Einige Anmerkungen zum Ortsnamen Merseburg

Abstract

The name of the small town Merseburg, some 15 km south of the city of Halle (Saale) has puzzled researchers for decades. Several solutions have been proposed, but all of them were flawed with respect to phonology and / or morphology and / or semantics. Here a new solution, first proposed by Albrecht Greule in 2014 can be corroborated taking also the geological formations of the surroundings of Merseburg into account. Greule connected the first part of the compound name Merse- with names of lakes and islands in Scandinavia. Together with a Swedish dialectal term for ‘heap of stones’ these names point to several terms with the structure Proto-Germ. *mVrs/zV- ‘(having) stone(s)/pebble(s)/rock(s)’ (originally ‘the crushed one’ vel sim.). North of the city of Merseburg we find on the left bank of the river Saale – below thick layers of mud, which might not be older then the Middle-Ages – an area of about 500 × 3000 m characterized exactly by rock and pebbles. Thus Merseburg might have been the ‘castle / town at the area with rocks / stones / pebbles’ – or, more pointedly: the ‘castle on the rocks’.