The Name Game

I had set off to research the name Judith to understand the allusions better. I understand the reference to The Book of Judith in the Bible, but I was just curious to see what else the interwebs had to say about this name. Really I had been curious since the baby in The Walking Dead had been named Judith. I didn't find much, but a happened upon some very cool allusions about Holofernes as a name.

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, “Holofernes” is  of Persian origin, similar information [sic] to ‘Artaphernes,’ ‘Dataphernes,’ ‘Tissaphernes,’ the last element of each of which is ‘pharna’ means ‘glorious’.  Is it possible that the unknown Anglo-Saxon poet and his audience  aware of this meaning?  What associations might have been made, then, with the name?

The first element may appear to be similar to Old English holh or hol, which can mean “hole,” “hollow” or “perforation.”  Hol  also has the meaning of “slander.”  No obvious associations here; in any case Judith’s beheading of Holofernes could hardly be considered “perforation,” unless understood as an extreme understatement!  The verb holian means “to oppress,” which could have some resonance: Holofernes, the general of Nebuchadnezzar, was sent to subdue or oppress the Jewish people.  Finally, and probably most fittingly,  Hloh, meaning “laughed."

Heolfor (“gore,” “blood”), also appearing in Beowulf and Andreas – poems which deal with similarly heroic matter – and heolfrig (“gory,” “bloody”), which itself appears in Judith, may have evoked a more distant kind of resonance, connecting the name of the enemy general to his bloody fate at the hands of the poem’s heroine. Perhaps the strongest connection is to be found not in Old English but in Latin.  Infernus means “infernal,” and fernus  is a perfect match with the Old English version of the villain’s name, Holofernus.  Certainly the poet dwells on Holofernes’s hellish fate once his head is cut off by Judith.