Tonight, because such exercises please me, I wish to discuss (which means I write, you read) the history of a name. The name is Oscar. Not a terribly common name, but it shows up now and then in unexpected places. Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple. Eddie Murphy’s character in Beverly Hills Cop. Sylvester Stallone did a film called Oscar. And of course – speaking of films – there’s the famous statuette of the Academy Awards – said to have been informally named by Academy librarian and historian Margaret Herrick, who remarked that it reminded her of her uncle Oscar.

Also Oscar the Grouch.

The book I reviewed yesterday, Armored, featured a Mexican character named Oscar. But I think of it primarily as a Scandinavian name. So I wondered, where did it come from and what does it mean?

My finely honed librarian’s skills led me to an arcane scholarly source known to insiders as Wikipedia. There I learned the story of the name, which is not without points of interest.

What does Oscar mean? It actually comes (purely by chance) from two different languages. In Old English, it means “Spear of the Gods” (cognate with the Norse name Asgeir).

But its modern use springs from Old Irish, where it means “One Who Loves Deer.”

The name was one of those indigenous ones that turned out insufficiently popular to survive the coming of Christianity, with its multitude of saints’ names to hang on babies. So it went out of use and was largely forgotten.

Then along came a man named James MacPherson (1736-1796), a Scottish writer, politician, and all-around scoundrel. Though he sprang from an old Jacobite (Stuart-supporting) family, he jumped wholeheartedly over to the Hanoverians (the English conquerors) and profited thereby. He also participated in the Highland Clearances, evicting poor cotters from their homes so their lands could be repurposed for sheep grazing. Countless Scots were made homeless by this treacherous betrayal of ancient trust.

But McPherson is best remembered for a series of poems called the Ossian Cycle, which he claimed he collected from ancient Scottish lays he learned from simple bards. Most scholars and critics have long agreed that McPherson wrote them himself, throwing in a few borrowings from Scottish and Irish folklore.

Whatever their source, the published poems were a huge success with the reading public. The Romantic Movement was blossoming just then, and people were hungry for tales of high adventure in ancient times – tales that came from somewhere further north than Rome or Athens. I’ve written here before about the popularity of Tegner’s Saga of Frithjof. The Lay of the Nibelungs and the Icelandic sagas were also objects of fascination. The Ossian Cycle fit right in.

Three of the main characters in the Ossian poems are Fingal, the great hero, Ossian, his son, who is supposed to be the poet, and his son Oscar, now dead.

Among McPherson’s many admirers was no less a figure than Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France. He hung the name on his godson, Joseph Bernadotte, son of his marshal Charles Jean Bernadotte. Charles Jean would go on to become king of Sweden (later of Norway too), and Joseph was eventually crowned King Oscar I. Thus did Oscar become a popular name with Scandinavians.

So hail to you, if your name is Oscar. Or if you live in Ossian, Iowa (nice town; I’ ve been there).