Voles, Tynwalds, Dingwalls & Other Viking words in English at Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day

Words & Names with the Viking Word Völlr Discussed In this Column include Dingwall, Rosal, Thingvöllr, Tynwald, Vole, Volemouse, Voll & Vollan.

Poor little voles! The furry bundle shown above is called in Dutch aardmuis ‘earth mouse.’ Voles only live about 18 months. Most predatory birds and larger mammals eat voles. Kestrels, barn owls, turkey buzzards and hawks rend their voley flesh gleefully. But perhaps the most loathed word in all of voledom is: rodenticide!

And they’re so cute. Voles are good parents. They vote Green. They brush their teeth after every meal and attend church regularly where they squeak hymns like “A Mighty Mouse is our God.” Male voles don’t drink, don’t do dope, and they don’t carouse with loose females.

And yet voles are universally reviled by humankind, for where they most abound and do pullulate, these lacey-pawed scurriers nibble to death tree seedlings and chomp up food crops that humans plant.

The vole was first called by the now obsolete term volemouse in English, probably from Old Scandinavian *völlrmus ‘field mouse.’ Volemouse appears to have been scampering its rodent way through English dialects for centuries before it reached print. The earliest entries seem to be early in the nineteenth century. While it is true that the Old Scandinavian form *völlrmus is not attested in surviving print, a very probable descendant of such a form occurs in the Icelandic word for vole, vallarmús. Compare the Dutch woelmuis.

There are dozens and dozens of species of voles. A wee Canuck pest is the prairie vole, Microtus ochrogaster or ― to translate in order the Greek roots in its name — ‘little-eared, brown-bellied creature.’ The tundra vole (Microtus operarius) is important prey for arctic foxes and other carnivorous mammals of our Far North.

Ratty, the animal character in Kenneth Graham’s children’s classic The Wind in the Willows, is in fact a water vole. In Britain, voles are not endangered but their population has declined precipitously in recent decades.

The late cartoonist B. “Hap” Kliban said this feline minstrel was his most reproduced work.

Dingwall: Place & Surname

We begin to explain the etymology of the Viking word völlr with the story of a Scottish surname. The surname Dingwall is part of the influx of Old Scandinavian words into English and Scottish Gaelic that began with the first Viking raids on northern Britain in AD 787. From that time until almost 1000, Scandinavian words like sky, egg, law, thing, them, their, riding, skin, and whisk were all borrowed into Old English. Old Scandinavian is our modern label for the language spoken by the Vikings. It used to be called Old Norse.

Dingwall is a direct borrowing into Scottish Gaelic of the Viking word thingvöllr, which means ‘meeting field.’ A völlr was a field or meadow set off by round wooden stakes, several of which were hammered into the ground to mark off the field in which Vikings convened to squabble about their next raid, to divide booty, even to wax petulant about plunder (“That mead bowl is mine, Ragnar, you big poopie!”), and to vote about matters political and judicial. They were sea raiders after all, and many of their first settlements were mere temporary camps. Thing meant assembly, and the same root is the origin of our English word thing—an example of a shift common in the semantic history of individual words, namely, the development of a word’s meaning from the particular to the extremely general.

Brief Etymology of the Word Thing

The Old Scandinavian word thing had a semantic breadth of these sorts of meanings: judicial assembly, get-together, business deal, matter, legal affair, any affair, thing, object. This range of meanings for a ‘thing’ word is quite common among Indo-European languages. Look at the Classical Latin word causa which begins its semantic life meaning ‘lawsuit.’ It’s Roman superlawyer Cicero’s word for any episode of litigation. It could also refer to any judicial process. That’s very upper-class Latin among Ancient Rome’s ruling elite. But in the street, in soldiers’ slangy Street Latin causa meant ‘thing happening, cause, object, thing.’ When Soldiers’ Latin began to transform into early Romance languages like Old French and the earliest Spanish, it was the ‘street’ meaning of causa that made eventual words like Spanish cosa ‘thing’ and French chose ‘thing.’ In any of their evolved Romance forms, the causa derivatives have always liked vagueness of reference. Consider that sly Italian synonym for the Mafia, la cosa nostra ‘our thing.’

