CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

SCANDINAVIAN PLACE NAMES

IN THE BRITISH ISLES

Gillian Fellows-Jensen

S

candinavian place names are found in varying densities over much of the British
Isles. They occur in the Northern and Western Isles and along the northern, western
and north-eastern seaboard of Scotland, in the Isle of Man, in eastern, northern and
north-western England, as well as in the northern and southern seaboard of Wales and
along the eastern seaboard of Ireland. It is impossible to date the coining of the place
names concerned but it seems reasonable to assume that the first settlements arose some
time after the first Viking raids in the British Isles.
Since documentation for Scandinavian settlement is earliest evidenced in England,
the study will begin with the part of the region now known as the Danelaw. Three
recorded partitions of land were made by the Danes in 876 , 877 and 880 , and it was
earlier thought that these partitions marked the first settlements in England by the rank
and file of the Danish army. It now seems more likely that most of the Scandinavian
place names in the Danelaw were not coined until the tenth century, when the Danes
began to split up between themselves the great English estates and large numbers of
Scandinavian names were coined for individually owned units of settlement. It should
not be forgotten, of course, that over half of the old names of Celtic and English origin in
the Danelaw survived and that even where Scandinavian names were most numerous,
namely in parts of Yorkshire and the East Midlands, less than a third of the Domesday
place names were of Scandinavian origin.
The largest group of Scandinavian names in England is that consisting of the over
700 settlements with names ending in -bý, a word meaning ‘settlement’ and ranging in
size from a flourishing town to a single farm (Figures 28. 1 and 28. 2 ). To begin with,
these names would seem to have had as their first elements common nouns, for example
topographical words such as dalr ‘valley’ in Dalby and saurr ‘sour ground’ in Sowerby,
terms for trees and plants such as askr ‘ash-tree’ in Ashby and English æppel ‘apple’ in
Eppleby, or animal terms such as gríss ‘pig’ in Girsby and veðr ‘wether’ in Wetherby. Such
names occur not only in Yorkshire and the East Midlands but also, although less fre-
quently, in East Anglia and north-west England. No fewer than forty-seven of the names
ending in -bý take the form Kirby or Kirkby, meaning ‘church settlement’, and most of
these were originally borne by English settlements later renamed by the Danes. It was
probably at a slightly later date that the names ending in -bý in England began to