Narrating names

Folklore, April, 2002 by W.F.H. Nicolaisen

Here are a few more examples of this kind of folk-etymological legend, from the part of the United States in which we lived, upstate New York.

Just west of Binghamton, N.Y. is a town called Owego, which is supposed to have got its name when the native Americans expelled from their homes by General Sullivan's raids are said to have shouted: "Oh we go!" About a hundred miles further north is the town of Schenectady: the story goes that a captive of the Indians was begging that his life should be spared but the chief informed him with the appropriate gesture, "Skin neck t'day." In Jefferson County in the same state, the river Oswegatchie received its name when an Indian pulled his drowning horse out of the water exclaiming, "Oss we got ye!" and another watercourse, the Genegantslet Creek in Chenango County, is reported to have been the scene of the drowning of an Indian girl; her lover, who returned to the stream often, commented sadly, "Jenny gone sleep." In the early days of Cattaraugus County, also in New York State, a large part was named Ischua; the neighbouring citizens of Olean tell the story of a drunken traveller stopping at a cluster of houses north of Olean, asking, "Ish a way for Olean?" and that is how Ischua got its name. There are many more such names and legends throughout the United States but this small selection certainly makes the point.

What we have here is a fascinating symbiosis of name and narrative: a semantically obscure name creating a story which is intended to make the name transparent again. The curious twist to this process, however, is that in practically all the examples paraded so far, it is a speaker of the language in which the place in question was named who, through his problems with English, is supposed to have triggered the name when, after all, the current name would not have been opaque to him in the first place. This incongruity undoubtedly adds to the humour of these apparently aetiological legends, to the entertainment of their audiences, and to the chagrin of humourless, serious name scholars. The need for such stories also points up the general discontinuity in North America between the cultures and languages of the native population and the European incomers. However, as the story explaining the origin of the name Ischua indicates, native Americans are not the only "outsiders" ridiculed or put down in such legends; drunks, Swedes, Germans, Mexicans, Afro-Americans, and children are sometimes given the same doubtful status and treatment, while all these narrative accounts, however improbable, point up the intriguing dichotomy between the functional adequacy of the lexically meaningless name and the perceived need for lexical meaningfulness beyond satisfactory onymic contents, on the semantic level.

Marchen

The kind of close relationship between story and name just singled out is probably not the one which would normally come to mind when one is interested in finding persuasive examples for the illustration of our theme. It is curious, however, if not apparently self-contradictory, that sometimes we have to approach this onymic aspect of folk narratives from a consideration of namelessness, for most of the characters, including many of the protagonists, and almost all the places in traditional tales do not have any names in the sense described earlier. In the case of localities in particular, the absence of names in Marchen leads to the creation of a fundamentally acartographical space in which the storying events unfold, in spite of the strong spatial element in those stories (Nicolaisen 1991). The main reason for this seeming contradiction is to be found in the generic nature both of most of the personnel (the king, the princess, the mother, the stepmother, the giant, the little old man, the witch, the hunter, the wolf, the bull, and so on) and of the features of the narrated landscape (the castle, the forest, the river, the witch's house, the island, the church, the graveyard, the road, and so on). One of a kind does not have to be named. That is why those tale types in which named characters appear, and in which their names really matter, merit particular attention.