Talk:Herleva

Legend

According to a local legend there, Arlette was born in HUY, Belgium, daughter of Fulbert the tanner and Doda a princess coming from Scotland (freddy (talk) 19:38, 28 September 2010 (UTC)) A statue of Arlette de Huy, William's mother, stands in the middle of the city.

For the readers of this page:

File:002 BB.jpg

Please note that the novel "Arlette" exists in english under the title "Arlette, daughter of Huy", same author/2004 and is also available in Huy, Belgium.

Style

The manner in which the legend is told is appropriate to the context in which it is told, or that of a funny story, but I am not sure it is consistent with the [Manual of style]. For example, in "perhaps a bit more than necessary" it is clear that the skirts were raised more than necessary, and I would argue that this should be stated expressly rather than as an amusing innuendo. --Robert the Devil — Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.107.189.202 (talk) 02:01, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't know that the legend says anything about skirts at all - the whole 'legend' is uncited and has been for some time. This looks to me like an editor trying to be amusing. Agricolae (talk) 19:22, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Why use the misleading name "Herleva"?

It's obvious she wasn't of Scandinavian descent as her father was called "Fulbert", a tradional Frankish name. The name "Arlette" was probably the real version and should be in the title instead of "Herleva". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.119.31.74 (talk) 02:08, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Given that her son was William, son of Robert, son of Richard, son of Richard, son of William, all of demonstrable Scandinavian descent, it is far from clear that a person of Scandinavian descent in 11th century Normandy couldn't bear a 'traditional Frankish name' - in fact, the majority of them bore Frankish names. Anyhow, Wikipedia bases its page names on the form most commonly used by English-language scholars, not what editors deduce to be the 'real version'. Agricolae (talk) 02:21, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

This IP has no idea of French onomastics. The suffix -ette (less commonly -otte) is typical of French hypocoristics, generally nicknames from christian first names such as Julie > Juliette, Nicole > Nicolette > Colette, Jeanne d’Arc was called Jeannette by her parents. So Arlette can’t be her original name but Herleve is. She is not the first recorded Herleve in Norman history : Robert the Dane’s wife is a certain Herleve too. Otherwise, Robert the Dane and Bernard the Dane are obviously of Scandinavian descend and they both bear a Frankish name, because the Scandinavian took very often a Frankish christian name when they were baptized, such as Hrolfr (Rollo) baptized as Robert. Sometimes they conserved the two names such as this Pierre Helge du Fay mentioned in Cotentin, 12th century. In addition, the descendants of Bernard the Dane have typical Scandinavian names : Anschetil (Anquetil, common Norman surname) from Asketill and Turchetil (Turquetil, Norman surname) from Thorketill. Herleve was obviously of Scandinavian descend because no pagan name was given to local Christians without a Scandinavian background.Nortmannus (talk) 23:24, 7 November 2025 (UTC)