History of Christian names

Section VI.—Astolfo.

Astolfo is to the Paladins what Conan is to the Feen, the butt or grazioso. In his full-blown perfection he is first cousin to Orlando, being the son of Milone’s brother Ottone, and was also related to Rinaldo, according to the quaint genealogies of the chivalrous heroes that exact heraldry loved to draw up. He joined the four sons of Aymon, when they left the court after the quarrel at chess, and shared in their wild exploits; but apparently permitted no meaner interlopers in the trade, for when he caught a party of robbers, he insisted on some unfortunate hermits being their executioners, declaring such an office was quite as pleasing to Heaven, ‘che dire il Pater nostro,’ and finally pummelling them into compliance. In Bojardo, Astolfo gained possession of a magic lance, brought by Angelica from Catay, which unhorsed all its antagonists, and secure in its aid, refused when he was required to deliver up to Gradasso, Bajardo and Durindana, which had been left in his charge while their masters were wandering after Angelica, but challenged Gradasso to single combat, defeated him, and then went in search of his cousins. Ariosto conducts him into the enchanted palace, where every one was pursuing something lost; Rinaldo, his horse, Bradamante, Ruggero, Ruggero, Bradamante.

One blast of Astolfo’s horn, also magical, destroyed the enchantment, and he became possessed for the time of the Hippogriff, upon whom he soared to the terrestrial paradise, and was conducted by St. John to the moon, where he obtained possession of Orlando’s senses, and restored them to him. The later writers, who added to the burlesque element and diminished the chivalrous, made more and more of Astolfo’s boastfulness, till he is quite the buffoon of their poems. He was finally killed at Roncesvalles; and the Spaniards call him Don Estolfo.

The person killed at the same time as Rotlandus is called, by Eginhard, Anselmus, and he, no doubt, contributed in the idea of the Astolfus, Count of Champagne, whose burial after the battle is recorded by Archbishop Turpin. But the real bearer of the name of Astolfo was one of the enemies of the Karlings, namely, Astolfo, king of the Lombards, who held his court at Pavia, and whose encroachments on the Roman territory were the first cause of the interference of the Franks in Italy. He was besieged by Pepin at Pavia in 755, and forced to come to terms; but he was evidently a very considerable sovereign; and Ernesto, Marchese d'Este, was killed in battle with him in 745. His promotion to be a Paladin is accounted for by his having been a Christian, and the character he bears, by the possibility of there having been satirical songs and poems upon him, especially at the time when Charlemagne ill-treated his granddaughter, Desirata. Astolfo is still a current name in Lombardy, though we do not find it anywhere else, and its congeners only in Scandinavia.

The meaning of the last syllable is, of course, wolf; the first is aast or ast, love or wishes, or if the sense of hot impetuosity be allowed, Astolf is the swift wolf. Aasta was rather a favourite name with the maidens of the North, and Asta is not disused, though too often treated as the short for Augusta.

Astridur is from hridhur, an impulse, and thus would mean swift impulse, or the impulse of love. It was greatly used by the royal ladies of the North, among whom may be specified the mother of St. Olaf, and a daughter of Knut, called by Danish pronunciation, Estridh, but transmuted into Margaret.

The diminutive of Ast, under various mispronunciations, named that most terrible of vikings, Hasting, whose ravages, though kept from England by the policy originated by Alfred, were fearful all along the French coast, and even extended to Italy. It is he who is said to have many times submitted to baptism, and then returned to his fury again; and there is a curious report, that Rollo’s Normans found him settled in France, and reproached him with the tameness of his old age, so that he dashed away again, and returned to his ships and his piracy. Hastinc occurs in Domesday, and Warren Hastings' family claimed descent from the old Sea King.^[142]

Section VII.—Ogier le Danois.

One of the Paladins was, undoubtedly, the legacy of a much more ancient myth, namely, Ogier le Danois. He does not play a very prominent part in the poems of the Italians, but as Ogier the Dacian he is one of Turpin’s catalogue of knights, and a ballad especially dear to Don Quixote thus commences:—

It proceeds to tell how he found Valdovinos, his nephew, dying under a tree, having been assassinated by the emperor’s son, Carloto. The ballad further relates how the Marques proceeds to court, gets Carloto tried by his peers and doomed to death, and though el Rey Carlo banishes them all for uttering the condemnation, the sentence is carried out.

