Pennines - Etymology

Etymology

The first use of the name "Pennines" to describe the mountain range is in the spurious De Situ Britanniae, first published in 1757:

This province is divided into two equal parts by a chain of mountains called the Pennine Alps, which rising on the confines of the Iceni and Carnabii, near the River Trivona (River Trent), extend towards the north in a continued series of fifty miles.

This book purported to contain the account of a Roman general preserved in the manuscript of a 14th-century English monk, Richard of Cirencester, and was considered the premier source of information on Roman Britain for more than a century after it was made available in 1749. It was in fact a forgery created by Charles Bertram, an Englishman then living in Copenhagen. In 1853, Arthur Hussey listed several names in De Situ Britanniae that he could not trace to an earlier source, including the "Pennine Alps". However, by that time, particularly in the early 19th century, the name "Pennine Chain" or "Pennines" had become widely accepted.

In his 2004 book Names and History: People, Places and Things, George Redmonds provided a modern assessment. He comments at length on the strange omission of the etymology of the Pennines in the serious literature regarding that area of England, including publications on place-name origins of Derbyshire and Lancashire by respected authors. He finally learns that the origin of the name is from De Situ Britanniae and that "nor do we know any name for the whole range before the 18th century." There follows a discussion of the forgery and the fact that a number of its inventions had found their way into the Ordnance Survey maps; and that the true origin of the name was known by serious authors, most of whom simply chose not to speak of it. He also notes that the mountains had been called by various names in the past, and that there were allusional references to the mountains as "our Apennines" as early as the 1630s (and perhaps before that), so likely Bertram simply invented a name that was easy for people to accept as fact.

Redmonds also suggests that Bertram may have got the idea for the name from the Elizabethan commentator William Camden, who wrote:

The north part...riseth up and swelleth somewhat mountainous, with moores and hills, which beginning here runs as an Apenine does in Italie, through the middest of England...even as far as Scotland, although oftentimes they change their name.

The name 'Pennines' may have become readily accepted if it was already closely related to an earlier name (or names) for the hills of a Cumbric origin, like the hill Pen-y-ghent in northern Yorkshire. A very similar language to Cumbric was once spoken in Northern Italy. The etymology for the Apennines of Italy that is most frequently repeated (because of its semantic appropriateness) is that it derives from the Celtic Penn, 'mountain, summit': which could have been assigned during the Celtic domination of north Italy in the 4th century BC or before. The name originally applied to the north Apennines. However, historical linguists have never found a derivation with which they are universally comfortable. Wilhelm Deecke said: "...is doubtful but some derive it from the Ligurian-Celtish Pen or Ben, which means mountain peak." Ranko Matasović reconstructs a Proto-Celtic root *bando- 'peak, top', which he considers of non-Indo-European origin.