word I don't know

[Lotta Rosenberg]

Hi,

I'm from Sweden and my boyfriend is about to change his last name to Berinne. We have googled the web and we see the word berinne in old english texts and now wonder what it means. Does anybody know?

/ Lotta

 

[Anglika]

Looking at the text from "The Green Knight", my suspicion is that the typeface used in these extracts does not include the old English character "thorn" which is usually transcribed as "th", and looks like this: ð.

As a result it has been set as a "b", so the word concerned is in fact "therinne" [therein].

The name seems to be that of a place in France, but so far I haven't been able to track its origins.