Names of Places in Normandy and Orkney.
—In reading Depping's History of the Norman Maritime Expeditions, my attention was directed to Appendix IX. vol. ii. p. 339., "Des Noms Topographiques de Normandie dont l'origine est étrangère." Many of the names given there resemble those in Orkney. I note a few of them.
Depedal. Deepdale, a secluded valley near Kirkwall; Dalv, Icelandic, a valley.
Auppegard, Eppegard in Normandy; Kongsgarth, Herdmansgarth in Orkney; Icelandic Gardr, a field, an enclosure.
Cape La Hogue, derived by M. Depping from hougr, a promontory; Hoxay in Orkney, hougs and ay, an island. Haugs-eid, isthmus of the hillock, is another derivation.
Cherbourg, Dep. p. 331.; Suhm, in a note appended, finds the root in his tongue, skiair, skeer; Icelandic Sker, a sea-rock, the Orkney Skerry, an islet covered at high water.
Houlmes, near Rouen; the Orkney Holm, a small island generally uninhabited.
Yvetot; Toft common in Orkney.
Bye, a dwelling, is the Orkney Bu or Boo, a pure Icelandic word.
Other instances could be given; and there is nothing remarkable in this when it is considered that the invaders of Orkney and Normandy were the same people at the same period, and the better preservation of the Norse tongue in Orkney is readily to be accounted for. In Normandy the language of the invaders was lost in the French in a very short space of time, while the Norse continued the language of Orkney and Zetland during their subjection to the Norwegian earls for a period of 600 years; and only last year, 1850, it was that an old man in Unst in Zetland, who could speak Norse, died at the age of eighty-seven years; and except there be in Foula (Fougla, the fowls' island, called Thule in the Latin charters of its proprietors) a person living who can speak it, that old tongue is extinct in Britain.