This Italian marquis is an exceedingly droll development of the old Teutonic hero, Holger Danske. In Italy he is Oggieri, Oggero, or Uggieri il Danese; in French, Ogier le Danois; and, at times, le damné, or il dannato, which title is further accounted for by the story that he was a Saracen who became a Christian, and that his friends wrote from home ‘tu es damné,’ whence he chose to be thus christened. In the Reali de Francia, Charlemagne cuts off, with his own hand, the head of an unfortunate Oldrigi, whose blood was too noble to be shed by any one else. Now this Oggier was without doubt a contribution from the stores of Norman tradition; for Holger, or Olger, Danske is the grandest national hero of Denmark. There is a ballad, given by Weber, where he and Tidrek the Strong have a tremendous battle, and he comes off victor. Moreover, he has eaten of the fruit of the trees of the sun and moon, and has become immortal, and there he sits with his fellows in the vaults of the Castle of Kronberg, near which are two ponds, called his spectacles. A peasant, with a plough-share on his shoulders, once lost his way, and wandered in; he found a circle of tall old men in armour, all asleep round a stone table, with their heads resting on their crossed arms. Holger Danske, who sat at the head of the table, raised his head and the stone broke asunder, for his beard had grown into the stone. He asked his guest some questions about the upper world and dismissed him, offering his hand. The peasant, dreading the gigantic grip of the old champion, gave his ploughshare. ‘Ha! ha!’ said Holger, as he felt its firmness, ‘it is well. There are still men in Denmark. Tell them that we shall come back when there are no more men left than can stand round one tun!’ But the ploughshare had been twisted round by his fingers. Can this return of Holger be the Roger Bon Temps of the French peasantry?

But Holger, though I have placed him among the Paladins, might have gone even farther back than the days of Dietrich. He is a mythical king, well nigh a god, originally called Haaloge, and owing, as his sacred island, Haalogaland, or Heligoland.

His name itself is holy, our very word holy—the halig of the Anglo-Saxons, the hellig of the North, the heilig of Germany, and these words sprang from those denoting health; as the Latin salve, hail, salvus, safe, and salvatio, safety, are all related to soundness.

Leaving this, as not belonging to our main subject, we find that Helgi, the Norse form of the word for this holy old mythic king, was exceedingly popular in the North. Helgi has a poem to himself in the elder Edda. A son of Burnt Njal was called Helgi, and forty-two cases are found of the name in the Landnama-bok, and thirty-four of its feminine, Helga. In Domesday there are five called Helgi, besides fourteen Algars, very possibly meant for Holger; and it may be suspected that the Helie of the early Norman barons may have been as much due to the Helgi of their forefathers as to the prophet whom they learnt to know on Mount Carmel. Perhaps, too, Helga was the source of Ala, or Ela, by which name a good many Norman ladies are recorded, the best known of whom was Ela, heiress of Salisbury, the wife of one William Longsword and mother of the other, one of the founders of Salisbury Cathedral, and the witness of a vision of her son’s death in Egypt.

Helgi’s descendants towards the East are far more certain matters. Helgi, called Oleg by the Russian historians, was the son of Rurik, the first Norman grand prince of Kief, and his daughter, Olga, visited Constantinople, and was there baptized by the name of Helena, which makes the Russians suppose her two names to translate one another; but they have fortunately not discarded either Oleg or Olga, which thus remain mementoes of the northern dynasty among the very scanty number of Russian names that are neither Greek nor Slavonic.

In its own country Helgi gets contracted into Helle, and Helga into Hæge.^[143]

Section VIII.—Louis.

With the throne of the Franks, the Karlingen took their favourite prefix of the old Salic line, hlod.

This word, the same in root as the Sanscrit çru, Greek κλύω (kluo), Latin cluo, Anglo-Saxon hlowan, may possibly have been originated by the cow, to whose voice, in our own language, the verb to low is now restricted. All mean to make a noise; and the dignity of that noise increased, for κλυτός (klutos) was Greek for renowned, κλέος, fame, as we saw when dealing with Cleomenes, Cleopatra, &c.; and in Latin, clueo, was to be famous, clientes or callers beset the honoured man, and laus was praise or fame; and so not only have we loud in English, lyde in the North, for the ordinary adjective, but hlod or hlud was the old German term for renown, and los for which French knights afterwards fought and bled, and a score of other words, less relevant to our purpose, will easily suggest themselves as current in every European tongue, first cousin words from laus or from hlod.

