Hiiu (Hiiu):

Aricle currently under review. 

Of or from Hiiumaa. Named for one of its scions, Andrus Bork, apparently a building-worker of Glehni N.v. who built a log cabin in the woods south of the railway, hanging his ‘Hioküla’ (Hiiumaa village) sign on the door. As other houses sprouted up, the name took on, but there was competition: until 1922 it was also known as Andrejevi after another local home-owner (or perhaps just a Russified version of the original Andrus?), but why Hiiu won the day remains unsure, nostalgia and clannishness perhaps. The early 1920s already had Hiiusche and Dagosche Straße (see below), so the trend towards Hiiu had clearly started. Hiiu is also the genitive of hiid (giant), but any reference to ‘Giantland’ is due to folk etymology (i.e. completely wrong but see Hiiela above...). It’s been more reasonably suggested that the name comes from its sacred groves, see Hiie. Be this as it may, Hiiumaa and Saaremaa have been the object of a centuries-long hoax as to their ‘Finnish’ names… Internet sloppy-and-paste routinely punts Hiiumaa’s former Finnish name as Päiväsalo (written variously as Päivänsalo, Päiwäsalo, etc.), translated into Swedish as Dagö (both superficially at least meaning ‘day island’), while Saaremaa was correspondingly Estonified from Yösalo to Ösel, or ‘night island’. To clarify, a quick recap of terms is in order:

English	Swedish	Finnish	Estonian
day	dag	päivä	päev
night	natt	yö	öö

Following a rabbit hole as entertaining as it is frustrating, let’s buckle up and look at the evidence…

1)   In 1870-71, linguist and self-established arbiter of Finnish as she is spoke, August Ahlqvist wrote an article called Några Östersjö-öars finska namn (On Finnish names of the Baltic Sea islands), asserting that neither name Päiväsalo nor Yösalo exists and accusing geography textbook writers of being too ‘poetic’, saying the names are en fiction, som har sitt ursprung från ett skämt af en finsk författare, men i verkligheten saknar all grund (a fiction springing from a flight of fancy by a Finnish author [he says not who], and has no basis in reality). He is both right and wrong. Part of the story consists in the fact that:

a)   The first known record of Hiiumaa comes from a 1228 granting of bishopric rights to the island referred to as quadam insula deserta, quae dicitur Dageida (a certain deserted island called Dageida), a phrase vague enough to suggest that none of the stakeholders had any great certainty as to what they were referring to. The name had already gained foothold with a coven of covert cognates, the first being Dagaiþ / Dagaiþi^[1] (from Gutasaga, ±1220-1275^[2], in Gutnish, an Old Norse language spoken on the island of Gotland), probable source for later Dagö (Swed.), Dagden (Ger.), Dagø (Dan.), Daghöe (?), etc. The Dag- element is widely trumpeted to mean ‘day’ (and probably means anything but, a point to which we return later). How it got there is unclear. On the other hand, Mod. Finn. calls it Hiidenmaa, or Hiisi’s Land (XXX to which we will also return later). For now, let’s just say that Hiiumaa = Swed. Dagö = Day Island.

b)   Saaremaa seems to have two ‘founding’ names: Latin Osilia, repeated throughout Henry of Latvia’s Livonian Chronical (±1229), where it may also have meant the entire ‘archipelago’ including Hiiumaa, Muhu, etc.; and Old Norse Eysýsla, recorded in various Icelandic sagas, 13^th‑C Njáls saga among others, which breaks down into ‘island territory’ as follows:

i     ey = Old Norse for island, which is ö in Swed., while öö in Est. = night

ii    sýsla = ditto, district^[3] (in this case, a stewardship held from king or bishop)

It seems probable that the earlier name was Eysýsla, rendered into Latin as Osilia, morphing into a more pronounceable Ösel with silia rounding down to sel. How is not 100% clear. But since Est. salu (grove) comes from Lith. / Latv. sala (island, swampy elevation), a term that spread N into other Finnic languages, revolving around the notion of ‘large, primeval, forested island’ as in Finnish salo, sel being understood as wooded island is not unreasonable. And this gives us Saaremaa = Ösel/Oesel = Night Island.

The two names can thus be played upon to create the cute little trans-Baltic yin-and-yang of ‘day’ (Swed. dag) and ‘night’ (Est. öö), a tale amplified by one of Finland’s major poets, Eino Leino (1878-1926), who we can now forget. See Kassisaba for a similar case of linguistic jiggery-pokery.

The likely candidate for Ahlqvist’s poetic Finnish geotext bro is Lavus Korander (Klas Corander) whose book Yleinen Maa-Tiede (General Earth Science, 1862) calls Hiidenmaa Päiväsalo. Any other culprits? The next guy holding the buck is Matthias Akiander who – in a note to his 1849 Utdrag ur ryska annaler (Extracts of Russian Annals) – says Namnet Oesel har uppkommit af det finska Yösalo, Nattö, likasom Dagö af Päiwäsalo (The name Oesel came from the Finnish Yösalo, as does Dagö from Päiwäsalo). And this is where ‘Päiväsalo’ seems to come to a grinding start. It is pure fantasy. He saw a non-existent day-night parallel and made it up. As far as I’m aware, no record of this name exists prior to 1862. So he probably is the guilty party. But not quite. Osilia/Oesel/Ösel already had a long line of multiple spellings before Akiander formalised his on paper. And even if only one prior record of Yösalo has been traced so far – a 14/11/1829 Finnish shipping report in Oulun Wiikko-Sanomia providing a location Gottlannin ja Öselin (Yösalon) wälillä (between Gotland and Ösel [Yösalo]) – it acknowledges that some Finns were already using Yösalo for Ösel before Akiander, although not necessarily as he supposed. Finnish yö is the typical way of transcribing Estonian long ö, and its Yö spelling says nothing as to how early 19^th-C Finns interpreted the name. It may well have come to be understood as Night Island, but evidence is lacking.

^[1]  þ, the Old Norse, Old English letter known as ‘thorn’, represents the ‘th’ (‘dh’) sound. Over time, it morphed typographically into ‘y’, hence its frequent use and mispronunciation as in placenames such as ‘Ye olde cybercafe’.

^[2] The saga date could be hundreds of years after the first naming. The human remains of individuals from central Sweden associated with the early Viking-age Salme ships (see Salme) strongly suggest that the islands had long been known.

^[3] Differentiating it from the mainland (or perhaps western Estonia) known as Aðalsýsla, where aðal meant main, chief or noble.

 

Hiiepuu (Hiiepuu)

Sacred tree, often oak, linden or rowan.

Hiiu-Maleva (Hiiu-Malev)

Hiiu* army or host. Which our gentlemen in grey converted to Rahvamaleva (1959-1994). See Maleva.

* Names prefixed by a District or Sub-district are often just a means of differentiating the name in the second part from others elsewhere.  Tallinn seems to be very sensitive to avoiding address confusion.