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This is a good podcast on viking 'whiteness'. Saga Thing is a podcast by two professors of medieval literature going through the Icelandic family sagas. Their Saga Briefs episodes mostly deal with subjects tangentially related to the sagas. After January 6th, they decided to podcasts with other academics to give an academic counterpoint to white supremacist movements appropriating Norse culture. Unfortunately they haven't done a second part yet.
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Jul 30, 2023 01:10
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Speaking of vikings and whiteness. We know that there was at least one viking that wasn't white, Geirmund Hjørson Heljarskin (Geirmund the Black Skinned). His mother was from Bjarmaland (most likely Arkhangelsk) and his father was a norse king. Geirmund was in fact almost the king of Norway until Harald Fairhair arrived and ruined his chances. One saga about him tells about how his mother was so ashamed of how he looked that she gave him away to one of her thralls in exchange for the thrall's kid that had lighter skin. After three years the king's skald, Brage the Old, revealed to the king who his son really was. According to the saga the king remarked that he had dark skin but accepted him as his son. Later Geirmund went back to Bjarmaland and took a wife, Illþurrka. Then he settled in Iceland where he became one of the wealthiest persons living there.
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Jul 30, 2023 11:26
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preserved_Fish
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Jul 30, 2023 17:09
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Guess I should have expected Sir Strömming
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Jul 31, 2023 06:49
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This is both neat and also amusing because the guy overenunciates deck prisms -- sources of light for lower decks of the ship -- probably to avoid it being misheard as dick prisons: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cuo8un0g9Kt/
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Jul 31, 2023 07:00
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Trabant posted:This is both neat and also amusing because the guy overenunciates deck prisms -- sources of light for lower decks of the ship -- probably to avoid it being misheard as dick prisons: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cuo8un0g9Kt/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6c4Nupnup0 Carbon dioxide has a new favorite as of 07:19 on Jul 31, 2023 |
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Jul 31, 2023 07:16
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Ghost Leviathan posted:What do you think police are even for? A stripper's uniform has to come from somewhere.
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Jul 31, 2023 13:08
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Alhazred posted:Speaking of vikings and whiteness. We know that there was at least one viking that wasn't white, Geirmund Hjørson Heljarskin (Geirmund the Black Skinned). His mother was from Bjarmaland (most likely Arkhangelsk) and his father was a norse king. Geirmund was in fact almost the king of Norway until Harald Fairhair arrived and ruined his chances. One saga about him tells about how his mother was so ashamed of how he looked that she gave him away to one of her thralls in exchange for the thrall's kid that had lighter skin. After three years the king's skald, Brage the Old, revealed to the king who his son really was. According to the saga the king remarked that he had dark skin but accepted him as his son. That's a very to-the-point name, but is still beaten by Reasonable Blackman.
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Jul 31, 2023 13:42
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NFX posted:Guess I should have expected Sir Strömming lol, excellent
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Jul 31, 2023 14:23
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Trabant posted:This is both neat and also amusing because the guy overenunciates deck prisms -- sources of light for lower decks of the ship -- probably to avoid it being misheard as dick prisons: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cuo8un0g9Kt/ I was just thinking yesterday about deck prisms and how cool they were and how probably pretty few people have any idea about them
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Jul 31, 2023 16:05
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Milo and POTUS posted:I was just thinking yesterday about deck prisms and how cool they were and how probably pretty few people have any idea about them Some Baader-meinhof poo poo going on here. There's a guy I watch on YouTube who's rebuilding an old wooden yacht from basically the ground up, and his crew just installed the
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Jul 31, 2023 20:44
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Phy posted:Some Baader-meinhof poo poo going on here. There's a guy I watch on YouTube who's rebuilding an old wooden yacht from basically the ground up, and his crew just installed the http://www.yachttallyho.com for those as are curious
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Jul 31, 2023 21:35
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Phy posted:Some Baader-meinhof poo poo going on here. There's a guy I watch on YouTube who's rebuilding an old wooden yacht from basically the ground up, and his crew just installed the I remember seeing them in a hardware store as a kid and thinking they were cool. It's just a very odd thing to notice out of the blue and I'd notice something like that
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Jul 31, 2023 22:08
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Samovar posted:That's a very to-the-point name, but is still beaten by Reasonable Blackman. Goddamn do I love old timey names like this.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:53
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Reminded of my favorite old timey baseball player, Johnny "Ugly" Dickshot.
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Jul 31, 2023 23:38
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Samovar posted:That's a very to-the-point name The norse had to use nicknames because of their naming traditions. You got your surname after your father (if your father was named Olav for example your surname was Olavsson). Which meant that you risked having dozens of people named Olav Haraldsson, Harald Olavsson and in some cases Harald Haraldsson. The only way to know which Harald you were talking to were to rely on their nickname.
