Down low in Wexford

[muckefuck]

Finished with Tóibín, moved on to Bowen. Just read a passage where the maid informed the young lady of the household that the mistress has been snooping in her room while she was out. "She said to me this morning, did I not find it difficult dusting with all that mess about. Your bears' party, she meant[.]" For a few glorious pages, I thought I'd stumbled across a delightful late-Victorian idiom for "shambles", but sadly the collection of carved bears in her bedroom is very literal.

Both the Tóibín novels were rather similar, being set in and around Wexford, particularly the seaside town of Cush (where Tóibín's family apparently had a holiday cottage). One can't help but be struck by the frequency of placenames terminating in -low--Tullow, Carlow, Arklow, Wicklow. (Also, with slightly different spelling, Curracloe.) Makes one wonder if we aren't looking at a common formant.

The area is known for its long history of Germanic settlement (both Viking and "Old English") so I thought at first this might be the same element one sees in such names as Gütersloh, Oslo, and Waterloo, a cognate of English lea. But that is true for only one of the cases, Wicklow (i.e. Wykinglo "Viking lea"). Arklow is also a Germanic name, but the second element is apparently lág "low [place]". The other toponyms seem to owe their forms to a local Leinster pronunciation of -ach. Carlow is an anglicisation of Ceatharlach (from ceathra "cattle"), Tullow of Tulach ("mound"). And Curracloe is off on its own (Currach Cló "marsh of the impression").

In contrast, the Viking towns have completely unrelated names in Irish. Wicklow is Cill Mhantáin "church of Mantán ['toothless']", which has spawned a charming story about one of St Patrick's followers losing a tooth in a brawl with pagans there and then returning to found a church. And Arklow An tInbhear Mór "The Big Estuary", historically anglicised as "Invermore". Similarly, the town of Wexford (Veisafjǫrðr "Mudflatsfirth") carries the more romantic name of Loch Garman, supposedly in memory of a young man drowned on the flats by an enchantress. Maybe he was looking for his teeth?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Tóibín invited my sister to his prom, many years ago. My father refused (the plight of the first-born girl). He now laughs, knowing how foolish he was and how safe she would have been!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

A' bhfuil aithne agam ort?

[paradigmslost.livejournal.com]

I read these posts with particular interest, as they are not far from where I live, and I always noticed the similar endings. Maybe they were back-formations, their similar endings made identical in people's memory.

Maybe you could help clear some thoughts of mine. I always wondered about the fact that Dublin seems to use Gaelic lexemes (dubh = black, dubh linn = blackpool, I'm told), but in a Germanic order, with the adjective first. I thought that Vikings may have settled there long enough to learn the local language, but reflexively placed them in a familiar grammar, as we might say "two samurais." Do you know more about it?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That's certainly the pattern in Normandy and other parts of northern France, e.g. Neuville and Boncourt vs. Villeneuve and Courbon further south, and no one disputes that this is due to Germanic influence. Funny thing is, I can't think of any other parallel examples from Ireland--can you?

[paradigmslost.livejournal.com]

Interesting -- I didn't know that about Normandy. It's hard to say how many examples are here, because place names here are a mix of Gaelic (noun-adj) and Anglicised (adj-noun). It's hard to say what derives from the Vikings -- I'll think about it.