Elvendon is a small settlement in
Oxfordshire and the
Chiltern Hills
The Chiltern Hills is a chalk escarpment in England.
The area, northwest of London, covers stretching from Goring-on-Thames in the southwest to Hitchin in the northeast - across Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, and Bedfordshir ...
, near
Goring. It includes the grade II listed building Elvendon Priory.
Etymology
The first element of the name is agreed to be the word ''
elf
An elf () is a type of humanoid supernatural being in Germanic mythology and folklore. Elves appear especially in North Germanic mythology. They are subsequently mentioned in Snorri Sturluson's Icelandic Prose Edda. He distinguishes "ligh ...
'', either in singular or plural form.
[Alaric Hall,]
Are there any Elves in Anglo-Saxon Place-Names?
, ''Nomina: Journal of the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland'', 29 (2006), 61-80 (p. 76).[Ann Cole, 'Two Chiltern Place-names Reconsidered: Elvendon and Misbourne', ''Journal of the English Place-name Society'', 50 (2018), 65-74.] The second element was long thought to derive from
Old English 'hill', but reanalysis of the primary evidence revealed that the second element is from Old English 'valley'. Thus at the time when it was coined, the name meant 'elves' valley' or something like it.
References
{{reflist
Villages in Oxfordshire