Norse Place Names in Scotland: Sources and Corrections

Sutherland, in Scotland's far north, is Old Norse Suðrland, "south land": south of the Norse earldom in Orkney and Caithness. Dingwall is þingvöllr, "assembly field", the same word as Tynwald on the Isle of Man. Kirkwall is Kirkjuvágr, "church bay". The Hebrides were Suðreyjar, the southern isles, and the Bishop of Sodor and Man still carries the name. This page gives the source for every slide.

Every factual claim in our carousel on Norse place names in Scotland and in its caption, with its source. It follows our sources page for the English -by names, Grimsby among them. Section numbers 01 to 05 match the number at the top of each slide; 07 to 10 are the later slides' places in the carousel. The cover and sections 02, 03, 05 and 07 use real photographs, credited below. The pictures in 01 and 04 are modern illustrations.

How we cite. Our main guide is Roddy Maclean's bilingual booklet for Scottish Natural Heritage, Gaelic and Norse in the Landscape: Place names in Caithness and Sutherland (2010), with the national place-name body, Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba, for the islands and for Dingwall. For the saga we read Joseph Anderson's 1873 English edition, The Orkneyinga Saga, and the Old Norse text of Orkneyinga saga as it stands in Flateyjarbók, a manuscript written between 1387 and 1394. Anderson could show only that the saga was known in Iceland in the first half of the thirteenth century. The sagas were written down in the 13th century, two to three hundred years after the events. They are not Viking Age records.

Slide by slide

Cover. "Scotland's far north is called 'South Land'."

Maclean's booklet: "The Norse called the country to the immediate south Suðrland 'Southland', anglicised as Southerland, later Sutherland." The name is in the saga itself. In Flateyjarbók the king of Scots gives the boy Earl Þorfinnr Katanes ok Sudrland ok jalls nafnn, "Caithness and Sutherland and the title of earl"; Anderson's index gives "Sutherland (Sudrland)" on nine pages of the saga text.

Two limits. The name first covered less ground than the county does now: it "properly applied only to the eastern part of the current county", as Maclean puts it. And the cover says "far north", not "northernmost", because the northernmost point of mainland Britain, Dunnet Head, is in Caithness.

Photo: Roger Davies, "Welcome to Sutherland at the Ord of Caithness", geograph.org.uk, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0. Cropped by us, with text added.

01. South of whom?

South of the earls. Anderson's introduction describes the Norse earldom on the mainland as Caithness and the land down to the Kyle of Sutherland, its "southern boundary"; the saga says the first earls conquered the country as far south as Ekkialsbakki. From Orkney and Caithness, the next country down was the south land. That is the slide's "the name later spread to a whole county on Scotland's north coast".

Caithness is Norse too. Maclean: the pre-Norse people of Caithness and east Sutherland "were known as the 'Cat People'. This has given us the name Caithness, from the Norse Katanes 'Promontory of the Cat People'." The Gaelic name, which the caption gives, is Gallaibh, "among the strangers". The booklet does not say who the strangers were, and we do not either.

Sources: Maclean (2010); Anderson (1873), introduction and index; Orkneyinga saga, Flateyjarbók text (heimskringla.no). The picture on this slide is a modern illustration.

02. A town named after a parliament

Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba's entry "Dingwall ~ Inbhir Pheofharain": "Dingwall is a name of Norse origin: Þingvellir meaning 'assembly field'", and "this Norse term is also the origin of the name of Tynwald, the parliament of the Isle of Man." A report for The Highland Council, D. D. MacDonald's Investigating Dingwall as Þingvöllr, gives the singular: "Old Norse Þingvöllr, the meeting field, or plain, on which a þing had met." It lists the relatives: Tingwall in Orkney and in Shetland, Thingwall in Cheshire and Lancashire, Tinwald near Dumfries and Tynwald. Iceland's Þingvellir is the plural of the same word. The earliest written form is "Dingwell in Ros", in Alexander II's royal burgh charter of 1226.

What a thing did: Tynwald's own history page says the name "is derived from the Norse word Thingvollr, meaning assembly field", and describes such an assembly as a high court of justice and a place to make laws. One honest limit on Dingwall: MacDonald writes that "nothing has been firmly known of Dingwall as a Thingsite beyond the place-name". That is why the slide says "the name is the main sign a Norse assembly met there".

Sources: Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba, "Dingwall ~ Inbhir Pheofharain"; D. D. MacDonald, report for The Highland Council (Highland Historic Environment Record); Tynwald, "History". Photo: Shritwod, "Tynwald Hill", Isle of Man, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped by us, with text added.

