During the twelfth century, probably among the Normans of Sicily, lived Rosalia, “the darling of each heart and eye,” who, in her youth, dedicated herself to a hermit life in a mountain grotto, and won a saintly reputation for her name, which is frequent in her island, as is Rosalie in France, and at the German town of Duderstadt, where it is vilely tortured into Sahlke.
St. Dominic arranged a series of devotions, consisting of the meditations, while rehearsing the recurring aves and paters marked by the larger and smaller nuts, or berries, on a string. These, which we call beads from beden (to pray), formed the rosarium, or rose garden, meaning originally the delights of devotion. This rosarium has a day to itself in the Roman calendar, and possibly may have named the Transatlantic saint, Rosa di Lima, the whole of which appellation is borne by Peruvian señoras, and practically called Rosita.
Rosa is found in all kinds of ornamental forms in different countries, and the contractions, or diminutives, of one become the names of another. Thus Rosalia, herself, probably sprang from the endearment Rosel, which together with Rosi is common in Switzerland and the Tyrol; the German diminutive Roschen is met again in the Italian Rosina, French Rosine, English Rosanne; the Rasine, or Rasche, of Lithuania; and Rosetta, the true Italian diminutive, is followed by the French Rosette.
These may be considered as the true and natural forms of Rose. Others were added by fancy and romance after the Teuton signification of fame had been forgotten, and the Latin one of the flower adopted.
Of these, are Rosaura, Rosaclara; in English, Roseclear, Rosalba (a white rose), Rosabella, or Rosabel, all arrant fancy names.
Rosamond has a far more ancient history, but the rose connection must be entirely renounced for her. The first Hrosmond (famous protection, or horse protection) was the fierce chieftainess of the Gepidæ, who was compelled by her Lombard husband to drink to his health in a ghastly goblet formed of the skull of her slaughtered father, and who avenged this crowning insult by a midnight murder.
Even from the fifth century, the period of this tragedy, hers has remained a favourite name among the peasantry of the Jura, the land of the Gepidæ, but it does not appear how it came from them to the Norman Cliffords, by whom it was bestowed upon Fair Rosamond, whose fate has been so strangely altered by ballad lore, and still more strangely by Cervantes, who makes his Persiles and Sigismunda encounter her in the Arctic regions, undergoing a dreary penance among the wehr wolves. Her name, in its supposed interpretation, gave rise to the Latin epigram, Rosa mundi, sed non Rosa munda (the rose of the world, but not a pure rose). The sound of the word, and the popular interest of the ballad, have continued her name in England.
Hroswith, the poetical Frank nun, is certainly famous strength, or famous height, though when softened into Roswitha, she has been taken for a white rose, or a sweet rose.
Rosalind makes her first appearance in As You Like It, whether invented by Shakespeare cannot be guessed. If the word be really old, the first syllable is certainly hrôs, the last is our English lithe, the German lind, the Northern lindre, the term that has caused the Germans to call the snake the lindwurm, or supple worm. The Visigoths considered this litheness as beauty, and thus the word survives in Spanish as lindo, linda, meaning, indeed, a fair woman, but a soft effeminate man. Yet, the linda, meaning fair in Spanish, was reason enough in the sixteenth century for attaching it to many a name by way of ornament, and it is to be apprehended that thus it was that Rosalind came by her name, and possibly Rosaline, whom Romeo deserted for the sake of Juliet. However she began, she has ever since been one of the English roses.
Rosilde, or Roshilda, a German form, is in like manner either really the fame-battle, or else merely ilda tacked by way of ornament to the end of the rose.