Etymology of Ragnar Danneskjöld

[dansullivan]

As I wrote earlier, the name of Ayn Rand's pirate, Ragnar Danneskjöld, seems to have derived from the name of the Viking pirate, Ragnar Lodbrok, who is perhaps the only famous Ragnar in history. (He certainly dominated my Google search.) Dannesgeld was what the English and French called their tribute to him, the literal translation being "Danes Gold." I had speculated that Danneskjöld might be a scandanavian spelling of Dannesgeld, but I couldn't find an online translation of "skjöld."

So, I wrote to the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. This is what they wrote back.

^{Hammar(e) means hammer and sköld is shield. There is no word "hammarsköld" in ordinary Swedish language (like goldsmith in English).}

Thus, Danneskjöld translates into "Dane's Shield." It offers an intersting symbolism, because Denmark has long maintained a culture of relative freedom and prosperity, despite being small in the era of great European powers, surrounded and easily plundered. It is also one of the most capitalistic and "business-friendly" of all European countries, despite having a rather large welfare state. (This suggests that taxation is less troublesome than meddlesome state intervention, but that is a tangent of a tangent.)

Rand had a flair for ironic symbolism, such as in the name Midas (Mulligan). Midas's "curse" of turning everything into gold is combined with "a Mulligan," which is slang for a do-over or second chance, alluding to a stereotypical habit of some Irishmen of being unsporting losers. For her character, however, the ability to make money was anything but a curse, and Midas Mulligan was not asking for a second chance, but rather was giving second chances to Rand's "looted" industrialists.

Ragnar Danneskjöld is a sort of Robin Hood in reverse, if you assume that Robin Hood was stealing rightful property and that Danneskjöld was returning rightful property. There are, of course, interpretations, even among non-socialists, that Robin Hood was taking what the Lords themselves had plundered from the people, and also (mostly socialistic) interpretations hostile to Rand's, that Ragnar's piracy was taking rightful property for his rich friends. If one such interpretation is right, RD and RH more of direct parallels than reverse parallels.

This symbolic naming question is a little different from the role model question, which would revolve around whether the actual behaviors of the Viking Ragnar Lodbrok suggested the behaviors of Ragnar Danneskjöld. Still, I think it's interesting.

[kiaer.ts]

Danneskjold (with various spellings) is a Noble Danish family. Rand remarks on Ragnar's family background. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danneskiold-Samsøe

[Reidy]

Wasn't he Norwegian? If he was, and his name is actually Danish, Rand did not research the matter very deeply, and speculations about what she might have meant if she had are beside the point.

[jriggenbach]

Wasn't he Norwegian? If he was, and his name is actually Danish, Rand did not research the matter very deeply, and speculations about what she might have meant if she had are beside the point.

Yes. No one in Norway has a Danish name, just as no one in America has a German name or a French name or a Spanish name. There is not now and has never been any immigration or emigration between countries.

QED

JR

[Peter]

Peter Reidy wrote:

Wasn't he Norwegian? If he was, and his name is actually Danish, Rand did not research the matter very deeply, and speculations about what she might have meant if she had are beside the point.

end quote

From Wiki Leaks )

Danneskiold-Samsøe is a Danish family of high nobility . . . . The first grantees were children from the 1677 marriage between countess Antoinette of Aldenburg-Knyphausen and Ulrik Frederik Gyldenløve, Count of Laurvig, a celebrated (Norwegian) general and the son of Frederick III of Denmark-Norway by his mistress Margrethe Pape, because that marriage was so high for a bastard that the king Christian V, the count's half-brother, agreed to guarantee a comital title to all its male-line descendants.

end quote

Their lineage is all mixed up, but considering the long nights on the Arctic Circle, it is understandable that the Danes loved the Norse who loved the Swedes who loved the Finns . . . hence the term, “Swedish horn dog.”

As long as Ayn was pretending, could I claim Ragnar as a descendent from my Swedish lineage, using as proof, the Swedish euphemistic phrase: “Inky dinky winky strudel?”

Back to “The Young and The Restless.” Poor Nicky! Victor is banging some new young stuff.

