Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/34

 tion in which the a of the genitive plural is wanting, as in Eadwulfingtūn, now Adlington in Cheshire. It was the opinion of Kemble that in the latter class of names the syllable -ing has not its function of forming patronymics, but is practically equivalent to a genitive suffix, so that Eadwulfingtūn would mean simply 'the farm of Eadwulf '. There does not, however, appear to be any evidence that the ending -ing was used in this way, and I am inclined to think that in place-names of this kind the a of the genitive plural was dropped on account of the length of the personal name to which it was appended. As a rule, we find -inga where the patronymic (in the singular) is a dissyllable, and -ing when it is polysyllabic.

Besides those patronymics in -ingas which designated the children or descendants of some person who lived perhaps two or three generations back, there were others that were the appellations of royal or noble families. We read in the life of St. Guthlac that he belonged to the famous Mercian family of the Iclingas, whose name evidently marks them as the reputed descendants of Icel, the great-grandfather, according to the pedigree in the Chronicle, of Creoda, the first king of Mercia. Whether Icel was a real person or not we have no means of knowing; it is possible that he is a mythic eponymus invented to account for the name of the Iclingas, and that this name is not a true patronymic at all; it is possible, again, that Icel was a personage of ancient heroic tradition, from whom the kings of Mercia chose to consider themselves descended, and to whom the genealogists arbitrarily assigned a definite place in the ancestral series. There is the same uncertainty about the historical character of the eponymi of the royal houses of many early Germanic nations. The Amali (as they are called in Latin; the Gothic form would be Amalungōs), from whom the Ostrogoths chose their kings, claimed descent from an ancient king Amala; the Scyldingas of Beowulf (in Old Norse Ski&#491;ldungar), the royal