The Saxons

Ptolemy (ca. 100-ca. 170 CE) was a Greco-Egyption citizen of the Roman Empire who lived and died in Alexandria. One of his most influential works was the Geographia, published, we think, around 150 CE. The book was written in Greek, lost during the Dark Ages, and translated into Arabic in the 9th century and into Latin in 1406.

Just to show you how influential Ptolemy's book was, let me mention in passing that Christopher Columbus was using revisions of Ptolemy's maps when he sailed to the New World, which he thought was India.

At any rate, the first mention we have of the group of Germanic tribes called "Saxons"--in Latin, saxones--is in Ptolemy. He places them as a group of Germanic tribes living near the North Sea coast of what is now Germany.

People who study etymology in depth surmise that the Saxons' name came from the Old English word for the kind of knife the Saxons used, the seax. The seax typically has a long, single-edged blade with a tang forged on the centerline of the blade and then enclosed in a handle of wood or horn.  Its name is thought to come from a Common Germanic root, *sah, *sag,"to cut."

And there is more!

The disparaging Scottish Gaelic word "sassenach," by which pet name Jamie often calls his wife Claire, in the Outlander series of books and now TV shows, means "outsider," literally Saxon or English.