Peter Taylor

[caroljane]

Peter Reidy wrote:

Wasn't he Norwegian? If he was, and his name is actually Danish, Rand did not research the matter very deeply, and speculations about what she might have meant if she had are beside the point.

end quote

From Wiki Leaks )

Danneskiold-Samsøe is a Danish family of high nobility . . . . The first grantees were children from the 1677 marriage between countess Antoinette of Aldenburg-Knyphausen and Ulrik Frederik Gyldenløve, Count of Laurvig, a celebrated (Norwegian) general and the son of Frederick III of Denmark-Norway by his mistress Margrethe Pape, because that marriage was so high for a bastard that the king Christian V, the count's half-brother, agreed to guarantee a comital title to all its male-line descendants.

end quote

Their lineage is all mixed up, but considering the long nights on the Arctic Circle, it is understandable that the Danes loved the Norse who loved the Swedes who loved the Finns . . . hence the term, “Swedish horn dog.”

As long as Ayn was pretending, could I claim Ragnar as a descendent from my Swedish lineage, using as proof, the Swedish euphemistic phrase: “Inky dinky winky strudel?”

Back to “The Young and The Restless.” Poor Nicky! Victor is banging some new young stuff.

Peter Taylor

You can not only claim such descent, you probably have it. Somebody had to repopulate the world when AS ended, and we all know how much fidelity exists in the marriages of actresses and "pirates".

Victor will never learn. He should send his lawyer over to Coronation Street and get poor Gail out of jail before evil Tracy frames her for that non-murder that she did not commit.

[kiaer.ts]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark–Norway

Denmark–Norway (Danish and Norwegian: Danmark–Norge, German:Dänemark–Norwegen) is the historiographical name for a former political entity consisting of the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, including the originally Norwegian dependencies of Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Following the strife surrounding the break-up of its predecessor, the Kalmar Union, the two kingdoms entered into another personal union in 1536 which lasted until 1814. The corresponding adjective and demonym isDano-Norwegian.

[kiaer.ts]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokmål

Bokmål (lit. "book language") is one of two official Norwegian written standard languages, the other being Nynorsk. Bokmål is used by 85–90%^[1] of the population inNorway, and is the standard most commonly taught to foreign students of the Norwegian language.

Bokmål is regulated by the governmental Norwegian Language Council. A more conservative orthographic standard, commonly known as Riksmål, is regulated by the non-governmental Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature.

The first Bokmål orthography was officially adopted in 1907 under the name Riksmålafter being under development since 1879.^[2] The architects behind the reform wereMarius Nygaard and Jonathan Aars.^[3] It was an adaptation of written Danish, which was commonly used since the past union with Denmark, to the Dano-Norwegian koinéspoken by the Norwegian urban elite, especially in the capital.

[Reidy]

That is most impressive but it's only of interest to the current conversation if you can document that Rand knew this and used this knowledge in the composition of her novel. In the meantime, Occam's razor says the name indicates nothing more than that she wanted something Scandanavian-sounding and that she liked names with a lot of consonants in them.

[jriggenbach]

Occam's razor says . . . that she liked names with a lot of consonants in them.

Yeah! Like D'Anconia!

JR

[Xray]

Wasn't he Norwegian? If he was, and his name is actually Danish, Rand did not research the matter very deeply, and speculations about what she might have meant if she had are beside the point.

Yes. No one in Norway has a Danish name, just as no one in America has a German name or a French name or a Spanish name. There is not now and has never been any immigration or emigration between countries.

QED

JR

Do we know whether Rand was aware that the name Danneskjöld is of Danish origin?

But when you think about it, whether she knew or not is really irrelevant in that context, since artistic license allows writers of fiction to give their characters whatever names they want.

(Or write "Redding" instead of "Reading", but maybe I'm wrong here and "Redding" is correct).

Edited March 14, 2011 by Xray

[Brant Gaede]

Occam's razor says . . . that she liked names with a lot of consonants in them.

Yeah! Like D'Anconia!

JR

Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian D'Anconia, for short. 19/26

--Brant Peter G__d_

6/9--she would have liked my name better!

[kiaer.ts]

Of course Rand knew the Scandinavian origin of the name of her Scandinavian character. She didn't call him Renard Foulâche. She commented explicitly on his family traditions, and I find it absurd to think that his name's meaning protector of the Dane is just a coincidence.

The Norwegian versus Danish issue is also a red herring:

Danish: Jeg er dansk. Mit efternavn er Kjær.

Norwegian: Jeg er dansk. Mitt etternavn er Kjær.

[caroljane]

Occam's razor says . . . that she liked names with a lot of consonants in them.

Yeah! Like D'Anconia!

JR

Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian D'Anconia, for short. 19/26

--Brant Peter G__d_

6/9--she would have liked my name better!

Aieee! Auwe! I started a whole thread on how ugly her names sound to my ear (Randian Nomenclature). Btw yours doesn't Brant. Consonants aren't bad, just the ones she liked so much to put together.

