Talk:Eiríkur Magnússon

Requested move 4 August 2019

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: page moved. (non-admin closure) Celia Homeford (talk) 13:32, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Eiríkr Magnússon → Eiríkur Magnússon – Eiríkur Magnússon is (a) the birth name of the individual, (b) the name he himself used except in some scholarly contexts and in his translation work with William Morris, (c) the name used in digital resources/databases such as the manuscript catalogue of the National Library of Iceland (handrit.is), and (d) the name used in modern scholarship about the individual (for example the work of Andrew Wawn, Richard Harris and Jón Karl Helgason).

In the nineteenth century, Icelanders used -ur for male names such as Eiríkur in the nominative and not the much older -r ending. Eiríkur Magnússon was born and raised EiríkUR and continued to use this spelling throughout his life, e.g. in his manuscript translation of "Hávamál: Hávamál or The Song of the High One translated from the original in the so-called Edda of Sæmund by Eiríkur Magnússon M.A., KD. Cambridge, 1884" in the National Library of Iceland. In his academic publications on Old Norse subjects and his published William Morris collaborations, the name is often archaized to "Eiríkr" - the Icelandic equivalent of writing "ye old scholar" for "the old scholar".

For an original source confirming the conventional -ur spelling, see the parish record for Stöð in Stöðvarsókn in 1839 (image from the National Archives of Iceland), when Eiríkur was 6 (and could already read according to his father, who was the local minister who wrote the record).

Since he did publish some work under the name "Eiríkr", a brief explanation of -r vs. -ur is useful, but later research on Eiríkur and his work does not adopt the archaized spelling. Sylgja (talk) 21:54, 4 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Support. Yes, modern scholars tend to refer to him with the 'u' in there, including in English. Haukur (talk) 23:49, 4 August 2019 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.