Another old word for stone is hall, much used in the North; and in a few cases, such as that of the Scottish Halbert, or Hobbie, creeping to our island with its Danish invaders; but except in this, and a few surnames, unknown away from the North, save for the Hallar, or stone warrior, of Germany.

The northern varieties, however, had much reputation in their own country. Hallgerda is in the Njal Saga the haughty wife of Gunnar, of Lithend, the dame whose virulence is the cause of all the vengeance and counter-vengeance of the story.

Grjot, in German gries, is another word for a stone. It was not so common as the others; but there was both a masculine and feminine Grjotgard, who in Denmark were rendered, the one into Gregorius, the other into Margarethe. The English lady, Græsia de Bruere (temp. Henry III.), must have been named from gries, a stone.

So too was Gries-hilda—Stone battle maid. Griselda was the perfectly patient wife whose tale was told by Boccaccio, and narrated by Petrarch to Chaucer, who told it in his own way. The Scots seem to have been peculiarly delighted with the lady Griselidis—and Grizell or Grisell acquired fresh honour with Lady Grisell Baillie. Grizzie or Girzie are the contractions, and there is a Grisley in the register of Madran, Cornwall, dated 1662.

Though in general Borg, or Bjorg, is used to mean protection, yet Bergstein is most probably a mountain stone, and it curiously answers to two names of noted ecclesiastics from Somersetshire, whose first syllable Dun is a hill; the same with our present word down, and the dunes on the other side of the Channel, where Dunkirk answers to our Dunchurch. The word is probably the Keltic don, dark brown, grey, or dun, used as the epithet of a hill, and lasting on like other Keltic local titles in the dunum of the Romans and the dun of the Teutons.

The two Somerset Duns are the hill-wolf, Dunulf, who is said by one of the traditions that ought to be true, to have been the swineherd whose cakes King Alfred burnt, and to have been afterwards made by him bishop of Winchester, which a Dunulf certainly was. The other was Dunstan, the mighty ascetic Abbot of Glastonbury and Archbishop of Canterbury, whose career, between wisdom and devotion, frenzy and sternness, is one of the least explicable studies of history.

His place in the calendar has given this rugged mountain stone a few namesakes.