Pärisnimedest Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwaldi kogumikus „Eesti rahva ennemuistsed jutud“

Abstract

The paper deals with proper names which occur in the collection Old Estonian Fairy Tales written by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, the author of the Estonian epic Kalevipoeg , and published for the first time in 1866 in Helsinki. The work includes 43 fairy tales and 18 local folk-tales. The main goal of the paper is systematic treatment of proper names. For this purpose, all possible toponyms and personal names have been localised and classified, had their use in the old written records identified, and as far as possible, had their etymology specified. In Old Estonian Fairy Tales there occur 47 toponyms, among them 17 in the fairy tales and 30 in the local folk-tales. We can distinguish real places, among them countries, regions, approximately localisable places (for instance, Põhjamaa ‘Northern land’) and virtual places, like Kullamaa ‘Gold country, Eldorado’ and Kungla ‘Eldorado’ in the fairy tales. They most often contain country names (8), for example Soome ~ Soomemaa ‘Finland’, Pohlamaa ‘Poland’ a. o. The folk-tales include mainly names of real places. The names of manors (7) and cities (5) are most frequent among them. The work includes 59 names of characters in the stories. Names from the fairy tales comprise the majority (56) of these. The collection includes 20 names of mythological persons ( Ahti , Põhja konn ‘Northern Frog’ a. o.), 39 anthroponyms ( Els , Une-Tõnu ‘Sleepy Tõnu’, Pahlen , etc.), and 4 zoonyms (dog names).