03. There is no wall in Kirkwall

The saga first names the town when Earl Rögnvaldr Brúsason settles there for the winter, in the eleventh century. Anderson notes that the name "does not occur in the Saga before the time of Earl Rögnvald Brusison". Flateyjarbók: Rognvalldr jall sat j Kirkiuuoge. Anderson: "Earl Rögnvald resided in Kirkiuvag (Kirkwall), and brought there all necessaries for the winter." The normalized form is Kirkjuvágr, "church bay". On the church, Anderson hedges, and so does the slide: "It seems probable that it is to the church of St. Olaf that Kirkwall owes its name of Kirkiu-vagr, the Creek of the Kirk."

The spelling: in 1422 a grant from King Eirik hands over "thet slot oc faeste Kirkqwaw liggende j Orknoy", the castle of Kirkqwaw in Orkney, so the late medieval name still ended in -waw. The slide's "The 'wall' is only vágr, bay, in a spelling that drifted" means exactly that: no wall, and no misreading, only a spelling. The slide calls the saga "a 13th-century text"; the firmest date in our sources is Anderson's, that it was known in Iceland in the first half of the thirteenth century.

Sources: Orkneyinga saga, the chapters of Rögnvaldr Brúsason (Flateyjarbók text; Anderson 1873, translation and introduction). Photo: Virtual-Pano, "Orkney Islands - St Magnus Cathedral", via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped by us, with text added. Anderson dates the start of the cathedral to 1137; the church of St Olaf was earlier.

04. A bishop still carries the Norse name

The Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, "Sodor and Man: Introduction": "Sodor" comes from the time of "the Viking kings of Man who also ruled the Scottish Hebrides and referred to this area as 'sud[r]e øyar' (southern islands) in relation to Orkney and Shetland." The diocese "was placed under the metropolitical authority of the archbishop of Nidaros (Trondheim) in Norway in 1153", having apparently answered to York before. In the saga the Hebrides are Sudreyar throughout, and Anderson wrote in 1873 that the name "still survives in the title of the Bishop of Sodor and Man."

It still does: the diocese is today the Diocese of Sodor and Man, in the Church of England. The Scottish isles left it long ago; the name stayed.

Sources: J. M. Horn, D. M. Smith and P. Mussett, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541-1857, vol. 11 (British History Online); Anderson (1873), introduction. The picture on this slide is a modern illustration.

05. The Gaelic heartland has a Norse map

Dr Jacob King, "Island Place-names" (Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba): in the north of the islands Gaelic "supplanted the Norse language at a much later date. Ironically, most names in the Western Isles, which we traditionally think of as a Gaelic stronghold, are of Norse origin." Island names ending in -aigh, -ey, -ay and -a are in general Norse, from øy, island. Jura is his example: "the aptly-named Jura from Dýr-øy 'deer island'", by way of Gaelic Diùra. Jura itself lies in the Inner Hebrides, where King finds many more Gaelic names.

The count is from Ian A. Fraser, "The Place Names of Lewis: The Norse Evidence", Northern Studies 4 (1974), reporting Magne Oftedal's 1954 study: "Oftedal's list of 126 village names included 99 decidedly of Norse origin". Oftedal called his names "rather arbitrarily selected". Fraser adds the other side. In a sample of 65 minor names he recorded in 1966, 55 per cent were entirely Gaelic, and the Norse names "achieved permanence long after Norse ceased to be a spoken language in the islands". Village names are mostly Norse; the small names of fields and hills are mixed.

Hence the slide's last line: a Norse name shows where the language went, not every settler.

Sources: J. King, "Island Place-names"; I. A. Fraser, Northern Studies 4 (1974), pp. 11 to 21, citing M. Oftedal, Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap XVII (1954). Photo: Alan Reid, "Paps of Jura", geograph.org.uk, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0. Cropped by us, with text added.

07. Does your place end in -wick, -ay, -dale or -ness?

All four examples are Maclean's. "Wick derives from vík 'bay'", and the island of Stroma is "straum-ey 'current-isle'", apt in the tides of the Pentland Firth. On -dale: "Norse names end in -dal whereas Gaelic names start with dal-. Norse examples are Berriedale 'rocky dale', Helmsdale 'Hjalmund's dale' and Halladale 'holy dale'." And "ness 'promontory' is common and well known". The -ay ending is King's øy, island (see 05). So a dale at the end of a name points to Norse, and a dal- at the front to Gaelic.

