| dc.description.abstract | Vidzeme, one of the cultural and historical regions of Latvia, became a part of the kingdom of Sweden during the 17th century. Subsequently, Swedish cartographers mapped the estates of Vidzeme and then compiled maps of larger territories then called castle districts.
The present research inspects 11 of these late 17th century maps and analyzes the microtoponyms found there. For an illustration, the maps of Sāviena (Sawensee) and Aburti (Lüggen) estates are chosen.
This paper consider as microtoponyms not only the names of meadows, forests, swamps and hills, but also some hydronyms denoting smaller rivers and lakes that had not yet been academically analyzed, in total names of 26 objects. The majority of these microtoponyms denote what was then called streijgabali – remote parts of agricultural land that belonged to a central property but did not have a direct border with it.
These maps depict some no longer existing lakes and swamps (e.g. Linn Siöö, Linne Purwe, Werdig purw), contain some almost unintelligible names of forests no longer known (e.g. Ewaete Sille), and testify about the ancient status of some place names (e.g. Pillis Kalln). The remote parts of land properties are often defined in map legends in Swedish as buskland i bruk, i.e. woodlands and scrublands. In most cases the names of these properties contain the generic element gabals ‘piece’. These placenames are often related to objects in the area. Four of them – Kanger, Pargull, Pasʃele and Saulleskaln – became farmhouse names during the following centuries.
The number of these placenames is not sufficient to reconstruct the linguistic landscape of the 17th century estates. Nevertheless, they give an insight into the concepts of centre and periphery of that time and their denominations, into the perception of reference points of a landscape, and into the creative mind of the 17th century people. | en_US |
