Names, whether personal names or place names, are often overlooked in studies of folk culture and folk narrative. But, as W. F. H. Nicolaisen shows in In the Beginning was the Name, a collection of his essays on names and naming, naming is an important aspect of folk culture. Nicolaisen approaches naming as a traditional folkloric act, which means that even in his more philological essays he pays attention to the semantics of naming and how naming works. (I should probably note here that I was one of Nicolaisen’s students as an undergraduate at SUNY-Binghamton.)
These essays cover a variety of topics, but mostly focus on Scotland and northwestern Europe in terms of place. Several of the essays, such as “The Prodigious Jump,” “Names as Verbal Icons,” and “The Past as Place: Names, Stories, and the Remembered Self,” concentrate on specifically folkloric topics or use folk literature extensively as evidence. In “The Prodigious Jump” Nicolaisen examines place-name legends associated with motif F1071 “The Prodigious Jump.” “Names as Verbal Icons” looks at “the deliberate poetic usage of the lexically meaningless name as a foregrounding device by the creative artist who seizes upon the onomastic item as a welcome means of enriching and condensing the texture of his work” (75). The sort of names Nicolaisen refers to here are names such as Dunfermling, Usher’s Well, or Bucklesfordberry, from the ballads “Sir Patrick Spens,” “The Wife of Usher’s Well,” and “Little Musgrave,” or names in literary works that cannot be analyzed by the writer or audience into meaningful elements, but are nonetheless used to create a certain feeling of place. Other essays, such as “Scandinavian Shore Names in Shetland: The Onomastic Sub-Dialect of a Coastscape” and “’The Post-Norse Place-Names of Shetland,” illuminate the mentality of those who named the places surrounding them.
Nicolaisen’s studies are not limited to just place names. In another essay in the volume, for example, “Surnames and Medieval Popular Culture,” he examines how surnames give us insight into medieval popular culture.
As Nicolaisen comments at the end of “Scandinavian Shore Names,” the concept “coast” becomes a viable concept for us through naming. As he suggests, “[t]hrough naming that concept is made both systemic and actual, and where land and sea meet, define each other and encroach upon one another, becomes a thinkable reality” (119). This idea can be further generalized to naming as a whole, whether in the real world or that of narrative: it is through naming that these worlds become real to us. Indeed, the study of names, as practiced by a place-name scholar like Nicolaisen, contributes in important ways to the general study of semantics and historical mentalities, whether in Europe or elsewhere.
As with his 1976 book Scottish Place Names, which won the Chicago Folklore Prize in 1977, this is a book that anyone with an interest in Scottish folklore or place names will want to have. But, because Nicolaisen’s essays contribute so insightfully to the study of the relationships of geography, landscape, naming, and narrative, this is a book that all who are interested in the processes of narration and naming, whether in northwestern Europe or beyond, should read.
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[Review length: 533 words • Review posted on September 5, 2013]