The rough aspirate at the beginning was once an essential portion of the word, and among the Franks it must have been especially harsh, since their contemporary Latinists always render it by ch.

Chlodio, as they call him, is numbered as the second of the long-haired Salians, the father of ‘Meroveus,’ and leader of the incursions of the Franks about 428. His grandson married the Burgundian maiden, called by the Valkyr title of Hlodhild, or Chlodechilda, as the Latin civilization of her day called her, when it hailed her with delight as the converter of her husband to Christianity. Although canonized, her name was not in great use for a good many generations, and to this she probably owes it that, when it was revived as belonging to a royal saint, for the benefit of the daughter of the good dauphin, son of Louis XV., it had not been shorn of its aspirate like all the cognate ones. It has since become a favourite with French ladies.

The husband of Clotilda was known to his own fierce Franks as Hluodowig, or famous war, or consecration; but when his success after his prayer to the God of Hluodhild had brought him to abjure his Teuton gods, and receive baptism from St. Remi, the pope accepted the only orthodox sovereign of Europe as most Christian king and eldest son of the Church by the appellation of Chlodovisus, or Clovis, the retranslation into French.

Among his successors was found many a fainéant who had nothing of him but his prefix and his long hair, and one who is counted as Clovis II. When these had passed away, Charles the Great gave the name of the great founder of the former line to one of his younger sons, the only one who lived to succeed him.

What Hlodwig Haman’s War was called in his own day may be seen by the curious barbaric Latin poem sung by his soldiers in honour of their exploit in setting him at liberty, when he had been treacherously made prisoner by Adelgis, Duke of Beneventum, a song that shows Latin in its first step towards the tongues of southern Europe.

‘Lluduicus’ is now known to the French as Louis le Debonnaire, a title that some ascribe to his piety, others to his weakness. The Germans took him as Ludwig, and thenceforth these two varieties held a double course, while the softer Provençals made him Aloys, which is now regarded, owing to a saint of its own, as a separate name. Three monarchs of the Karling line bore this favourite name, and the fifth descendant of Hugh Capet brought it in again, to come to its especial honour with the saintly Crusader, ninth king so called, from whom it became so essentially connected with French royalty, that after the succession of the Bourbons, no member of the royal family was christened without it. Indeed, hardly any one of rank or birth failed to have it among their many names, till its once-beloved sound became a peril to the owners' heads in the Revolution, and it has in the present day arrived at sharing the unpopularity of François.

Elsewhere it is chiefly a French importation; the Welsh use Lewis as an Anglicism of Llewellyn, and the Irish of Lachtna; and the Scots make rather more use of it from their old alliances and connection through the Scottish guard. The Scottish Lodowick is probably taken from the northern form of the original word; just as with the Italians, Luigi is the mere Italian version of Louis, Lodovico the inheritance from the Lombards or Germans, and in this shape was long current in northern Italy, belonging in particular to the unfortunate Sforza, of Milan, who perished in the first shock between France and Italy.

The Provençal Aloys apparently was the first shape that threw out a feminine, the Aloyse or Heloïse, whose correspondence with Abelard was the theme of so much sentiment, and whose fame, brought by the archers to Scotland, no doubt was the origin of the numerous specimens of Alison found in that romantic nation. According to Dugdale, the wife of the Norman William Mallet was Hesilia or Helewise, no doubt the same as Heloïse. Heloïse had nearly died away in France when Rousseau’s romance of La Nouvelle Heloïse brought it as well as Julie into fashion again.

The votaresses of St. Louis had, however, chosen to come much nearer to his name, and by the end of the fifteenth century Louise was in great vogue at the French court; it travelled everywhere with French princesses, came to us with the House of Hanover, and has now a thorough hold of all ranks.

The eldest son of the great Clovis was Hlodmir, or Clodomir, great fame, made more euphonious in German as Ludomir, and furnishing such surnames as Luttmer and Lummers.

All his sons were murdered by their uncles, except one, who was shorn of his long locks to save his life, and was put into a convent, where he became a holy man, was canonized, and his harsh name of Hlodowald, or Clodvald, became the pleasant one of St. Cloud, best known for the sake of the palace near Paris. Another St. Chlodvald, of Metz, is commonly called St. Clou.