Edited March 14, 2011 by daunce lynam

[kiaer.ts]

Aieee! Auwe! I started a whole thread on how ugly her names sound to my ear (Randian Nomenclature). Btw yours doesn't Brant. Consonants aren't bad, just the ones she liked so much to put together.

Renard Foulâche, he is quite pleasing to the ear, non?

Of course Rand knew the Scandinavian origin of the name of her Scandinavian character. She didn't call him Renard Foulâche. She commented explicitly on his family traditions, and I find it absurd to think that his name's meaning protector of the Dane is just a coincidence.

The Norwegian versus Danish issue is also a red herring:

Danish: Jeg er dansk. Mit efternavn er Kjær.

Norwegian: Jeg er dansk. Mitt etternavn er Kjær.

Edited March 14, 2011 by Ted Keer

[Reidy]

She knew the name was Scandanavian; this doesn't mean that she knew its etymology. Danneskjold didn't protect Danes. Rand didn't use allegorical names; the practice went out with John Bunyan, except among humorists and the writers of very lowbrow Victorian melodramas (the kind Rocky and Bullwinkle used to satirize).

This conversation goes to show the vacuousness of speculative mind-reading unrestrained by any need to come up with documentary support. It started with one speculation, based on one understanding of the etymology and no biographical evidence. When that etymology was overruled, along came up with another, just as plausible and just as innocent of factual backing. This is why scholars get paid to do this kind of thing and we don't.

[kiaer.ts]

She knew the name was Scandanavian; this doesn't mean that she knew its etymology. Danneskjold didn't protect Danes. Rand didn't use allegorical names; the practice went out with John Bunyan, except among humorists and the writers of very lowbrow Victorian melodramas (the kind Rocky and Bullwinkle used to satirize).

This conversation goes to show the vacuousness of speculative mind-reading unrestrained by any need to come up with documentary support. It started with one speculation, based on one understanding of the etymology and no biographical evidence. When that etymology was overruled, along came up with another, just as plausible and just as innocent of factual backing. This is why scholars get paid to do this kind of thing and we don't.

I suppose it would be above your pay grade to consider the concept of irony.

[jriggenbach]

Rand didn't use allegorical names; the practice went out with John Bunyan, except among humorists and the writers of very lowbrow Victorian melodramas (the kind Rocky and Bullwinkle used to satirize).

The voice of invincible ignorance. "Allegorical names" remain common in serious literature to this day. Writers who have no secondary meanings in mind when they choose names for their characters are hacks who never learned how to write. Part of what the phrase "good writer" means when applied to crafters of fiction is "writer who gets the maximum meaning out of all the words and names s/he chooses to employ."

JR

[9thdoctor]

Rand didn't use allegorical names; the practice went out with John Bunyan, except among humorists and the writers of very lowbrow Victorian melodramas (the kind Rocky and Bullwinkle used to satirize).

Bunyan used character names like Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mercy, Hypocrisy, really obvious things that couldn't pass for names, at least not in English. For some reason this makes me think of the German name Gottlob, which means God-praise, we just don’t use names like that.

I cited on another thread earlier today a character from V. by Thomas Pynchon, the name is Benny Profane. Profane has a pretty obvious meaning, while Benny could allude to Benedetto, as in blessed, or Benzedrine, as in speed, amphetamines. Both probably. In any event it hardly passes for a name, maybe just barely, I say no. He has crazier one's too, Genghis Cohen is a favorite. Are his names just more artfully allegorical than Bunyan’s, or is there a fundamental difference? Moving on, how about Heinlein's Lazarus Long? Umberto Eco's William of Baskerville? What do you mean by allegorical?

[caroljane]

Rand didn't use allegorical names; the practice went out with John Bunyan, except among humorists and the writers of very lowbrow Victorian melodramas (the kind Rocky and Bullwinkle used to satirize).

Bunyan used character names like Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mercy, Hypocrisy, really obvious things that couldn't pass for names, at least not in English. For some reason this makes me think of the German name Gottlob, which means God-praise, we just don’t use names like that.

I cited on another thread earlier today a character from V. by Thomas Pynchon, the name is Benny Profane. Profane has a pretty obvious meaning, while Benny could allude to Benedetto, as in blessed, or Benzedrine, as in speed, amphetamines. Both probably. In any event it hardly passes for a name, maybe just barely, I say no. He has crazier one's too, Genghis Cohen is a favorite. Are his names just more artfully allegorical than Bunyan’s, or is there a fundamental difference? Moving on, how about Heinlein's Lazarus Long? Umberto Eco's William of Baskerville? What do you mean by allegorical?

