Road sign showing Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Skegness
© Gillian Fellows-Jensen

Road sign showing Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Skegness

Great Grimsby

Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire

Great Grimsby, in the Bradley Wapentake of Lincolnshire, which was later joined with Haverstoe Wapentake to become known as Bradley Haverstoe Wapentake. The original name Grimsby comes from the Old Norse male personal name Grímr and the Old Norse element by ‘farm, settlement’. It is Great in contrast to Little Grimsby, in the Ludborough Wapentake of Lincolnshire; earlier spellings including mekill Grimesby are derived from Old Norse mikill ‘great’.

The personal name Grímr is common across the Scandinavian world and recorded several times throughout Lincolnshire in the Domesday Book.

For a saga-anecdote about Grimsby, see the blog post A Poet Visits Grimsby.

Features in Saga

Orkneyinga saga, ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson. Íslenzk fornrit XXXIV. Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1965, pp. 130-131.

Orkneyinga saga, tr. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards, Penguin, 1982, pp. 59-60.

Ascribed Culture

Collection

Viking Names

Keywords

Lincolnshire, place-name

Further information

This object is related to Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire.
Find out about Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire.

Acknowledgements

Image © Gillian Fellows-Jensen

Image © David Wright, via Geograph, CC BY-SA 2.0

References

Kenneth Cameron, A Dictionary of Lincolnshire Place-Names. Nottingham: English Place-Name Society (1998), p. 54.

Kenneth Cameron with John Field and John Insley, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire V, English Place-Name Society Volume LXXIII (1997), pp. 46-48.

Kenneth Cameron with John Field and John Insley, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire IV, English Place-Name Society Volume LXXI (1995), pp. 22, 47.

John Insley, Scandinavian Personal Names in Norfolk. Uppsala: Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi LXII (1994), pp. 144-148.

Gillian Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag (1968), pp. 105-107.

E.H. Lind. Norsk-isländska dopnamn ock fingerade namn från medeltiden. Supplementband. Oslo: Jacob Dybwads Bokhandel  (1931), col. 306-314.

E.H. Lind, Norsk-isländska dopnamn ock fingerade namn från medeltiden. Uppsala: A.B. Lundequistska Bokhandel (1915), col. 359-361.

 

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