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.
Today’s bizarre mystery name is the last of our Q-name mysteries! It’s a masculine name found in 9th C Spain, and, well…take a look at it.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that there might be some sort of scribal or editorial error going on here…it just doesn’t seem to have enough vowels.
The deuterotheme can tentatively be derived from Proto-Germanic *mērijaz ‘famous’ — the same element that shows up as the root of the deuterotheme of the Iberian name Ramiro (entry available in the next edition). But it’s quite unclear what the prototheme might be, even if we stick more vowels in.
Do you have any suggestions? Some vowels you can spare? Please share in the comments!
In OCR, s and a can easily be mixt up, so I’d amend the name to Quatremiri. This resembles the French surname (de) Quatremer “of the four seas” (I have no idea which seas count up to four in the given historical context, but that’s the explanation given to the surname.)
The comment by Diego and Brain M. Scott make me wonder whether the French surname Quatremer isn’t an offshot of Wistrimirus, too.
There is a large collection of 9th and 10th c. variants of the name in Spain here, s.v. Wistrimirus:
https://books.google.com/books?id=SUwv8x15BE8C&pg=PA596
This would equate Qustremiri to Wistremar, Wistremir, Wistrimir that Förstemann lists under VESTA.
That was my immediate thought; q for w is not entirely unexpected. Piel & Kremer, Hispano-gotisches Namenbuch, p. 292, also have a copious examples of the name, including Questremiro 1003. They derive the prototheme from a Gothic *wistr- ‘west’, which would be from PGerm. *westraz (adj.) or *westrą (derived noun).
Brilliant! Thanks!
Also, there are several places called Castromil in Galicia; their name derive from the Latin genitive of this anthroponym. In particular Castromil in Aranga, A Coruña, is attested as Guistrumir in 1037, Uestremir in 1157, uilla Uistremir 1190, Guistrimir 1206. In Galicia this was a rather common name till the low Middle Ages. Links:
http://sli.uvigo.es/toponimia/toponimia.php?entidade=n&provincia=n&busca=castromil&cantos=20&compara=conten&volta=1
http://gmh.consellodacultura.org/nc/buscador/resultados/lib/0/buscar/stremir/dende/Dende%20AAAA/ata/Ata%20AAAA/envio/Buscar/op/1/fb0/0/