Hiiela (Hiiela)

Place of the sacred grove. The ‑la suffix usually indicates a place where actions related to the underlying noun are done (e.g. parkla for car cark), but since grove is already a place, perhaps it acts to emphasize its ‘ceremonial’ status rather than its being sacred in a simply passive way. The suffix could have a variety of origins, often a contraction of entities such as valla (from vald, parish, although this is also translated as kihelkond, a territorial unit where, historically, inhabitants were related / bound to each other through pledges [kihl, pl. kihlad], derived from Old Germanic *gisla giving rise to modern German Geisel, hostage), or from küla (village), salu (grove...), even ‑(t)la from ‑talu (farm); accordingly, the Finnish epic Kalevala is said to derive from “the country of Kaleva”. Another interesting possibility or relation comes from stories preceding the Kalevala where legendary chieftain Kalev had various sons including one named Hiisi. And hiisi in Finnish means ‘pagan place of sacrifice; bad spirit, dreadful giant’ (but see Hiie). Since the progeny in question (including Kalevipoeg) seemed to be mildly enormous, with miscellaneous sorcerer powers, Hiisi may well represent an Esto-Finnic Titan (other outsize characters include Hiiumaa’s Leiger and his big brother Suur-Tõll on Saaremaa, corroborating the idea that if Saaremaa was the home of Saarepiiga, and if Hiisi was related to Hiiumaa (see Hiiu), then a coalescence of the ur-legend into its current dramatis personae may have occurred some 800-odd years ago (very ‘odd’, please see big question mark hanging over this) around a then-powerful tribe in the north-eastern land area of modern Estonia, known as Kaleva(la)? Web-designers will be pleased to know that Joomla could also mean ‘place of drinking’, hence ‘bar’, but it’s actually a phoneticization of Swahili jumla, meaning ‘all together’.