Every Monday we will post an entry that hasn’t yet been published with a view towards harnessing the collective onomastic power of the internet. If you have any thoughts about the name’s origin, other variants it might be related to, other examples of its use, etc., please share them in the comments! If you wish to browse other Mystery Monday names, there is an index.
In the eleven century period that the DMNES covers, there were — naturally — a lot of changes in onomastic fashions. But considering that that period is only about twice as long as the era from our cut-off date to the present time, it is surprising just how familiar how many of the names are — names are both remarkably fluid and changeable and remarkably stable. This is especially the case when we look at the 15th C (or thereabouts) onwards. The number of Mystery Monday names that we have that come from the final two centuries of the period we cover is quite low — simply because the vast majority of the names in use then are still in use, in some form or another, today, or are closely related to names which are still in use.
So when we find a name whose first occurrence in data set is quite late and yet we still don’t recognise, this is always unusual! Today’s name is one of those names — recorded in Middle Low German in Estonia in the early 15th C, it’s not obvious (to us, at least!) what it’s origin is.
Do you recognize the name? Have any thoughts on its origin? Please share in the comments!
This one does not look like a given name it and it does not look Low German either.
I think it is a surname derived from a Slavonic place name like Zarrentin (see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarrentin_am_Schaalsee ).
I think this is right. Note the different spellings of the place name in Zedler’s “Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon”: “Zarentin, oder Zarrentin, Zarentien, Zarrentien, Serentin, Serentyn, auch Cern-Sarren, Tzern-Zaren”.
https://books.google.com.ar/books?id=85k0AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA1649
I agree that it’s not a forename, and so does Derrik, judging by the corresponding entry in his Table 2. And that place-name is a pretty plausible choice. The entry for Zarentin in Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, Vol. 60, 1749, col. 1649, begins as follows:
This appears to be the same place. Moreover, Dieterich Schröder, Wismarische Erstlinge Oder einige zur Erläuterung Der Mecklenburgischen Kirchen-Historie, Vol. 5, p. 224 takes Serentyn to be the normal spelling of what is evidently the same place: Der Ort / welcher in unsern Schreiben Serentyn genennet wird / heisset sonsten auch Cern=Sarren=Tzern=Zaren=und Zarrentien . . . .