One of the uncles who killed the poor boys was Hlodhari, or Chlotachari, famous warrior, a terrible savage, but the last survivor of the brothers, and counted in the Frank history as Chlother, or Clotaire. Others of his race likewise were so baptized, and when the name passed to the Karlingen it was as Lothar. So was called the son of Louis le Debonnaire, whose portion, known at first as Lotharingen, came to be in Latin Lotharingia, and still remains Lorraine. Lothar did not pass away from Germany; one emperor, after the separation, was so called; and it fell into many forms of surnames, in especial into Luther; and when Martin Luther had rendered this almost saintly to his countrymen, they over-hastily explained it by lother, pure; while the Bohemians found a similar word in their own tongue, meaning a swan. Oddly enough, Huss signified a goose, and the saying arose that the Bohemian goose had let fall a quill, which had been picked up by a swan of far more distant flight.

Luther has a few namesakes in his own country on his own account, but, in general, Chloter has died out of Christian nomenclature.

Chlodoswintha, or famous height, was a Frank princess, without namesakes beyond her own race; in fact, the use of this prefix seems to have been exclusively Frank.^[144]

Section I.—Nobility.

The names connected with any great cycle of interest have been nearly exhausted, and only those remain that seem to have been chosen more for sense than connection, though afterwards continued for the sake of their owners. Several of our own truly English or Anglo-Saxon names are among these, and in especial those with the prefix meaning noble, Æthel, Athel, Adel, Edel, or in High German, Adal. It is thought to come from the universal word atta, a father, and thus to convey that the owner has forefathers, the essence of nobility, as with the pater and patrician of Rome, and the hidalgo, the son of something, of Spain. Adel, or Æthel, is a favourite prefix in all the Teutonic branches except the Scandinavian, where it does not occur at all. It is essentially Gothic,—witness Athalaric, the formidable but gentle conqueror of Rome, who well deserved his name of Noble-King. He is generally, however, called Alaric, and his name has been deduced from al, all; but the right reading seems to be that which identifiesidentifies his appellation with our own English Æthelric, and the Uadalrich of Germany.

Udalrich, archbishop of Augsburg till the year 973, is notable as the first person canonized by the pope according to the present forms, which could not, however, have included the half-century of posthumous probation, as he was placed in the calendar only twenty years after his death. Contracting his name to Ulrich, Germany made him a favourite national saint; and we find him and his feminine spread throughout the countries influenced by the empire, and the feminine particularly prevalent in Denmark, whither it was carried by German queens. Though the ensuing table places all the forms of Athalaric together, it should be kept in mind that the forms beginning with A are the modern namesakes of the great Goth, those with U and O the votaries of that saint, and Adelrich is considered as a different name from Ulrich.

The successor of Alaric, who laid him in his river-grave, is known to us as Ataulfus. In his own time he was Athaulf, the Noble-Wolf, and his likeness stands in our own roll of English kings as the father of Alfred, namely, Æthelwulf; but this good old name was dropped in England, while its German cousin, in honour of a sainted bishop of Metz, of the ninth century, became very common in the principalities of the empire, and was imported with the house of Hanover in the barbarous Latin form of Adolphus. Its feminine, coined in Germany, is Adolfine, usually called Dofine, and now extremely common. This may possibly be the source of the Dolphine given as the name of one of the daughters of Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria, as the habit of making barbarous feminines was just beginning in her time.

Athanagild, or Athalagild, Noble Pledge, was another of these early Goths, and afterwards we meet the same meaning in Adelgis, or Adelchis, the brave son of the last Lombardic king, whose noble spirit, under his misfortunes, is the subject of a fine tragedy of Manzoni. The duke of Beneventum, who made Louis le Debonnaire prisoner, was Adelgis; but it is curious to find the soldiers in the dog-latin poem above alluded to, terming him Adalfieri. Odelgis was old High German.

Æthel was so much used by the royal families of Kent and Wessex, that the diminutive, Ætheling, was latterly applied to designate the heir to the crown, and was thus continued even after the Conquest to the son of Henry I., who perished in the white ship.

