Knut

Historical scholarship

Passages quoted verbatim from public-domain reference works. They reflect the scholarship of their time, not current consensus, and may use obsolete spellings.

• 1884From the archives

  Knut— “hill”

  Knud, or Knut, a very common northern name, is a very puzzling one. Its origin and nationality are Danish, and it only came to Norway by intermarriages, nor does it appear at all in the _Landnamabok_. The great Dane who brought it here is called by the chroniclers Canutus, from some notion of making it the Latin _hoary_, and thus we know him as Canute; but even in Domesday, one landholder in Yorkshire, and another in Derbyshire, are entered as Cnud. The whole North, and the…

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  Knud, or Knut, a very common northern name, is a very puzzling one. Its origin and nationality are Danish, and it only came to Norway by intermarriages, nor does it appear at all in the _Landnamabok_. The great Dane who brought it here is called by the chroniclers Canutus, from some notion of making it the Latin _hoary_, and thus we know him as Canute; but even in Domesday, one landholder in Yorkshire, and another in Derbyshire, are entered as Cnud. The whole North, and the inhabitants of the Hebrides, use the name, which comes from the same root as our _knot_, and properly means a protuberance, a hill, or barrow.

  Yonge, History of Christian Names (1884), Part VI, Chapter VI (Descriptive Names), Section IX (Locality) · Public domain (Project Gutenberg)