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Aug 1, 2023 13:19
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Milo and POTUS posted:I was just thinking yesterday about deck prisms and how cool they were and how probably pretty few people have any idea about them Some of those dick prisons look like they would be really painful if you wanged your head on 'em. That pointy number could kill you in heavy seas.
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Aug 1, 2023 13:34
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Alhazred posted:The norse had to use nicknames because of their naming traditions. You got your surname after your father (if your father was named Olav for example your surname was Olavsson). Which meant that you risked having dozens of people named Olav Haraldsson, Harald Olavsson and in some cases Harald Haraldsson. The only way to know which Harald you were talking to were to rely on their nickname. The Romans worked the same way. And that's how an ironic nickname of 'hairy' became a basis for royal titles.
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Aug 1, 2023 13:35
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Alhazred posted:The norse had to use nicknames because of their naming traditions. You got your surname after your father (if your father was named Olav for example your surname was Olavsson). Which meant that you risked having dozens of people named Olav Haraldsson, Harald Olavsson and in some cases Harald Haraldsson. The only way to know which Harald you were talking to were to rely on their nickname. Are there any patriarchal societies where names didn't work like this? (+ the whole "from" thing)
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Aug 1, 2023 13:40
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Alhazred posted:The norse had to use nicknames because of their naming traditions. You got your surname after your father (if your father was named Olav for example your surname was Olavsson). Which meant that you risked having dozens of people named Olav Haraldsson, Harald Olavsson and in some cases Harald Haraldsson. The only way to know which Harald you were talking to were to rely on their nickname. it's patronym, not a surname, those are much later for commoners
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Aug 1, 2023 13:49
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Alhazred posted:The norse had to use nicknames because of their naming traditions. You got your surname after your father (if your father was named Olav for example your surname was Olavsson). Which meant that you risked having dozens of people named Olav Haraldsson, Harald Olavsson and in some cases Harald Haraldsson. The only way to know which Harald you were talking to were to rely on their nickname. I think it's more accurate to say that people really only had a first name and no surname, and then to disambiguate people would use any number of bynames, the most common being the patronymic. It was only much later that bynames calcified to "surnames", significantly due to unclear laws in the mid 1800s. Many people had multiple bynames depending on context, eg. Jens son of Hans might, if he lived by a forest, be known as Jens Hansen Skov or simply Jens Skov. You could also "inherit" a byname via your wife, for example by marrying a widow. Or you could get one by buying or copy-holding a farm with an associated byname. There's also for example Sweyn II of Denmark who went by Estridsson (a matronymic) to emphasize his royal lineage. His mother Estrid was a daughter of Sweyn Forkbeard, granddaughter of Harald Bluetooth, and great granddaughter of Gorm the Old, who were all kings of Denmark. e: some of my Faroese family members have begun adding matronymics as middle names, but I don't know how common that practice is.
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Aug 1, 2023 14:04
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You could also get a surname like Newman by being a person who moves into a place that has a very short tenancy of each person. For instance, that is how my dad's side of the family got their surname, just the Danish Nymand version.
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Aug 1, 2023 14:28
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Wales used to use patronymic surnames until the 1500s. People still use it now (eg 'ap Huw' for 'son of Huw', 'ferch Huw' for 'daughter of Huw), but those monikers got Anglicised into a lot of modern names. So 'ap Huw' became Pugh, 'ap Hari' became Parry. Jones came from 'son of John'. The move away from patronymic surnames to fixed surnames came as a result of colonisation, unsurprisingly. Loads of traditional names were lost as a result, especially pagan devotional names.
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Aug 1, 2023 15:07
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The Romans worked the same way. And that's how an ironic nickname of 'hairy' became a basis for royal titles. The Romans didn't have patronyms that changed each generation like the norse. I think they had used them earlier, but the ones still in use had stopped changing and become hereditary before they started expanding in Italy. Maybe you are thinking of how several emperors changed names when they were formally adopted by the previous emperor? Members of an imperial dynasty tended to only use names of previous emperors for their kids as well, so several emperors are known to history by their nickname. For example, Caligula's name was actually Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, but since his father was already known as Germanicus, and Caesar and Augustus were already "taken" by more famous people before him he is almost only known to history as little-boots. Several other emperors have the same problem, but at least they didn't share a first name with Caesar (Gaius) and could be remembered by their first name, like Tiberius and Titus. Roman first names were a bit odd though, and there weren't many of them. One quirk about the traditional Roman three name system - first name, clan name, last name - was that they only had about a dozen different first names between them by the end of the republic. Since this name was mostly used by members of your household this wasn't really a problem for them, but still. This name is usually dropped in school history books and the like as well, since it's the least important part of the name, or the least used in public. So it wouldn't have taken more than a few extra Julio-Claudians named Caesar Augustus until we'd have to get creative with emperor names.
