Þóra Greylock

It's not essential, but it's helpful to have a persona name in the SCA. And my real name isn't very Viking. So I decided to pick a Norse name.

Norse surnames were patronyms, and still are in Iceland. This means that, rather than having a surname passed down from parent to child, a child family name is based on the father's (or, rarely then, increasingly now, the mother's) name. I'd be my father's daughter, so one of the first decisions was that my name would be something somethingdóttir.

I looked through various lists of Norse names, including lists of bynames—basically nicknames. On seeing Greylock as a byname, I knew I had to have it—I've had white streaks in my hair since my early twenties. Unfortunately, I've only seen it in the one list, which doesn't have its source, and haven't been able to find it elsewhere, so I'll have difficulty with documentation when I come to register the name. But I think it's a reasonable Norse byname, so I hope I'll get away with it. If not, I suppose I can register without a byname, and go by it anyway.

Thora, or Þóra, I chose by scanning through lists of female names, and picking out a few that I liked. Sigrid was the front runner for a while. But I decided that I wanted a name that could be easily converted if I shifted my interest to another time or place. If I was going for Christian era, that would have been easy enough - there's so many variations on Mary and saints' names. But I wanted a pagan, or a pagan/Christian synthesis persona, not someone who would have a Christian name. I couldn't find any names I liked that had cognates in other places. But I've come up with a "fake cognate" that I'm happy with. Thora is short for female names beginning with Thor/Þór. I chose Þórdís as the name I would have been given at birth. Thor is a god. Dís means goddess. My fake cognate is Dorothea and its cognates, my reasoning being that Thor isn't too far off Doro in sound, and thea means goddess, like dís does. I also get to keep ...morphemes(?)... starting with Th and D, albeit swapped around. Dorothea itself has a bunch of variants; Theodora, Dorothy, Dorotea, and perhaps, at a stretch, Isidore, giving me lots of freedom. From Byzantium to England, and Spain to Scandinavia. I haven't found a suitable Irish fake cognate, but give me time :-)

I haven't yet chose a patronym, so I'm currently Þórdís Somethingdóttir, known as Thora Greylock.

Frontrunner for patronym is Røriksdottir (spelling to be checked). I like the sound and it has cognates (not fake ones!) in other languages, even Spanish, where it's Rodríguez. I can fake cognate it to Irish too, via Roderick, an Anglicisation of the unrelated (as far as I know) Rørik and Ruaidhrí. One reason for holding off on making a decision is that I'm not sure where exactly my persona is from. Just Scandinavia. Rørik is Old East Norse, spoken mostly in what is now Denmark and Sweden. If I want to be from Norway, it'd be Hrœrekr, which looks a bit scary to pronounce and spell. People from both Denmark and Norway settled in Ireland, so my persona biography justifies either very easily, and who's to say that people from Sweden didn't settle too, just in smaller numbers? Or perhaps even Iceland.

So, that's the state of the name.

By the way, if you're semi interested in the SCA, but all this thinking about a name is putting you off, don't worry about it. You do not have to put this much thought into it. I could have been [real given name] of Dun In Mara if I wanted. Or picked a time and place and a name that fits them. That time and place doesn't have to be same as the one you dress up as, which you can change at any time. Eg I could have picked Alessandra Giraldi (both names from renaissance Florence) and still been a Viking. And then worn Byzantine clothes.