Re: Trees and Princes

["John S. Quarterman" <jsq@quarterman.org>]

>If you call the exceptional man who was Henry premier Jarl of Norway a
>Prince it does not make him a Prince.

In the sense that nobody has presented a contemporary text that I've
ever seen that calls him Prince or princeps, quite likely you're right.

However, what was the Latin word the Romans used for emperor?
Most people would guess imperator, which was one office the emperors
often held, or possibly caesar, from which we get Russian czar or tzar.
Actually, the Roman title for what we call Emperor was Augustus, with
Caesar as a sort of lieutenant Augustus in the later empire.  Yet that
doesn't stop the common usage of the word emperor in English where the
Romans would say Augustus.

In the sense that Henry St. Clair was the crowner of the king of Norway
and holder of a semi-independent jarldom, one could make an argument
that he was an equivalent of some of the Russian princes or of some of
the princely German nobility:

``In the British system, one can discriminate between royalty, nobility,
knights, gentry and commons: five grades. The Germans tend to regard
certain of what the British regard as gentry as noble, and at the
highest levels, what the British define as noble resembles what the
Germans regard as "princely" and in general, continental systems as a
whole tend to have a broader definition of "noble".''
 http://www.heraldica.org/topics/odegard/titlefaq.htm

Nordic nobility appears to more closely resemble German nobility
than British, and of course there was long interaction between
Nordics and Russians; much Russian nobility was actually Nordic
in origin.

So I suppose if Russian knyaz can be translated duke, as it often is
instead of as prince, that it might not be inaccurate to translate
Norse jarl in this case as prince.

John S. Quarterman <jsq@quarterman.org>
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