Surnames and local names have been often discussed, but the Christian name has been usually considered too fortuitous to be worthy of notice. Camden did indeed review the current ones of his own day, and gave many correct explanations, chiefly from the German author Luther Dasipodius. Verstegen followed him up, but was more speculative and less correct; and since that date (as far as I am aware) no English author has given any real trustworthy information to the subject, as a subject. A few lists of names and meanings now and then have appeared in magazines and popular works, but they have generally been copies of Verstegen, with childishly shallow and incorrect additions. One paper which long ago appeared in Chambers’ Journal, was the only really correct information on English names en masse that I have met with.
The Anglo-Saxon names had been, however, treated of by Sharon Turner in his history, and Mr. Kemble put forth a very interesting lecture on Names, Surnames, and Nicknames among the Anglo-Saxons. Thierry, moreover, gives several explanations, both of Saxon and Frank ones, in the notes to his Conquête d’Angleterre and Récits des Rois Mérovingiens. These were groundwork. Neither Turner nor Thierry is always right, for want of having studied the matter comparatively; but they threw light on one another, and opened the way to the dissection of other names, neglected by them, with the aid of an Anglo-Saxon dictionary.
The Scriptural class of names was studied with less difficulty. Every Hebrew one has been fully discussed and examined by the best scholars; and the Greek, both biblical and classical, have received the same attention, and are in fact the most easy of all, as a class. With regard to Latin, much must be doubtful and inexplicable, but the best information at present attained to was easily accessible.
The numerous race of German appellations has received full attention from many ripe German philologists, and I have made much use of their works. The Scandinavian class has been most ably treated by Professor Munch of Christiania, in a series of contributions to the Norsk Maanedskrifts, of which I have been kindly permitted to make free use, and which has aided me more than any other treatise on Teutonic nomenclature.
Our Keltic class of names has presented far greater difficulties.[difficulties.] for the Cymric department, I have gathered from many quarters, the safest being Lady Charlotte Guest’s notes to the Mabinogion and M. de Villemarqué’s elucidations of King Arthur’s romances, Rees’s Welsh Saints, Williams’s Ecclesiastical Antiquities, and Chalmers’s Caledonia; the least safe, Davies’s various speculations on British antiquities and the Cambro-Briton. These verified by Dr. Owen Pugh’s Welsh Dictionary, and an occasional light from Diefenbach and Zeuss, together with a list kindly extracted for me from the Brut, have been my authorities in the Welsh and Breton departments. In the Erse and Gaelic names I was assisted by a very kind letter from the lamented Dr. O'Donovan, whose death deprived me of his promised revision of this extremely difficult class, and left me to make it out to the best of my ability from his contributions to the publications of the Archæological Society, from the notes to those of the Ossianic Society, Chalmers’s Caledonia, and the Highland Society’s Gaelic Dictionary.
From the first, however, I had perceived that the curiosity of the study does not lie merely in the meanings of the sounds by which men in one country are distinguished from one another. The changes through which the word passes is one great interest, and for this I had been collecting for years, from dictionaries, books of travels, histories, and popular tales, whenever people were so good as to give the genuine word, instead of translating it into English. Dr. G. Michaelis' Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Gebrauchlichsten Taufnamen left in me little to desire in this respect, especially with regard to German dialects, and I have used it copiously.
The history of names, however, seemed to have been but little examined, nor why one should be popular and another forgotten—why one should flourish throughout Europe, another in one country alone, another around some petty district. Some of these questions were answered by history, some by genealogy, many more by the tracing of patron saints and their relics and legends. Here my great aid has been a French edition of Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints, where, in the notes, are many accounts of the locality and translations of relics; also, Mrs. Jamieson’s Sacred and Legendary Art, together with many a chance notice in histories or books of travels. In each case I have tried to find out whence the name came, whether it had a patron, and whether the patron took it from the myths or heroes of his own country, or from the meaning of the words. I have then tried to classify the names, having found that to treat them merely alphabetically utterly destroyed all their interest and connection. It has been a loose classification, first by language, then by meaning or spirit, but always with the endeavour to make them appear in their connection, and to bring out their interest.
In general I have only had recourse to original authorities where their modern interpreters have failed me, secure that their conclusions are more trustworthy than my own could be with my limited knowledge of the subjects, which could never all be sufficiently studied by any one person.
Where I have given a reference it has been at times to the book whence I have verified rather than originally obtained my information, and in matters of universally known history or mythology, I have not always given an authority, thinking it superfluous. Indeed, the scriptural and classical portion is briefer and less detailed than the Teutonic and Keltic, as being already better known.
I have many warm thanks to render for questions answered and books consulted for me by able and distinguished scholars, and other thanks equally warm and sincere to kind friends and strangers who have collected materials that have been of essential service to me.