Æthelbryht, or Noble Splendour, named our first Christian king of Kent, also a brother of King Alfred’s, and a missionary of the royal blood of Northumbria, who preached in southern Germany, and died about the year 700, at Egmond, where, as St. Adelbrecht, he became patron. His name was taken at baptism by one who became archbishop of Magdeburg, who, in his turn, bestowed it on his pupil, the Bohemian Woyteich, Army-Help. This convert was afterwards bishop of Prague, and was martyred near Dantzic while preaching to the heathen Prussians in 997. Adelbrecht could not fail to become national wherever the saint had set his foot; and when shortened to Albrecht, was adopted by Italy, and thence sent to Jerusalem with a Latin patriarch, who, being beatified, rendered Alberto freshly popular in the South. Albrecht, and the feminines Alberta and Albertine, were, however, almost entirely German, until the late Prince Consort brought the name to England, where it bids fair to become one of the most frequent of national names. Some fancy it comes from Allbright; but the German saints, whence it was taken, are evidently direct from our English Æthelbryht, though in Germany Adelbert and Albrecht are now treated as two separate names. Bela, which belonged to an excellent blind king of Hungary, is believed to be the Magyar form of the name.

Æthelred, Noble-speech or counsel, the brother of Alfred, was almost canonized by his subjects, and is sometimes called Ethered, whence the Scottish Ethert. The nickname of our last Ethelred was a play on his name “onreade,” not meaning so much tardy as without counsel—Noble-rede the Un-reedy. Ethelred must not be confused with Etheldred, the feminine name, properly Æthelthryth, meaning in Anglo-Saxon the Noble-threatener, connected with the German Ediltrud, or noble maiden. Most likely names ending in trut had been brought to England, and as the Valkyr sense was forgotten, the native meaning of threat was attached to the word, and the spelling adapted to it. St. Æthelthryth was a queen who must have been a very uncomfortable wife, and who, finally, retired into a monastery, getting canonized as St. Etheldreda, and revered as St. Audry. From the gewgaws sold at her fairs some derive the term tawdry; and, at any rate, Awdry has never been extinct as a name among the peasantry, and has of late been revived, though with less popularity than the other more modern contraction, Ethel, which is sometimes in modern times set to stand alone as an independent name. Addy is the common Devonian short for Audrey.

Germans do, however, seem to have used the word without another syllable, for Adilo, or Odilo, was an old name, and Ado and Addo are still current in Friesland, no doubt, the same as the Ade of the Cambrian registers. Adela and Adèle, too, occur very early; indeed, there is reason to think that just as in England the son was the Ætheling, in Frankland the daughter was the Adalheit, or the Adelchen. This word heit is translated as the root of the present German heiter, cheerful, and thus would mean noble cheer; but I suspect it is rather heid, condition, answering to the hood or head at the end of our abstract nouns, e. g. hardihood, and that the princess royal of each little Frankish duchy or county was thus the ‘Nobleness’ thereof.

All the feudal princes of the tenth and eleventh centuries seem to have had an Adelheid to offer in marriage, and to have Latinized her in all manner of ways, while practically they called her Alix (or Alisa in Lombardy), a name that was naturalized in England, when Alix la Belle married Henry I. Alice is our true English form, though it has been twisted into Alicia, and then referred for derivation to the Greek Alexios, so as often to appear in Latin documents of the later middle ages in the form of Alexia; whereas in earlier times, before its origin was forgotten, it is translated by Adelicia, Adelisa, or Adelidis.

The French made great use of all the forms of the name; the Germans, in honour, perhaps, of the Italian Queen Adelaide—whose adventures before her marriage with the Emperor Otho were so curious—preferred that variety, and from them we received it again with our good Queen Adelaide, from whom it is becoming frequent amongst us. The German Alice is Else, a favourite old peasant word. This same contraction is common in northern England, but gets confused with Elizabeth, as in Scotland, with Alison; and in Ireland, the prevalent Alicia is, perhaps, meant for Aileen, or Helen.

The Adeleve of early Norman times is probably meant for Æthelgifu, Noble-gift, a frequent Saxon lady’s name, which we generally call Ethelgiva.

Æthelwold, the Saxon historian of royal blood, is Noble-power. Æthelheard, or noble resolution, answers to Adelhard, a cousin of Charlemagne, and abbot of Corbie, whom his contemporaries glorified as at once the Augustin, the Antony, and the Jeremiah of his day, and who, being canonized, left Alard and Alert to Friesland, and Aleardo, Alearda to Provence.

