Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1995, Page 72

76
THE FAROESE WHALE NAMES
single whale instead of HVALUR, and may
be the only altemative in use, e.g. odda-
fiskur »leader whale«.
GRINDAFISKUR, -HVALUR Pilot
Whale (Globicephala melas). Both terms
were known to Svabo, e.g. Dict.fær. 290,
but the latter is found earlier in Debes 156
danicised ‘Grindehvall’ — Dan. grinde-
hval, Norw. grindhval, together with Icel.
grindhvalur, are borrowings from Faroese.
The names are relatively recent, hardly an-
tedating the 17th cent.; they have replaced
NÝÐINGUR (q.v.) used in this sense in
1594.
The element GRIND f. denotes primari-
ly a school of Pilot Whales. It is first en-
countered in Debes 156, the concept devel-
oping from a meaning ‘fence’, attested in
Old Norse, here applied to whales swim-
ming in the lateral formation typical of this
species. So spread out, the herd can more
efficiently locate and then surround poten-
tial prey. That the word in its present sense
is an abbreviated form is evident from syn-
onymous Norwegian dialect hvalgrind,
first recorded in 1698, from Vesterálen; a
variant »Hvalsgrind«, quoted by Debes
156, derives from P. Claussøn Friis, Nor-
riges...Bescriffuelse (1632), written 1613-
14.
GRØNLANDSSLÆTTIBØKA see un-
der SLÆTTIBØKA
‘HAF(F)ERRYTTE\ Spellings of a name
for the Sperm Whale from Resen 72f. The
word, as it stands cannot be reliably com-
pared with any other name in the related
languages, see the editors’ footnote p. 72.
If, however, we accept one of their suggest-
ed solutions and amend to *«Haf(f)er-
kytte«, which could be normalised *havur-
kitti, we have a correspondence with ON
hafrkitti, species unknown, but surviving in
Icel. hafurkitti meaning ‘Right Whale’ ac-
cording to Blóndal. No satisfactory etymo-
logy has been found, and it is scarcely pos-
sible to say which species the term origi-
nally denoted.
HVALUR m. Whale. This ancient generic
term, ON hvalr, remains a living word,
though as the second element in com-
pounds it may be replaced by -FISKUR. It
occurs as the first element in a small num-
ber of traditional compounds, including
some purely Faroese examples, as hval-
spýggja f. ‘jellyfish’ lit. ‘whale spit’. In
other such words, the sense is de facto re-
stricted to the Pilot Whale or, less frequent-
ly, the Bottlenose Whale, e.g. hvalvákn
»whaling spear« used to dispatch the
whales as they are herded into shallow wa-
ter. Similarly in a few place names, notably
Hvalvík ‘Whale Bay’, a village on Streym-
oy, where the reference is to the Pilot
whale, while Hvalba ‘Whale Village’ on
Suðuroy, like the neighbouring Hvalvík
(Dan. Kvalviig 1650), an earlier name for
the present-day village of Sandvík, are pri-
marily associated with the Bottlenose
Whale, see DØGLINGUR.
HVESSINGUR m. Bottlenose Dolphin
(Tursiops truncatus) making its debut in
Resen 73 »Qvæsing eller Vaagenhog«. It is
hardly to be doubted that these names prop-
erly denote different species; on the latter,