The main work of the selected texts is the book Mai og med. Malfore og mednamn fra
Smola, Tapir Akademisk Forlag, Trondheim 2000, pp. 305. In short, it is an analysis of
c. 400 fishing meads, collected from written sources and from active fishermen, and
supplied with land-kennings and information about usage, the location, traditions about
the place and/or name etc. The main corpus of the volume is a linguistic analysis of the
name inventory. As a base for the linguistic analysis, there is a detailed examination of
the local dialect, including a breakdown into phonemic units, and a section on the
historic and cultural frame surrounding the use of meads. Each individual name entry is
supplied with information about the practical usage of the location, such as the kind of
fish likely to be caught there, the fishing tools best applied, particular significance of
weather, ocean currents and depths. This is done in the hope that it will create an
overall picture on how the name-givers, the fishermen, experience their world and that
it will expose how names are coined within this particular milieu. It is, as far as I know,
the largest and most exhaustive analysis of its kind from Norway. Making extensive use
of the book in a study of meads from Shetland, Professor Gunnel Melchers (2005:165)
says that 'Kruse's work is of the utmost interest for comparative studies'.
The personal background for the choice of topic for this book is mainly my own
family connection to the island of Smola. The fact that I have partly grown up on the
island and therefore have knowledge and close personal ties to the landscape and
people is probably not vital for such a study but it certainly is of great help. One thing is
the analysis of the dialect and the phonemic transcription of the names which were
made far less painful and probably a lot more accurate because of my intimate
knowledge of the local dialect. Another matter, helped by the fact that I was not
considered a total outsider, has to do with the special nature of meads within a fishing
community. Fishing meads are often surrounded by much secrecy. They are, or used to
be, the key to good fishing. You had, as a fisherman, to know the precise locations
where fish were found at certain times of the day, of the year and at given currents.
Further, the fewer who shared this hard-earned knowledge, the fewer had to share the
catch, and, as a consequence, knowledge about good meads was guarded as well kept
secrets. I was, in the early days of my project, by several people warned that it was
doomed to be a failure because the fishermen would not pass on their knowledge. I did
not, however, experience this problem, and I believe that this can partly be explained by
the fact that I was considered a local, although not a competing fisherman. Also, the
knowledge of meads is now vanishing rapidly - with new technology replacing old
know-how - and most fishermen 1 interviewed were actually pleased to see that this
information was collected and registered before it was too late.
I promised my informants that my book was not going to be a hand-book on where
to find the best fishing-grounds in the area, and so I chose not to the give the exact
positions, neither grid nor GPS references, of the fishing-grounds. Apart from a rough
indication on a
relatively small scaled map the fishing-meads are only indicated by the
crossing mead-lines using the names of the land-kennings of the local fishermen. This
means in practice that in order to find the actual fishing-grounds you will have to be
fairly local to recognize the names of the locations given.
The exceptionally local and socially limited nature of many of the names was a
fascinating discovery that came out of my research. I had of course expected to find
that names of locations like skerries and small islands would be known only within a
limited group of people who lives close to the locations. Such names would clearly fall
into the group of names which Magnus Olsen (1930) calls either 'gardens navn', or
'bygdens navn', i.e. names known only within a limited distance away from the
locations by people who have use for referring to these locations in their daily life
within a farm or a village. What I did not quite expect to find was that certain other
names had an exclusive provenance to the local fishermen only. Points of orientation
that fishermen use when navigating, such as skerries, islands, hills and mountains, very
often carry names that reflect this type of useage.
The article 'Sjonamn pa medfjella', in Namn og Nemne 15/1998 (:21 -31), explores
further how fishermen establish a naming practice unique to the their community. The
article partly utilizes name data from my book on meads and investigates an aspect of
fishermen's use of names while they are at sea. Only briefly touched upon in Mai og
med, this topic is further documented and discussed. The article also challenges Jakob
Jakobsen's theory that taboo naming is behind the often unusual onomasticon of
fishermen. I propose that a type of argot within an exclusive name user group can
better explain this type of naming, rather than having to construct theories of taboos in
the naming process.
User group theory is also central in my criticism of WFH Nicolaisen's idea that the
Norse could have left many names on the Scottish west coast littoral without ever
having settled there. In the article 'Norse Topographical Names on the West Coast of
Scotland', in Scandinavia and Europe 800-1350 Contact, conflict and co-existence, ed.
by J. Adams and K. Holman, Brepols, 2004 (:97-l08), I argue against Nicolaisen's
hypothesis, showing how it contradicts both Norse practice of naming elsewhere in
their colonies as well as onomastic theory. The latter is based on a discussion about
how names come about as a result of certain needs within a community and how they
are not likely to be passed on outside a community without a certain degree of
permanence of settlement or work situation. In her book Northern Conquest, Katherine
Holman (2007) calls the study 'important' and refers from it in detail.
Naming practice as a reflection of an incoming group's gradual intensified use of a
new landscape is argued for in the article 'Explorers, Raiders and Settlers. The Norse
Impact on Hebridean Place-Names', in Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Region:
The Evidence ofNames, ed. by P Gammeltoft, C Hough and D Waugh, 2005 (: 141 -56).
The paper discusses the early contact and subsequent settlement pattern of the Norse on
the Scottish west coast, arguing the case that there is a stratum of island names dating
from the first contact the Norse had with the native population, adopting existing names
on landmarks important for navigation, and after this initial contact consistently
rejecting all native names. Ian Tait (2006:129) calls in a review the article a 'superb
analysis'.
alysis'.
I have in several articles studied Scandinavian-American speech and place-names,
and from these I chose to put forward the article 'Scandinavian-American place-names
as viewed from the Old World, in Language Contact Across the Atlantic, ed. by I
Clarkson and S Ureland, Tubingen, 1996 (:255-67). Here, the main topic is again how a
certain user group of names will establish a name inventory unique to the group, based
on tradition and need. The article demonstrates how certain naming patterns are
constant over a time-span of a thousand years and how other parts of the naming
process is altered as a result of changes in society and changing needs of the namers.
I believe that there is a theoretical consistency throughout the book and the articles,
a
theory which is developed more explicitly in the following article, 'Fashion, nostalgia
and limitation. Scandinavian place-names abroad'
• 1. Introduction and presentation of submitted work
• 2. Review article 'Fashion, nostalgia and limitation. Scandinavian place-names abroad'
• 3. Submitted articles:
'Sjonamn pa medfjella', mNamn ogNemne 15/1998 (:21 -31) [4.500 words]
'Norse Topographical Names on the West Coast of Scotland', in Scandinavia
and Europe 800-1350 Contact, conflict and co-existence, ed. by J. Adams and
K. Holman, Brepols, 2004, (:97-108) [5.500 words]
'Explorers, Raiders and Settlers. The Norse Impact on Hebridean Place-Names',
in Cultural Contacts in the North Atlantic Region: The Evidence ofNames, ed.
by P Gammeltoft, C Hough and D Waugh, 2005 (: 141-56) [6.500 words]
'Scandinavian-American place-names as viewed from the Old World, in
Language Contact Across the Atlantic, ed. by I Clarkson and S Ureland,
Tubingen, 1996 (:255-67) [6.000 words]
• (Book handed in separately :)
Mai og med. Malfore og mednamn fra Smola, Tapir Akademisk Forlag,
Trondheim 2000, pp. 305, [c. 100.000 words]