Æthelstan, the Noble-stone or jewel, was second only to Alfred in ability and glory, and his name lived on to the Conquest, when it is set down as Adestan and Adstan.

Adelhelm, the Noble-helmet, named the excellent and poetical Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborn, from whom the headland on the Dorset coast was once called St. Aldhelm’s head, but is now corrupted into St. Alban’s head.

Adelgar, or Noble-spear, was chiefly continental, first figuring in the beautiful Scottish ballad of Sir Aldingar, but better known in Lombardy, where Allighero sprang from it, and gave his patronymic to Dante Alighieri. Algarotti was another Italian derivative; and in France, Augier and Augereau; in Germany, Oehlkar, show that it once must have been much in use. It is not always easy, however, to separate between the words from Adel and from Hilda. The remaining varieties are—

Section II.—Command.

The Gothic bidyan has resulted in our verb to bid, the German baten, the Danish byde, besides bote, a messenger, and the budstick, bidding-stick, or summons to the muster.

All these were in the sense of command; but from the same root grew the race of entreating words, the Scandinavian bede, German bitten, and English beg. When these entreaties were devotional, the Germans made the verb beten, and our term for prayer, bede, passed on to the mechanical appliance for counting beads—the beads of the rosary, while the pensioner bound to pray for his benefactor was his bedesman.

It is doubtful whether this, or the Welsh bedaws, life, gave his name to the Venerable Bæda, but no doubt to himself and his contemporaries it suggested the idea of prayer. There is no doubt, however, in the case of Baudhildur, or Bathilda (the commanding heroine), the daughter of king Nidudr, the lady whom Volundr carried off with him when he fled from her mother’s cruelty. After her was called Bathilda, an Anglo-Saxon slave, who was elevated to be the wife of the second Hluodwig, and lived so holy a life, and exerted herself so much to obtain the redemption of slaves, that she was canonized, and, as la reine Bathilde, was greatly venerated in the believing days of France. Denmark also used this name, having probably taken it from England. There ‘Dronning Bothild,’ the wife of king Ejegod, spread the name among the maidens, so that it passed to Norway as Bodild, Bodil, and even to the contraction Boel.

Of English birth, too, was the Commanding-wolf—Bedvuolf, or Bodvulf—who, with his brother, St. Adolf, went, about the end of the sixth century, to seek religious instruction in Gallia-Belgica. Adolf became bishop of Maestricht, and eponym to the Adolphuses. Bodvulf came home, and founded the monastery of Ikano, where he died in 655, and was canonized. The monastery was destroyed by the Danes, and the situation forgotten, but the saint’s relics were carried away by the fugitive monks, and dispersed into various quarters, giving title to four churches in London, besides St. Botolf’s bridge, commonly called Bottlebridge, in Huntingdonshire, and St. Botolf’s town, in Lincolnshire, usually known as Boston, whence was called its American cousin Boston, with little relation to the saint. The tower of the church of St. Botolf, looking forth over the Wash, was a valued landmark, and thence the saint was apparently viewed as a friend of travellers, and connected with the entrances to cities, much as St. Christopher is elsewhere. Camden even supposed him to be Boathulf, or boat helper, and his day, the 17th June, is a market day in Christiania, under the term of Botolsok, or Botsok. In Jutland there is a church of St. Botolv; and in the North the names of Botol and Bottel are kept up; while, in England, there only remain to us the surnames of Bottle and Biddulph. The Old German forms of the two names above-mentioned are Botzhild, Botzulf; and Botzo, or Boso, a Commander, was now and then used as a name with them, as in the instance of the troublesome duke of Burgundy, whom French historians generally call Boson, and who is apt to be translated by böse, wicked.

Boto, Botho, Poto, are also found in Germany, and the very earliest specimen of this class of name is to be found in Botheric, commanding king, the name of the governor whose murder in the hippodrome caused Theodosius to give his bitterly repented command for the massacre of Thessalonica. Now and then bot occurs at the end of a word, as in the Spanish prince Sisebuto, the messenger of victory, or victorious commander.

These are not the same with some that look much like them, derived from the Northern bød, German badu, A.G.S. beado, war. Beadwig, in the Wodenic ancestry, is thus battle war, and the Gothic king of Italy, Totila, is probably made by the Romans from Bødvhar, battle pleader, a name still used in the North as Bødvar. Bødmod, Bødulf, and Bødhild, or Bødvild, have also been in use.^[146]