Photo: Roger Davies, "Welcome to Caithness sign on the A9", geograph.org.uk, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0. Cropped by us, with text added.

08. The Norse named people too

A byname was what everyone else called you: Sigurðr Snake-in-the-Eye, Þorbjörn the Brittle. The sagas record them because that is how people were told apart. Our free Viking name generator draws on real Old Norse given names and bynames from medieval sources.

09. Put a name on steel

Any blade in our personalized Viking blades collection can carry a name, a date or a word, laser-engraved exactly as you approve it. The knife on the slide reads ERIKSSON. In Old Norse that is Eiríksson, "son of Eiríkr", the Norse way of naming a son after his father, and his daughter would be Eiríksdóttir. The photograph shows a forged blade with a raven's head at the pommel, a leather-wrapped grip and a stitched leather sheath.

10. Norse, in silver

The ring is our handmade wolf sterling silver ring, with a Norse animal wrapped round the band: 925 sterling silver, about 7 g, made to order in your size.

Caption. Gallaibh, the west, and the dates

"Gaelic still calls it Gallaibh, 'among the strangers'." Maclean: "The Gaelic for Caithness is Gallaibh 'among the strangers'." See 01.

"In the west, Gaelic later replaced Norse speech and renamed many small places, but the big names stayed." See 05: King on Gaelic arriving later in the north of the islands, Fraser on the minor names. The east went a different way. In north-eastern Caithness, Maclean writes, "Scots probably replaced Norn, the Scandinavian speech which developed from Old Norse", "without an intermediate phase of Gaelic".

"The sagas were written down in the 13th century, two to three hundred years after the events." See "How we cite" above. Maclean dates the forming of Norse place names in the region broadly to between the 9th and 13th centuries.

The rest of the caption repeats the cover and 01 to 05. The photo line credits Roger Davies, Shritwod, Virtual-Pano and Alan Reid; each file and licence is linked in its section above.

What we do not claim

• That the sagas are Viking Age sources. They were written down in the 13th century; the Flateyjarbók text is from the 1380s and 1390s.
• That Sutherland is the northernmost part of Scotland. Dunnet Head, in Caithness, is the northernmost point of mainland Britain.
• A date for the naming of Suðrland. We found none.
• That Skye, Uist or Lewis are Norse names. King derives Skye from old Gaelic Sgithe, probably "winged", says Uist defies analysis, and calls Lewis's "song house" derivation "rather an odd name".
• That most place names in Lewis are Norse. The count is 99 of 126 village names, in a list its author called arbitrary, from 1954.
• That people misunderstood Kirkwall's name. The spelling drifted.
• That Dingwall's assembly met on a known spot in the Viking Age. The thing is read from the name.
• That Tynwald first met in 979. Tynwald's own site says there is no documentary evidence for that date.
• That a Norse name means a Norse family lived there. It shows where the language went, not every settler.
• That the pictures in 01 and 04 show real people or ships. They are modern illustrations.

Corrections

None yet. If you find an error, tell us, with a citation.

Frequently asked questions

Why is Sutherland called Sutherland if it is in the far north?

The name is Old Norse Suðrland, south land. The Norse earls ruled from Orkney and Caithness, and the country to their south was Suðrland. It first meant only the eastern part of today's county and appears as Sudrland in Orkneyinga saga. The northernmost point of mainland Britain, Dunnet Head, is in Caithness.

What does Dingwall mean?

Dingwall is Old Norse þingvöllr, assembly field, the place where a thing met. The same word gave Tingwall in Orkney and Shetland and Tynwald on the Isle of Man, and Iceland's Þingvellir is its plural. The town is Dingwell in Ros in a charter of 1226. Where Dingwall's assembly met is inferred from the name alone.

Why is there no wall in Kirkwall?

Orkneyinga saga calls the town Kirkjuvágr, church bay, probably after an early church of St Olaf. In 1422 the name was still spelled Kirkqwaw, and only later did vágr, bay, drift into wall. The saga was known in Iceland in the first half of the 13th century.

Why is the Bishop of Sodor and Man called that?

Sodor is Norse Suðreyjar, the southern isles: the Hebrides, as seen from Orkney and Shetland. The Viking kings of Man also ruled the Hebrides, and in 1153 the diocese was placed under the archbishop of Nidaros, Trondheim. The Scottish isles left it long ago, but the Diocese of Sodor and Man keeps the name.