Skip to content
Surf Wiki
Save to docs
general/english-language-feminine-given-names

From Surf Wiki (app.surf) — the open knowledge base

Malvina


FieldValue
nameMalvina
genderFemale
languageoriginScottish Gaelic
derivationMala-mhìn
meaning"smooth brow"
Note

a feminine Gaelic name

Malvina is a feminine given name derived from the Scottish Gaelic Mala-mhìn, meaning "smooth brow". 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.

People

  • 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

  • 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.
  • 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.

References

References

  1. (1786). "Sean Dain, Agus Orain Ghaidhealach".
  2. (2006). "A dictionary of first names". [[Oxford University Press]].
  3. Vladimir Nabokov (2008), ''Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry'', [[Harcourt, Inc.]] Pages 52-57.
Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

Want to explore this topic further?

Ask Mako anything about Malvina — get instant answers, deeper analysis, and related topics.

Research with Mako

Free with your Surf account

Content sourced from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This content may have been generated or modified by AI. CloudSurf Software LLC is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of AI-generated content. Always verify important information from primary sources.

Report