This article is about a feminine Gaelic name. For the place, see Malvina, Mississippi. For other uses, see Malvina (disambiguation).
Malvina
Gender
Female
Origin
Language(s)
Scottish Gaelic
Derivation
Mala-mhìn
Meaning
"smooth brow"
Malvina is a feminine given name derived from the Scottish Gaelic Mala-mhìn, meaning "smooth brow".[1] It was popularized by the 18th century Scottish poet James Macpherson. Other names popularised by Macpherson became popular in Scandinavia on account of Napoleon, an admirer of Macpherson's Ossianic poetry, who was the godfather of several children of Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, an officer of his who ruled Norway and Sweden in the early 19th century.
The Argentinian name for the Falkland Islands, Las Malvinas, is not etymologically related to Malvina, but is instead derived from the name of St Malo, a seaport in Brittany.[2]
People
[edit]
Malvina Bolus (1906–1997), Canadian historian, art collector, editor of the Hudson's Bay Company magazine "The Beaver"
Malvina Garrigues (Schnorr von Carolsfeld) (1825–1904), Danish-German operatic soprano
Malvina Hoffman (1887–1966), American sculptor
Malvina Longfellow (1889–1962), American stage and silent movie actress
Malvina Major (born 1943), New Zealand singer
Malvina Mehrn (1862–1960), Danish animal rights activist
Malvina Pastorino (1916–1994), Argentine film actress
Malvina Reynolds (1900–1978), American folk/blues singer-songwriter and political activist
Malvina Shanklin Harlan (1839–1916), American wife of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, grandmother of another U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and author of a 1915 memoir
Malvina Bovi Van Overberghe (1900–1983), Belgian operatic soprano known as Vina Bovy
Malvina Evalyn Wood (1893–1976), Australian university librarian and college warden
Fictional characters
[edit]
Malvina is the bride or lover of Oscar in the Ossian cycle of James Macpherson.
Thomas Campbell's poem Lord Ullin's Daughter was translated into the Russian language by the Romantic poet Vasiliy Zhukovsky. In Zhukovsky's translation, the title character, who is left unnamed in Campbell's original, is given the name Malvina, which the Russian poet likely borrowed from James Macpherson's Ossian. Vladimir Nabokov has translated Zhukovsky's translation into English to demonstrate the changes that were made.[3]
Malvina, the girl with blue hair – a doll-heroine from Aleksey Tolstoy's 1936 book The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino.
Malvina is also the name of the main antagonist in the 1992 Mexican telenovela María Mercedes.
^Hanks, Patrick; Hardcastle, Kate; Hodges, Flavia (2006), A dictionary of first names, Oxford Paperback Reference (2nd ed.), Oxford University Press, pp. 180, 406, ISBN 978-0-19-861060-1.
^Vladimir Nabokov (2008), Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry, Harcourt, Inc. Pages 52-57.
Name list
This page or section lists people that share the same given name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change that link to point directly to the intended article.
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