I think you are both right up to a point, Lords Copper and <Metroland. Character naming is not a literary indicator except of the individual writer's inclination. The sublime Austen just reused boring common names and got on with the story. I think Rand had a fair bit of fun choosing her names but hardly agonized over them. They have resonances beyond what she may have thought of, certainly.

For the first and only time I will compare myself to Ayn Rand and give an example of why I think the above is true. Recently I wrote something trivial here, on Canadian Boring,about Scottish-Canadians, quoting the Heritage Minister, James something. I forgot his name so called him James Candour, thinking it good for a politician. After I wrote it I realized that scots are often dour - Can.-dour-

obviously an unconscious connection, or happenstance. This stuff happens all the time, in speech and writing. Unless the writer deliberately plots his names (like Dorothy Dunnett, a chess-master) I don't think they're usually that significant.

[Reidy]

On the strength of what I've seen of Pynchon, Eco or Heinlein, they all qualify as satirists much of the time and thus aren't counter-examples to what I said earlier. I can't imagine an author using names like the ones cited in #19 (or "Wesley Mouch" or "Claude Slagenhop") without such intentions.

Offhand, I'd define allegorical names as names that allude to abstract qualities or to a character's personality traits or role in the story.

[9thdoctor]

On the strength of what I've seen of Pynchon, Eco or Heinlein, they all qualify as satirists much of the time and thus aren't counter-examples to what I said earlier.

I don’t see where the goalposts are, I don’t know how to convince you. The Name of the Rose certainly isn’t a satire, and while many of the names in it are of actual historical figures, the invented one’s are meaningful, though not as plainly allegorical as Bunyan’s. Also, so much “serious” literature today has elements of satire, looking at the Modern Library 100 best list, I’d say each of the top five might qualify.

http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/

Heinlein was science fiction, I wouldn't call him a satirist, and Pynchon, well, he's just Pynchon. This just made me think how Heinlein named the protaganist of Stranger in a Strange Land because at a sci-fi conference he jokingly pointed out that no one would name a Martian "Smith".

Offhand, I'd define allegorical names as names that allude to abstract qualities or to a character's personality traits or role in the story.

“William” evokes William of Occam, “of Baskerville” evokes Sherlock Holmes by way of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Hmm, wait a minute, it's an Italian novel, were we talking English language only?

[kiaer.ts]

Who said allegory? No one is accusing Rand of substituting a name for constructing and dramatizing a plot. The assertion is merely that she was not unaware of the meaning of the name.

[dansullivan]

On the strength of what I've seen of Pynchon, Eco or Heinlein, they all qualify as satirists much of the time and thus aren't counter-examples to what I said earlier. I can't imagine an author using names like the ones cited in #19 (or "Wesley Mouch" or "Claude Slagenhop") without such intentions.

Offhand, I'd define allegorical names as names that allude to abstract qualities or to a character's personality traits or role in the story.

Atlas Shrugged was not satirical? No jabs at various ideologies? No exaggeration to drive home a point?

And no symbolism in the character names of such modern non-satirical works as The Bourne Identity?

Earlier, you wrote,

This conversation goes to show the vacuousness of speculative mind-reading unrestrained by any need to come up with documentary support. It started with one speculation, based on one understanding of the etymology and no biographical evidence. When that etymology was overruled, along came up with another, just as plausible and just as innocent of factual backing. This is why scholars get paid to do this kind of thing and we don't.

Let me offer a clue about civilized discussion. You will more easily get away with back-pedaling if you you learn to start your disagreement without trashing the perspectives you disagree with.

And, yes, I do have a lot more on Dagny and Rearden. I was just hoping someone had something to offer besides contempt. You claimed there was a great deal of biographical information on Frank O'Connor. So, where is it?

Risk being helpful instead of insulting. I think your image will withstand it.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I have a son I named Ragnar (in homage to AS).

He was born in Brazil, but he is both a Brazilian and an American citizen.

His mother came from an Arabian-descended Catholic and Muslim family. (That's the way some folks roll down there.) But she was adopted and her bloodline family came from the mix you get in Bahia.

The weird thing is that I imagined at the time you pronounced the name "RAY-nar." It sounded plausible and much more romantic that way so I went with it. Thus, he grew up with everyone pronouncing it that way. And that's that way he is called by everyone today.

Michael