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Aug 1, 2023 15:13
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I mean a lot of Roman emperors had the exact same name as their fathers so they used nicknames to differentiate them when talking about them later, but not at the time. Also Roman aristrocrats named their daughters the female version of the name so every girl in the Juli was named Julia. If you had two daughters it was Julia and Julia II
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Aug 1, 2023 15:28
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CharlestheHammer posted:Also Roman aristrocrats named their daughters the female version of the name so every girl in the Juli was named Julia. Reminds me of the firefighter naming his twin sons José and Hose B
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Aug 1, 2023 15:48
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Samovar posted:That's a very to-the-point name, A more direct translation is Geirmund Hell-skin or Geirmund Death-skin. Which is more metal but somewhat problematic by modern standards.
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Aug 1, 2023 16:03
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Oh, and if you think a dozen first names for everyone to share was lacking in creativity from the Romans, that's nothing compared to women's first names. There was quite literally zero creativity applied to this, every woman simply got the feminine form of their father's first name. Yes, this meant that sisters had the same name, one common solution to this was to number them. Say that Atticus has three daughters, all named Attia. These could be called something like Attia Prima, Attia Segundo and Attia Tertia. I think it's fair to say that Roman society could be a tad dismissive of women. This wasn't always how it was done, but it was the norm for much of Rome's heyday, at least among everyone who mattered.
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Aug 1, 2023 16:04
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in the slavic speaking world, western slavic cultures (czech, slovak, sorbian, polish, etc.) went with surnames that were originally nicknames, occupations, or identifying characteristics, but south (e.g. bulgarian, former yugoslavia) and east slavic developed patronymics as well as last names. some of these cultures (e.g. east slavic, macedonian, and bulgarian) then went further and combined patronymics with surnames, while in others (e.g. bosnian, croatian, montenegrin, and serbian) the patronymics became one kind of surname (and then were often imported into west slavic-speaking areas due to migration). the real divisive thing in czech/slovak right now is how both traditionally turn female surnames into a possessive adjective (e.g. navrátilová- "of the navrátil family"), but czechs can now legally give female children or spouses the unmarked masculine form of the last name. NoiseAnnoys has a new favorite as of 16:30 on Aug 1, 2023 |
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Aug 1, 2023 16:27
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SerthVarnee posted:You could also get a surname like Newman by being a person who moves into a place that has a very short tenancy of each person. There are a bunch of variations on parish that indicate one is descended from somebody who was an orphan or bastard taken in by a orphanage run by a Episcopalian church. Edit : it occurs to me that my fathers name is basically: little king lee bastard Jr. Bar Ran Dun has a new favorite as of 16:37 on Aug 1, 2023 |
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Aug 1, 2023 16:33
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There's a Scottish and sometimes Irish surname "MacTaggart", which means "son of the priest", that I've always wondered about. Priests haven't been allowed to marry for over 1000 years, and the surname doesn't seem to as old as that. Were priests just fathering children outside marriage and openly acknowledging them?
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Aug 1, 2023 16:48
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Name infotech is administrative, not social. "Had to use nicknames" is a weird way to put it when they'd be collecting nicknames just because they are public figures. 12 millennia of name infotech and we still have to call a US president Dubya. I'd love if ironic kennings came back into style to style him WMD-Finder.
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Aug 1, 2023 16:49
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In the Netherlands, there was no formal system of surnames until the time Napoleon occupied the country. His administration required everyone to come to the nearest local government office and tell their first name and last name, where it would be written down in the books. There were some people who believed "The French will be gone soon, and then this silly bureaucracy will be gone too. Let's have some fun with it". Unfortunately for them, the Dutch government that was formed after the French left decided to keep this name administration system. And this is why there are still people in the Netherlands with a last name that literally translates to, for example, "Poopies", or "Born Naked".
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Aug 1, 2023 18:03
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CharlestheHammer posted:I mean a lot of Roman emperors had the exact same name as their fathers so they used nicknames to differentiate them when talking about them later, but not at the time. julia and juliia
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Aug 1, 2023 18:18
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What’s funny is Julius Caesar had a daughter named Julia. The Octavian was adopted by Julius Cesar and changed his name to Julius Cesar, then had a named Julia
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Aug 1, 2023 18:58
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slothrop posted:Some of those dick prisons look like they would be really painful if you wanged your head on 'em. That pointy number could kill you in heavy seas. Well what should you not do
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Aug 1, 2023 19:08
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Old Norse Nicknames.FreudianSlippers posted:Some interesting historical or semi-historical Icelanders with nicknames: Note that the old meaning of "Ljótur" is light or bright but the modern meaning is ugly making his name even more unfortunate.
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Aug 1, 2023 19:15
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And if you weren't careful you would be known as Øystein Fart the rest of your life.
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Aug 1, 2023 19:54
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Carbon dioxide posted:In the Netherlands, there was no formal system of surnames until the time Napoleon occupied the country. I'd be more alarmed if someone was named "Born Clothed", to be honest.
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Aug 1, 2023 20:09
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Look, you're born naked, you die naked. I don't see what the big deal is.
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Aug 1, 2023 20:17
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