Researching Clotilde

Like her husband, Queen Saint Clotilde's name is rooted on the term hludo, a root which also gave us the word loud, and which means famed.  It is often translated as "bright" or "shining" - but, for modern ease of understanding, I think "famed" makes more sense for precision and the intellectual transfer we must make for mental translation.  The cognate term loud explains the resonance - fame can come from a great noise.  But brightness, though I can understand why it is sometimes used, doesn't link to that cognate word (loud) and so doesn't create the chain of meaning quite the same way.

Clotilde, though ... maybe "bright" is a feminine term in my mind, maybe "shining" just captures some aspect of this woman in the same terms as the character I came to know, writing her ... I like the flash of light this translation represents.

Clovis - hludo and wiga - famed warrior.

Clotilde - hludo and tild - bright battle.

Each of their names carries a deep resonance for me as the author of characters inspired by these real people.    Battle might not seem an apt name for the Catholic saint who brought the first king in Gaul, the first king in Europe, to her Church.  Yet she did mount a campaign, and Clovis' conversion in the end has been marked as her victory.

In many ways, too ... relationships - marriages - are a battle.  I don't say that in some pejorative sense, nor the shallow-brained manner people affect, making unfunny jokes about opposite genders, or reducing lifetime commitments to battles of will.  Clotilde, as I encountered her, is more than capable of pitting our king to just such a battle.

But marriage is work.  Is now, was then, always has been, between people who want more of it - from each other - than exactly those shallow stereotypes I deny employing just above.  And if a couple are required to work together, at times it will engender clashes inward and outward as well.  Clovis and Clotilde come against one another from time to time (even as their relationship is durably powerful emotionally and physically), but also find themselves called to stand together and face challenges as well.

Bright battle.  Shining saint.  Remarkable woman.  This is my Queen ... Saint Clotilde.