Re: Iseut/Isolde etymology: Celtic?

From: Brian M. Scott
Message: 68364
Date: 2012-01-05

At 8:19:31 PM on Tuesday, January 3, 2012, Joao S. Lopes
wrote:

> Is there a secure etymology for Iseut/Iseult, Isolde from
> Tristan & Isolde?

OFr <Iseldis> appears by 1113 and appears to be of
Continental Germanic origin, from *I:s(a(r)n)-hildiz
'iron-battle'. A masculine <Isoldus>, presumably with the
same prototheme and a deuterotheme from *-waldaz 'power,
rule', is attested even earlier; I shouldn't be surprised if
the <o> forms of the feminine name were influenced by the
masculine name. At any rate, <Iseut> is an expectable
reflex of <Iseldis>. (The ON translation by 'Brother
Robert', which is one of our main sources for the 12th
century Anglo-Norman version of Thomas, makes her <Ísǫnd>,
genitive <Ísóndar>; I've no idea why.)

Middle Welsh <Essyllt> is a different name. I quote from
Kenneth Jackson, _Language and History in Early Britain_, p.
709, omitting references:

In the Harleian 3859 OW. genealogies the mother of Rhodri
Mawr (ninth century) is called <Etthil>. The same woman
is <Ethellt> in the Jesus 20 pedigrees, and <Etill> in the
Life of Gruffydd ap Cynan; otherwise she is known as
<Essyllt> in MW. sources. There can be no doubt that this
is the well-known MW. name <Essyllt>, <Esyllt>, cf. OC.
<Eselt> (in a charter of 967). One may suggest a
derivation from Brit. *Adsilita, 'she who is gazed at',
'Miranda',: W. <syllu> ['to gaze' - BMS]. This would
regularly give MW. <Essyllt>. The other spellings seem to
point to a Brit. secondary bye-form *Adthilita or
*Atthiltia, and to be the rare survival of this dental
affricate (in dialect?) in Wales, alongside <ss>, as late
as the ninth or tenth century at least.

This etymology is accepted by Sabine Heinz in 'Textual and
Historical Evidence for an Early British Tristan Tradition'
in Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 28: 2008.

<http://books.google.com/books?id=S2I5grdcY4EC&pg=PA98>

The name <Tristan> is more problematic. It may appear, in
the form {D}RVSTA(N)VS, in the inscription CSTLD/1, which is
from Cornwall and has been dated to the 6th century by at
least one fairly recent authority and has been connected
with the Tristan legend.

<http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/cisp/database/stone/cstld_1.html>

However, the reading is uncertain, and in any case Jackson
was unwilling to connect it with Brittonic <Drystan>.

Pretty much all of the other early instances of possibly
related names are from Scotland and Ireland. The Pictish
Chronicles and the Irish translation of the Historia
Britonum have very similar versions of a list of Pictish
kings; in the third group, which is the first with any claim
to historicity, <Drest> is the most common name, though not
by much. It really does appear that <Drest> is a Pictish
name, though this form may not be contemporaneous with the
bearers (e.g., it may lack some inflectional ending).

In one instance <Drest> in the Pict. Chron. is paired with
<Drust> in the Irish version. The Annals of Ulster have at
least <Drosto> (gen.), <Drostan> (presumably a diminutive),
<Drostain> (gen. of the dimin.), and <Druist> (acc.), all of
which are consistent with an i-stem *Drusti-. Despite the
change in vowel, this seems more likely to be a borrowing of
the Pictish name than a native Irish form, since IE *-st-
should give OIr -ss-.

Another early instance is the Drosten Stone, SVIGN/1, which
is an inscription in the Latin alphabet from Pictland,
probably from the early 9th century, towards the end of the
existence of a separate Pictish kingdom. In 'The Drosten
Stone: a new reading' (Proc Soc Antiq Scot, 123 (1993),
345-53) Thomas Owen Clancy, discussing the question of
whether <Drosten> (rather than the usual nominative
<Drostan>) is a genitive says that Padel cites both
<Drostain> and <Druisten> as Irish genitives. The former is
unremarkable if <Drostan> was understood as a diminutive in
<-án>; the latter looks as if the name had been
reinterpreted as an n-stem. This does nothing to undermine
the idea that the name is not native Irish.

All of this leaves Brittonic <Drystan> a bit up in the air.
It's generally derived from *Drustagnos, but according to
Sims-Williams there are no clear instances of native British
names with the diminutive suffix *-agno-. It appears rather
that the OIr suffix <-án> (from *-agno-) was borrowed by the
British as <-an>, occasionally creating the appearance of a
name derived from an old diminutive in *-agno-. Thus,
<Drystan> *might* be a British borrowing of an Irish
diminutive of an Irish borrowing of a Pictish name.

However, that doesn't explain the <T> of <Trystan>, which
according to Heinrich Zimmer, 'Beiträge zur Namenforschung
in den altfranzösischen Arthurepen', Zeitschrift für
Französische Sprache und Literatur, XIII (1891), 73, is *at
least* [his emphasis] as old and as customary a form as
<Drystan> in the mss.; /d/ > /t/ can't be explained by
normal Welsh developments. Zimmer (76ff.) suggests that the
<T> forms originated in Breton, for which there is evidence
of D-/T- interchange. Specifically, he suggests a
development from <Drestan> to <Trestan> and thence, via
contamination by French <triste>, to <Tristan>; these <T>
forms were then taken to Great Britain by Bretons and
Anglo-Normans generally. This isn't unreasonable,
considering that the romance gives Tristan a Breton origin,
but I don't know how generally it's accepted.

I've not seen a good recent discussion in depth, but my
impression is that there's still considerable disagreement
about the history of the name; in particular, not everyone
accepts the Pictish name as the source.

Brian