At 4:02:01 PM on Friday, February 18, 2011,
wyrdplace@... wrote:

> I have a YA novel about Vikings that I'm entering final
> draft stages on.  A reader from Norway enjoyed the novel,
> and offered me some very helpful comments -- especially
> about the landscape.  But one thing she pointed out may be
> innaccurate, because she isn't really a historian:  names.
> She didn't think the names of my Norwegian characters were
> very Norwegian sounding.  For example, she thought the
> character I'd named "Hrolf" would be named "Rolf",
> instead. 

The normalized Old West Norse name is <Hrólfr>; <Hrolf> is a
perfectly reasonable version for an English-language novel.
(The final <-r> simply marks the nominative case; in Old
Norse the name was declined <Hrólfr> (nominative), <Hrólfs>
(genitive), <Hrólfi> (dative), and <Hrólf> accusative, so
you can see that <Hrólf> was the root form.) In the later
viking period there were some differences between Old
Icelandic and Old Norwegian; in particular, Old Norwegian
tended to lose the <H-> from initial <Hr->, so that <Hrólfr>
becomes <Rólfr>. In the earlier viking period, however,
<Hrólfr> would be expected even for Norwegian (as distinct
from Icelandic) characters. Moreover, <Hrolf> would, I
think, do a better job of conveying the period flavor that
you probably want.

> And the name "Gylfi" just wasn't at all Norwegian. 

The modern Norwegian form is <Gylve>; it's rare, but it does
exist. The earliest known instance, however, is from 1949;
in the viking age <Gylfi> seems to be known only from
legendary and mythical characters, so it's not a good
choice.

> (Obviously, I took the latter from the Prose Edda.)  Is
> there a good reference available (hopefully online) for
> Old Norwegian names, or was there no distinction between
> names in ancient Iceland and ancient Norway, around 1,000
> C.E.?

There were differences in usage -- some names that were
popular in Iceland were little used in Norway and vice
versa, but on the whole the name stocks were very similar.
As noted above, there were also some small differences in
the dialects, but they're pretty minor. One example: Old
Icelandic <Steinn> corresponds to Old Norwegian <Stæinn>.

I recommend starting at
<http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/scandinavian.shtml>,
especially
<http://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/names/norse/landnamabok.html>,
and then asking here (or asking me directly) about specific
names; I've more extensive references that give information
on when and where these names seem to have been most
commonly used.

Brian