Section I.—Ground occupied by the Teutons.
The great mass of modern European nomenclature springs from the class of languages which it is convenient collectively to call Teutonic.
Nothing shows the identity of the entire Teutonic race more than the resemblance of the names in each of the branches. Many are found in each of the stems—Gothic, Scandinavian, and High and Low German—the same in sense, and with mere dialectic changes in sound, proving themselves to have sprung from a name, or from words, current in the original tribe before the various families parted from it. Others are found in some branches and not in others; but there are comparatively very few belonging to a single tongue, and the analyzation of one into its component words is never safe till the same name has been sought for in the cognate languages. All the more popular of these personal names have gone on a little in the rear of the spoken language of the country, undergoing changes, though somewhat more slowly. Then, perhaps, some famous character has, as it were, crystallized his name for ever in the form in which he bore it, and it has been so continued, ever after, in his own country, as well as imitated by others, who often have adopted it in addition to their own original national form of the very same.
The Teutonic names were almost all compounds of two words. Sometimes a single word was used, but this was comparatively rare. For the most part, families were distinguished by each person bearing the same first syllable, with other words added to it to mark the individual, much in the same way as we have seen was the custom of the Greeks. Some families, like the royal line of Wessex, would alternate between Æthel and Ead; others between Os and Sieg and the like. The original compounds forming names were expressive and well chosen; but it seems as if when once certain words had come into use as component parts of names, they were apt to be put together without much heed to their appropriateness or signification, sometimes with rather droll results. Their names were individual, but every man was also called the son, every woman the daughter, of the father; a custom that has not passed away from some parts of Norway, the Hebrides, or even the remoter parts of Lancashire, where, practically, the people use no surnames. A family was further collectively spoken of by the ancestor’s or father’s name, with the addition of ing, the derivative or patronymic; as, in France, the sons of Meervig were the Meerwingen; the sons of Karl, the Karlingen; not Merovingians and Carlovingians, as Latinization has barbarously made them. Remarkable features, or distinguished actions, often attached soubriquets to individuals, and these passed on, marking off families in the genealogical songs of the Scallds; and from these derivations, as well as from the fertile source of territorial terms, have most of our modern surnames arisen.
The words whence names were compounded were usually the names of deities and those of animals, together with epithets, or terms of office, generally conveying good auguries. They were usually connected with some great hero belonging to the various cycles of myth, in which the Teuton imagination revelled, and which, for the most part, under Christian influence, descended from the divine to the heroic, and then to the fairy tale.
These Teutonic centres of legend may be considered as threefold. There is the great Scandinavian mythological system, as elaborate and as poetical as that of the Greeks, and which belonged in part, at least, to the Goths, Franks, and Saxons, though their early conversion deprived it of five hundred years of development; and Louis le Debonnaire unfortunately destroyed the poetry that would have shown us what it had been among them.
Next, there is the cycle of Romance, represented in Scandinavia by the latter part of the elder Edda and by the Volsunga Saga, in Denmark by the Vilkina Saga, and in the centre of Europe by the Nibelungenlied, where old myths have become heroic tales that have hung themselves round the names of Attila the Hun and Theodoric of Verona, who in Germany is the centre of a great number of ancient legends, once doubtless of deified ancestors.
Thirdly, we have the grand poetical world, in which Charlemagne has been adopted as the sovereign, and Roland as the hero—the world of French romance, Spanish ballad, and Italian poetry, which is to continental chivalry what the Round Table is to our own.