Sólund : Súlund

Abstract

The Faroese verb súlunda, »destroy, waste, ruin,« with its Icelandic parallel sólunda, has most probably its origin in the Viking age. For technical reasons a word of this category must be derived from a noun súlund or sólund (cf. pfunda, vb., from pfund, fem.; tíunda, vb., from tíund, fem.). An apellative súlund (or sólund) is not known, and has probably never existed. The verb súlunda is therefore best explained as a derivative of a place*name Súlund : Sólund (with the suffix -und, fem., a wellsknown element in several Scandinavian nanies, especially of islands) A quite famous example is Suhn, the name of a group of islands outside the Sognefiord in Norway. The modern Norwegian form of the name goes back to a mediaeval form Súlund, sing., cf.
the plural »i Sulundum« (Hauksbók, p. 335). All other extant mediaeval forms are spelled with =ó=: Sólund, sing., has only been recorded once (in the enumeration of islands in Snorra Edda II, 492), and Sólundar--, gen., twice (»Sólundar haf« in Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, and »Sólundar sund« in one of the stanzas in Kormáks saga), in all other instances the plural is used both in Icelandic and Norwegian sources from the Middle Ages: Sólundir and one example of Sólundar. According to Landnáma and the Kings' Sagas ships used to gather near Sólundir before they set out for the voyage to the west. In Historia Norwegiæ, a description of Norway and Norwegian history written in the 12th or 13th century only known from an Orcadian MS (15th cent.),
it is explained why the sea between Norway and Ireland was called Sólundarhaf: »Sunt ergo insulae praeiacentes Gulaciae, quae ab incolis Solundae nominantur, unde Solundicum mare dictum, quod inter Norvegiam et Iberniam fluit, in quo sunt Orchades insulae.« Also in this text the name is spelled with =ó*, and if the form reflects Orcadian tradition, people in the Orkneys must have said Sólundarhaf, and not Súlundarhaf as their kinsmen in the Faroes did, since the Faroese verb súlunda can only be derived from the form Súlund. The Icelandic verb sólunda, »perdere, jacturam facere,« was already in the 17th century explained as a derivative of the Norwegian placename Sólundir, »eo qvod Naves ibi sæpe pereant« (Guðmundur Andresson), »par voru opt rænd skip, pvi er sagt bað sólundist sem fer(vocabulary in AM 738,4°).