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Thank you for this wave of information! I'll have to study it a little closer as soon as I'm on my feet again. Shakespeare really struck me …

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I don't know any of the name books you mention, but maybe I'll be able to get hold of them some time. I've got two American name books and they are no good, but maybe I just got the wrong books. As a general rule I found: the less baby faces with big grins on the cover, the more reliable the book. So maybe you just check the cover …

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What I'll try to check: Was VANESSA used as the name for the butterfly before Swift's poem? What do we actually know about that goddess and what happened to her name?

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I like your quotation about "etymological fallacy". Now in the case of given names things are a bit more complicated. Philologists working on names do not so much ask about the etymological background but rather about the name giving motive. And sometimes this has little to do with scientific explanations given from today's point of view. Sometimes we talk about "folk etymology" with a condescending smile on our faces. But we can't say that people at a time misunderstood a certain name, they understood it in a different way. You'll find a lot of this in the Hebrew bible: the original meaning of JACOB for instance is "God protects", others say it's from an Ethiopian word meaning "Steinhuhn" ("rock chicken" or something like that). But at one point it was comprehended as "holding the heel" or "sneaking behind the heels" (> to betray) and there is a good story to this. From then on almost everybody who named his child JACOB thought of JACOB the betraying heelholder (if he thought of anything at all).

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Now what is the "better" meaning? What is more original? And where does "etymological fallacy" come in? But on this board, I understand, any piece of information is of interest, if it helps to get the history of a name straight. And this is why I always try to ask: what was first? What happened later and why was this? A lot of times people misunderstood a name or a part of it and thus changed it to what they thought made more sense. To me this is the most interesting part of chasing wild geese.

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A lot of times similar names met as in a "clash of civilizations" and they became one name. In England ALFRED was ALF-RED ("council of elves"), whereas on the continent it was understood as AL-FRED ("noble + peace"). So what is the "real" meaning of the name?

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Sometimes one name has many different backgrounds that have nothing or at least little to do with each other (LENA from MagdaLENA or else from HeLENA; MAYA or MAJA from Mary, or from the Latin goddess MAIA [> maius, "bigger, greater"], or else from the Greek goddess by the same name [here derived from the vocabulary word for "little mother"]).

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I'm afraid this mail is longer than it should have been, but I hope you are willing to follow my thoughts - and oppose if neccesary.
Thanks for listening!

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Andy ;—)

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