Look at the range of meaning of a Dutch word like zaak ‘affair, thing, orig. strife, dispute, lawsuit, cause, charge, crime.’ Finally, look at the semantic spread in another Latin ‘thing’ word, res ‘affair, thing, case in law, lawsuit, cause.’ Why, indeed, res ipse loquitur ‘the thing speaks for itself.’

[ adapted from but amplified beyond the Oxford English Dictionary (Second edition 1989) entry about the etymology of the word thing ]

Thingvöllr All Over The Place

We know the piratical Norsemen liked to hold meetings in temporarily staked fields. In Iceland shivers the little town of Thingvellir. Of the same origin are the Scottish place names Tinwald in Dumfriesshire and Tingwall in Shetland. All of them are named after fields where Vikings convened. Icelandic emigrants to Saskatchewan, Canada named the town of Thingvilla ‘place where the local council meets.’

On the Isle of Man in solemn conclave sits the Tynwald, the Manx legislative assembly that meets once a year to proclaim new laws. Founded by Vikings who invaded the Isle of Man, the Tynwald consists of a governor, a council, and an elected assembly called the House of Keys. Tynwald is the Manx version of the Old Scandinavian thingvöllr.

Just north of Cape Breton Highlands National Park lies the little Nova Scotia village of Dingwall. Scottish emigrants to our Maritimes brought the name to Cape Breton Island and other Gaelic-speaking settlements of Nova Scotia. Once in ‘New Scotland’ (Nova Scotia) these emgriants were remembering Dingwall, a town in the Scottish county of Ross-shire, often also cited as the origin of the family name. But evidence in ancient deeds and wills shows that Dingwall existed as a surname before the Scottish town was founded. So how did a person come to have a surname like Dingwall? Well, someone who dwelt beside a field where Vikings once met could be called Angus of the dingwall, and eventually Angus Dingwall.

Modern Norwegian Surnames

A reasonably common Norwegian surname is Vollan which implies that the founding ancestor of the family lived near ‘a tilled field or farmstead.’ Voll is also a Norwegian surname named from an ancestor who was perhaps a farmer who lived beside his völlr.

Remote Scottish Place Name

There is a deserted highland village named Rosal and a Scottish surname Rossal, both Viking names, from Old Norse hross-völlr ‘horse-field.’ The root ross is still riding around in modern German. ‘A knight on his steed’ in modern German might be ‘ein Ritter auf seinem Ross.’ Etymologists used to assume that the same root lurked in the ancestry of the English word walrus, that walrus evolved from some form like hval-hross, that is, whale-horse, that its form traced far back to a confusion between two Viking words, hross-hvalr a kind of whale and rosm-hvalr a walrus. But the hross component now seems doubtful and the precise origins of walrus are perhaps forever obscured.

Cognates of Völlr

The Old Scandinavian völlr is cognate with the German word for forest, Wald, with Swedish vall ‘field’ and with Old English weald ‘forest’ which produced the English word wold, now confined to poetry and older place names like Stow-on-the-Wold or The Yorkshire Wolds or The Lincolshire Wolds. Wold now generally means high land long cleared of its original forest. The famous tourist destination in Britain, the Cotswolds were originally the high forest lands of an Anglo-Saxon named Cod, that is, Codes woldes. When Brits say ‘The Wolds’ they are almost always referring to the ones in Yorkshire which have their very own long footpath called Wolds Way. Wold hides in other British place names like Walton-on-Thames and Waltham Forest.

Weald is still seen among English place names and meant a forest or wooded area. Weald too could mean now open land cleared of forest. A well-known area in southern England still bears its ancient moniker, The Weald, shortened from its Anglo-Saxon name, Andredesweald ‘the forest of an AS bigshot named Andred.’

The Vikings were dominant in Britain for only a few hundred years but they left fascinating, persistent marks on our English language, not least of which is our name for those meadow dwellers called voles.