The Viking Connection

I'm not too sure if it's possible to plagiarise your own work, but a lot of stuff that will appear on here, has already appeared elsewhere on the net. I will be attempting to make it a bit sharper but it's still fairly blunt. It's just I thought it was mildly amusing at the time and I'm suffering from tennis elbow of the brain at the moment.

THE VIKING CONNECTION

My surname is Skellern, which is derived from the Olde English “Skalhorne”. I have a theory about this, which has been enthusiastically embraced by my progeny. Let’s face it who wouldn’t want to be genetically related to the race that produced Eric the Ready and his barbarous gang who brutalised the North of England, discovered Greenland (nice con job that one, not a blade of grass to be seen) and America.

I reckon that Ethelred ‘The Unsteady’ Skalhorne was a Viking who was on a long-ship from Norway, to go raping and pillaging in Newcastle (North of England not NSW Aus.) He wasn’t much good at raping and his pillaging was pathetic. While the rest of his motley crew carried home buckets of coal (highly desirable in the cold northern climes) and comely Anglo-Saxon wenches, he took home a couple of bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale (Piss-pottery runs in the family!).


When he got home to Norway, his mum was less than impressed, dragged him into the nearest sauna and thrashed him soundly with Birch branches and threw him out into the snow (this was roundly applauded by the neighbours who immediately followed suit, nakedly thrashing themselves with branches and throwing themselves into snowdrifts). This practice continues to this day. (A first of many innovations for the Skalhornes, which have never been publicly acknowledged).

Ethelred was suitably bashed and abashed and his Mum sent him back to raping and pillaging. When he arrived in Newcastle he pillaged several more cases of Newky Brown (subsequently a favourite tipple of generations of Skalhornes) and ran off into the interior. He ended up in Derbyshire, which is about as far as you can get from the sea in England, no matter which way you walk.

He was welcomed with open arms by the locals, who soon polished off his Newky Brown and although he couldn’t speak English. It wasn’t a great problem because neither could they.

Anyway, over the next five hundred years or so, the monks/priests etc who had a rudimentary understanding of Latin came to translate Skalhorne as Skellum, Skelm and eventually Skellern. The first two seem to relate to Olde Scottish and Olde Dutch respectively in which they both mean ‘thieving ratbag’, so probably they knew something I don’t.

There is also the ancient French word Scelerat, (a few accents and graves in there, those little critters that they put over vowels and which I don’t know how to do, being a technological Neanderthal), which also means something similar. However, who cares about the Frogs and their accursed language.

To add to this, 'Keith' apparently means 'The man who dwells in the woods' which makes Keith Skellern 'The thief who dwells in the wood', making me a latter day Robin Hood?? When I was working for the Tax Office, it could legitimately be argued, that I was robbing the poor to give to the rich.

Cheers for now,

SkyBlueSkull.

http://keith-skellern.blogspot.com