caa a22 4500 463200403 CHVBK 20180405153110.0 cr unu---uuuuu 170326e20071001xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/s11061-007-9028-1 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/s11061-007-9028-1 Jurasinski Stefan Department of English, SUNY College at Brockport, 350 New Campus Drive, 14420-2968, Brockport, NY, USA aut The feminine name Wealhtheow and the problem of Beowulf ian anthroponymy [Elektronische Daten] [Stefan Jurasinski] Since names in Beowulf are widely understood to reflect aspects of the characters who bear them, the standard translation of Wealhtheow as "Welsh slave” has caused scholarship to entertain two propositions regarding the significance of its etymology: either Wealhtheow was some sort of slave or captive, or the standard translation of her name is faulty, a name indicating bondage being unworthy of Hrothgar's queen. What these divergent analyses of the name have in common is a shared conviction that names were meaningful in the era Beowulf describes. As this essay demonstrates, such a view is complicated by most of the current scholarly literature on the principles of name-formation in Old English. Since a number of the names in Beowulf are demonstrably real names that circulated outside of the poem rather than the coinage of the poet, conclusions about their meaningfulness cannot be offered without reference to these ideas. Accordingly, this essay approaches Wealhtheow as an onomastic rather than literary anomaly. In the process, it demonstrates that no meaning can be construed in a principled manner for the name-element Wealh- and uncovers a possible analogue for the peculiar behavior of the name-element -þeow in this compound. Springer Science+Business Media, Inc., 2007 Beowulf nationallicence Onomastics nationallicence Neophilologus Springer Netherlands 91/4(2007-10-01), 701-715 0028-2677 91:4<701 2007 91 11061 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-007-9028-1 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-007-9028-1 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Jurasinski Stefan Department of English, SUNY College at Brockport, 350 New Campus Drive, 14420-2968, Brockport, NY, USA aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Neophilologus Springer Netherlands 91/4(2007-10-01), 701-715 0028-2677 91:4<701 2007 91 11061 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer