Skrælingar
The Skrælingar ( German Skrälinger ) were, according to the sagas, the indigenous people of northeast North America. The term was used by the Grænlendingar , i.e. the Vikings who settled in Greenland , to denote the inhabitants found in eastern Canada and Greenland.
The word skrælingr could be translated as weakling , from urnordian * skrāhilinga (Jan de Vries) or * skrēhila- (Johannesson), Norwegian skræling , Shetland skrelin , Danish skrælling (dt. Weak person ) < skrante (sickly) cf. skral (scarce, lean) < Middle Low German schraal (= bad device , rattling , dry ).
In today's Icelandic a skrælingi is a "barbarian" and in Faroese a skrælingur is a native of Greenland or Canada. Gerhard Köbler translates skrælingr in his Old Norse dictionary simply and exclusively with "Eskimo" while Walter Baetke only refers it to the inhabitants of Vinland .
It is assumed that the Grænlendingar brought the word into Greenlandic , where it is now used as a self-name for the Kalaallit , i.e. the Greenlanders.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nudansk Ordbog (1974)
- ^ Icelandic Online Dictionary
- ^ Føroysk orðabók
- ^ Gerhard Köbler: Old Norse Dictionary. 2013.
- ^ Walter Baetke: Dictionary of Norse prose literature. 1976.
- ^ Ernst Håkon Jahr, Ingvild Broc (Ed.): Language Contact in the Arctic: Northern Pidgins and Contact Languages. 1996. p. 233. Limited preview in Google Book search