Þveit

Abstract

The topic of the article is the origin of the toponym Þveit, a name of a lake in South-Eastern Iceland but otherwise unknown as a place name in Iceland. The corresponding morpheme is well known in Scandinavia and Denmark, both by itself and as the last part of place names, esp. in the names of (small) farms, and it occurs in place names in earlier viking settlements in Britain and France. The author discusses the meanings of the word þveit and its cognates in modern Scandinavian, the age and distribution of place names derived from it, and the possible origin of the Icelandic name. Her conclusion is that the name may originally derive from the habit of cutting a hole in the ice for fishing, as one meaning of þveit, known from Norwegian dialects, is ‘a channel cut into ice’.