...
My analyses of hundreds of names must often be oversimplied or too general. The in-evitablemistakeswillpleasepartisansforthetraditionalCeltic‘white, pure’model, whichhasbeen endorsed by just about every distinguished academic linguist with experience in Celticlanguages. These scholars have paid too much attention to linguistic theory and not enoughto map reading.Howfarcanthislogicbetaken? Whataboutpersonalanddivinenames? Asearchthroughthe Clauss-Slaby epigraphic database produces nearly a thousand mentions of VIND, or simi-lar, which need to be painstakingly examined and whittled down. Several hundred can rapidlybe thrown out as linguistic coincidences (based on
quindecim
‘fteen’,
vindemia
‘grape har-vest’,
vindictus
‘freed slave’, etc) and post-Roman special cases (
Reccesvindus
etc).The overwhelming majority of VIND epigraphs are very Roman, not Celtic. Particularlyprominent is one of the earliest attested Latin words,
vindex
‘defender, claimant, champion’,from which hundreds of Roman soldiers and their families drew names
Vindex
or its deriva-tives
Vindicius
,
Vindicianus
, etc. Romans seem to have rung the changes around that core(in spelling, grammar, and creativity) in much the same way as there are now hundreds of variations on John Smith.Great swathes of Latin (for example in the retirement diplomas of soldiers who were
PiisVindicibus
‘loyal and erce’) soon show that personal names based on VIND often derivedfrom a place name. The champion leavers of epigraphs were
Vindelici
soldiers recruited fromthe oodplain of the river Lech around modern Augst in Bavaria. In fact, the overwhelmingmajority of VIND names came from regions that entered history speaking a Germanic lan-guage. Maybe regions such as Austria or the Rhineland had a particularly noteworthy contrastbetween hills and valley bottoms.A good place to seek low-status British personal names is curse tablets, but they must betreated with caution, because curses often used formulaic, hocus-pocus language, with Latin
vindico
‘to claim’ prominent. Also VIND-, not necessarily a fuller VINDIC-, may mark former slaves.In the end, it becomes necessary to examine in forensic detail just a few names mostcommonly cited as strong evidence for old thinking. For example,
Apollo Vindonno
on votivestatue inscriptions may have been a local protective god of an
onno
‘spring’, a holy well atthe head of a valley. And
Alcovindos
makes sense starting like Latin
alces
‘elk’, because deerthrive in wet, wooded valleys.The personal name
Cunovendus
, clearly linked to Britain and attested repeatedly, has rstelement
Cuno
, of debatable meaning (possibly like ‘hound’, ‘kin’, ‘head’, or ‘chine’). Was
Cunovendus
blonde or an ex-slave? Did he keep hounds, or live at the head of a valley? Aswith many compound names, reversing its order of elements yields another name, the place
Academia Letters, November 2021
Corresponding Author:
Anthony Durham,
[email protected]
Citation:
Durham, A. (2021). Vindo- in Early Place Names.
Academia Letters
, Article 4033.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4033
.
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©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0