Emotions in the Household: Emotion Words and Metaphors in Domesday Book Personal Names

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the set of emotion-related personal names recorded in the Domesday Book. Through the fine-grained analysis of the themes used in these names, this paper proposes a semantic description of late Old English personal names, which have been classified into the following seven name sub-categories: happiness, joy, love, tenderness, pride, anger, and fear. This analysis shows that emotion-related vocabulary was a favorite personal name element in post-Conquest England. Furthermore, it proposes some of the general tendencies behind name-giving practices, especially in relation to (i) gender distribution of emotion themes and concepts and (ii) frequent lexical combinations of emotion-related themes. Finally, the paper offers an interpretation of the metaphorization processes that motivated the development of some of these combinations of words and their usage as personal names in Anglo-Saxon England.

Keywords:

• Old English
• Domesday Book
• emotions
• Anglo-Saxon
• name-giving
• conceptual metaphor
• metonymy

Notes

1 The database is publicly available from <http://www.pase.ac.uk/index.html>.

2 Based on the GEW, it will be assumed here that the difference between the emotional concepts happiness/joy relies on the intensity of the emotional experience. According to Goddard (1998: 94), whereas present-day English happiness words have “a comparatively muted quality,” joy words imply “an intense but generalized and almost euphoric view of one’s current existence.”

3 For example, personal names containing words of unknown meaning were excluded from this research, as well as names for nationalities (such as OE seax “Saxon” and OE geat “Geat”).

4 The total number of individuals bearing each name in DB is indicated in brackets; where no number of occurrences is indicated, the name appears only once in the database.

5 Redin (1919: 41) interprets Edlu as a diminutive of variant of Æþel, derived from OE æðel “noble.”

6 For a critical analysis of this assumption, see Colman (1996) and, especially, Okasha (2011).

7 Or, alternatively, the homonym neutral noun OE glæd “gladness.”

8 Namely Ocga (2), Ochta, Ogga, Oggod, and Oghe (see Redin, 1919: 103).