Nick meme - with useful pronunciation guide ;-)

[sigune]

Yesterday I got a mail message from _vocalion_, who asked me to please repeat how my nickname is pronounced, to prevent her calling me names at Lumos ::grins::. It did make me realise that if I meet people at Lumos and introduce myself with my nickname, chances are they won't recognise it, and if anybody were to ask for me (supposing that they would), I probably wouldn't recognise my own name in it :D. So I thought, now that the nickname meme is going around, I might as well gack it from _grainne_ and use it as an excuse to tell you how I sound ;)...



In the days when I first wanted an e-mail address (that would be eight years ago, I just calculated), I opted for Sigune because my own name wasn't available and, having no affinity whatsoever with numbers, I didn't want to remedy the situation with a solution of that kind. It so happened that at that time I was reading a wonderful novel called Der Rote Ritter. Eine Geschichte von Parzivâl by Adolf Muschg, an ingenious rewriting of Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval Parzivâl. The first part of it is written from the point of view of a young girl called Sigûne, a Grail Maiden who lives in the Grail Castle with her aunt Herzeloyde. I greatly identified with Sigûne - mainly because in the story she read all the romances of courtly love on which she could lay her hands and, inspired by them, got all kinds of fanciful ideas about true love and what it should be like. (I was eighteen; I did so too :D.)

Unfortunately Sigûne's story did not have a happy ending. She met the young man of her dreams (he had the impossible name of Schiônatulander) and, in the spirit of courtly love, she felt compelled to educate him in the ways of perfect knighthood, telling him to fight other knights in her name. However, poor Schiônatulander was better at singing songs and telling tales, and the first knight he challenged was a brute who killed him in one stroke. Sigûne was unspeakably sad and felt very guilty; in her sorrow she lost all her hair - she is known in Grail lore as the Bald Lady - and swore never to let go of her Schiônatulander again. Whenever Parzivâl or Gâwân meet her later in the story, she is carrying the corpse of her beloved.

Rather sad, isn't it? Of course I picked the name when I was still incurably romantic; I have turned rather more cynical since.

Anyway - even though I no longer fancied myself a Sigûne by the time I started writing fan fiction, I had to use a nickname of some kind, and this was the one I was used to as the username for my e-mail address. Because I rather frown upon nicks of the "Snapeluvrr" kind, I thought I'd stick to my medieval German - a decision I rue to some extent, because nobody outside of Germany (and I'm not even German myself!) has a clue as to how it should be pronounced. The pronunciation goes somewhat like this: Zee-'goo-nuh.

I have recently discovered (rather to my surprise) that it's not as weird a name as I used to assume; apparently there are quite a few German women who are called Sigune, one of them a famous classical singer.

And what happened to the novel that started it all? Well...
Der Rote Ritter has 992 very closely printed pages, and I had arrived at page 795 when the new academic year started (now seven years ago). The reading was so labour-intensive that I decided to put off reading the ending, and I never picked the book up again. One of my projects for quieter days is to start all over again :D...

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_grainne_/]

Hurrah! The only place I'd ever seen the name before was the Grail maiden story, but, like many others, I hadn't realised that it was a name of German origin (and had always been puzzled by the "Bald" thing!). It was fascinating to hear how you came to use it as your pen name.

*off to practise now*

[sigune.livejournal.com]

Are you a Grail enthusiast? I once dreamed of writing my master's thesis about it, but then I realised that there is very little substance and heaps of speculation to the whole Grail thing so it wasn't going to work from an academic point of view; and then Oscar came along...

*giggles at the idea that her name urges people to practise*