A case study in Danish personal names from Feilberg’s dialect dictionary
By Peder Gammeltoft
What can a dialect dictionary tell us about how people felt about a name – and those who bore it? Quite a lot, it turns out. H. F. Feilberg’s monumental Bidrag til en ordbog over jyske almuesmål (1886–1914), a dictionary of rural Jutish dialects, is in fact far more than a lexicon. The entries are often an encyclopedia of folklore, folk poetry, and folk belief. But it also offers something rarer: an unfiltered record of social attitudes of a speech community.
Let us take a look at the entries in which Per or Peder, the Danish forms of Peter, occur. Across several pages, Feilberg (II.797ff) documents a rich constellation of compounds, proverbs, rhymes, and expressions that reveal how Jutish speakers used this common name to encode social judgments, sexual humor, and folk wisdom.
The personal name Peter, with its variants Peder, Per and Peer, is taken to be the most popular Danish male personal name for the last 1000 years, owing to the strong biblical significance. The name itself derives from Greek petros (Πέτρος), meaning ‘rock, stone’, siginifying solidity and stability. However, the name Peter’s very popularity seemingly brought an air of ordinariness, which made it available for typecasting.
The Clueless Everyman and a Guide of People
In Feilberg, Peder Tot (or Tåt) designated a weak, characterless person – as one saying put it, someone who does neither good nor bad. Peder Tratte marked a fool; Peder Gante a simpleton, just to mention a few. In these compounds, Peder becomes a Jutish synonym for an everyman – a blank slate onto which the speech community projected mediocrity, indecision, and haplessness.
The name also attached to non-human referents in ways that complicate any simple reading. For instance, Peder Smut and Peder i gjærdet were terms used of the bird wren, that tiny brown bird beloved in European folklore for its cleverness despite its size. And Peders pig (”Peter’s arrow, stick”) designated three stars in Orion’s belt – signifying a means of guidance like Saint Peter’s staff for Christians and the belt of Orion for travellers.
These associations suggest something more than mockery. Here, Peder is the name of the familiar, the domestic, the small but persistent – a symbol of everyday rural life rather than heroic endeavor.
Theater of the Obscene
Yet the dictionary also preserves a contrasting dimension. In children’s rhymes, figures such as Peder Ronnevæder and Peder Ronølbok appear repeatedly. To the uninitiated, these look like nonsense words – playful sound-patterns for young voices. But dialect knowledge reveals their bawdy meaning: Jutish ronne means ‘to fuck’, whereas rontle means ‘to whore, fuck’. Peder Ronnevæder is literally “Peder the fucking ram”, although the meaning stated in Feilberg (III.78) is just “a ram, male among the sheep”. Similarly, the literal meaning of Peder Ronølbok is “Peder the whoring buck” (Feilberg III.79). Here Peder becomes a vehicle for robust, sexual farmyard humor – linked to virile male animals in explicitly carnal terms. The rhymes were passed down; the dialect word faded; the dirty joke was preserved in innocence.
Bearing the name of Peder myself – and of Jutish descent – I was myself subjected to teasing with a rhyme of Peder Ronnevæder that went like this:
Pej’er, Pe’ væj’er, Pe’ ronnevæj’er
Fløw op i æ væj’er o en stur støk’ læj’er
Æ læj’er fløw væk, å Pej’er fåll ni’er
Pej’er, Pe’ væj’er, Pe’ ronnevæj’er.
Translation:
Peter, Peter the ram, Peter the fucking ram / Flew up in the air on a large piece of leather / The leather blew away, and Peter fell down / Peter, Peter the ram, Peter the fucking ram.
As a kid I did not know what the meaning of the rhyme was, but I could see in the smirks of the adults that I was somehow made fun of and that it was naughty in some way. It wasn’t until I actually encountered the entry in Feilberg, that it dawned on me that the rhyme was a veiled verse on fornication.
Questionable Characters
Peder could also be morally suspect. The children’s rhymes preserve a Peder who steals: one verse tells of Peder who “stole a cat on Christmas Eve” (han stål æn kat, julənat), roasted and ate it. Another, more audaciously, has Peder fly up into the sky and steal a sausage from Our Lord himself (stål æn pøls fra Våhær)—and when God came with a knife, Peder had already swallowed the evidence. These are comic thefts, to be sure, but they cast Peder as the petty pilferer, the cunning rogue.
More sinister is the tale of Peder Nittengryn (“Peter Nineteen-grains”) embodies a different vice: miserliness. Feilberg records that the Aalborg merchant “Little Per” sold only nineteen grains for a shilling during a famine in Norway and thus earned the name. Here Peder is the exploiter – the man who profits from others’ hunger.
What Dialect Dictionaries Preserve
The methodological lesson here is significant. Folklore collections, not constrained by Victorian propriety and focused on narrative genres, often captured scattered, incidental, sometimes obscene material. Feilberg, documented this by including proverbial expressions, children’s rhymes, and figurative compounds that might otherwise have been passed over in embarrassed silence.
The result is an unexpectedly rich source for socioonomastics – the study of social attitudes toward names. Dictionary entries for words containing personal names capture how naming practices are intersected with social judgment, sexual humor, folk astronomy, and the texture of rural life. They preserve long-forgotten attitudes and associations that more formal documentation often missed.