names would arise
in connection with the annual slaughter of
Bottlenose Whales when, about Michael-
mas, they apppeared off Sandvík and in
Hvalba Fjord. In the first name we see the
evasive change of -hvalur to - fiskur (q.v.),
in the second an originally poetic term ON
døg-, dgglingr ‘king, prince’, a byname of
Odin. It is known that stylistically elevated
words may be adopted as noa terms, a com-
parable example being gestur, properly
Gestur i.e. Norna-Gestur, a name for the
oyster-catcher tjaldur, though the motiva-
tion has yet to be explained. In the present
case, however, the choice of the name is
known to be bound up with an age-old be-
lief in a whale which, Odin-like, had only
one eye, as explained by Chr. Matras, ‘Den
enójede hval’, Saga och Sed (1960), 1-7,
who further notes that the superstition is
also attested for 13th-century Norway.
The name is recorded by Svabo, e.g.
Dict.Fær. 144: Døglingur ‘Næbbehval’, but
the first mention is Debes 167 ‘Døgling’.
Earlier still, in 1584, a stranded »one-eyed
whale« was termed ‘throldhual’ (Matras,
op.cit., 1), but we doubt if this was more
than ad hoc usage, see TRØLLHVALUR.
The present name occurs in Fiskakvæði 19.
A name from this text could go back to, say,
1500. But how much older it may be eludes
us.
The notion of a one-eyed whale is pre-
sumably to be compared with a widespread
belief in one-eyed fish. Such are, to the best
of our knowledge, first mentioned by Giral-
dus Cambrensis in 1188. We quote from the
translation of the original Latin by W.
Llewelyn Williams, Itinerary through
Wales (1908) 127f.: On the highest parts (of
Snowdonia) are two lakes... the one has a
floating island in it. The other... contains
three sorts of fish, eels, trout, perch, all of
which have only one eye, the left being
wanting... it is remarkable also, that in two
places in Scotland, one near the eastern, the
other near the westem sea, the fish called
mullets possess the same defect, having no
left eye. From Germany, the Handwórter-
buch des deutschen Aberglaubens III
(1930-31) 1612, reports a belief in one-
eyed giant pike. And not only in Europe. In
Japan many tales are told of one-eyed fish,
usually carp, found in certain pools and
known as katame no uo ‘one-eyed fish’ or
katame nofuna ‘one-eyed carp’. Numerous
legends account for their condition, the
most common being that a god had his left
eye put out by a pine needle, whereupon a
compassionate carp from a nearby pool of-
fered his own eye in replacement.
Tradition does not tell us which of the
eyes of the døglingur was missing, but it
now rather looks as though it was the left
one.
FISKUR m. Fish. An altemative to HVAL-
UR in whale names. Such usage would de-
velope in connection with whale catching
and be evasive in the first place, though
later generalised. Usually both altema-
tives are known, e.g. GRINDAFISKUR,
-HVALUR, but - doubtless fortuitously -
only NEBBAFISKUR.
In connection with the all-important
herding of the Pilot Whale, the simplex
FISKUR is commonly used to denote a