Place-names
Some Orkney place-names: Maeshowe, Orkney and Brodgar.
By Dr Berit Sandnes, Lund University
The Orkneyinga saga gives us the oldest name for Maeshowe: Orkahaug ‘mound of orks’. A runic inscription within the mound says that the crusaders broke into orköuh. The latter form would seem to support a recent hypothesis that the Vikings’ spelling left much to be desired, suggested by Marco Bianchi after a study of ca 1000 runic inscriptions in Sweden.
In Norway, some of the largest mounds were traditionally ascribed to some powerful forefather. For the Vikings it must have been a natural to think of Orkahaug as a tomb for the old rulers of Orkney. Ork is a rendering of Celtic orc ‘(young) pig’. TheMiddle Irish name for the isles was Innsi Orc ‘Islands of the pigs`. Orc thus appears to be a tribal name derived from an animal, just like the cats of Caithness. The Old Norse form Orka- reflects genitive plural, which means that the Vikings envisaged a common burial mound rather than the individual ones that they were used to from Norway. Perhaps they had been inside and found a number of human sculls and bones even before the crusaders broke into Orkahaug?
The tribal name Orc also lies behind the Old Norse name Orkneyar, but the unfamiliar word orc has been replaced by the familiar word erkn or orkn ‘grey seal’. The sagas demonstrate that the Vikings had a habit of adapting foreign names, for instance Jerusalem becomesJorsal ‘horse hall’. Names adapted word by word may not be meaningful as a unit, but ‘seal islands’ happen to be a very appropriate name for Orkney.
The newer name Maeshowe is also of Old Norse origin. The form Mesow or †Mese-how is recorded from the 1790s in Orkney Parishes. The first element is an Old Scandinavian word *mað or math ‘meadow’. It develops into mad in Swedish and made in Danish but has not survived into modern Norwegian. However, the word is common Germanic and exists in older English in the form mead, so we need not doubt its existence. An element mae seems to enter into a number of Orkney place-names, both as a specific and a generic (second element): Langomay, Howmay, Maesquoy. Marwick relies heavily on Norwegian references and cannot suggest a derivation for these in Orkney Farm-names, but it seems very likely they contain the word math. It fits linguistically, as a final ð orth will normally disappear in Orkney dialect. Farm-names ending in -gar have developed from Old Norse garðr ‘farm’, for instance. A name meaning ‘meadow mound’ does certainly make sense as Maeshowe is located so close to Loch of Harray. About four kilometres north of Maeshowe, the house of Maesquoy is situated right on the bank of Burn of Furso. Both locations seem likely to have been meadows originally.
One of the gar-names in this area is Brodgar. The derivation is quite straightforward from Old Norse brú-garðr ‘bridge farm’, which makes perfect sense. Brodgar lies right next to the bridge across the very narrow sound between Loch of Harray and Loch of Stenness and there must have been bridges here from a very early stage. But why should the name be spelt and pronounced with a d? This was a puzzle to me until I realised that the d belongs to the second element. The traditional dialect pronunciation of gar is with a soft g, not just like in Standard English but rather with a d and a y pronounced separately.
