Marinel

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A proper name for a knight in Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene, a figure of the chivalric romance tradition
2. The name of a chivalric knight appearing in Edmund Spenser's allegorical poem The Faerie Queene from the sixteenth century
3. A character named after a knight of romance, featured in Edmund Spenser's late Elizabethan epic The Faerie Queene

Etymology: In Edmund Spenser's epic poem "The Faerie Queene", Marinell is a knight whose name signals his watery origins. He is the son of the sea-god Proteus and the sea-nymph Cymodoce, and his name is built on the Latin "marinus," meaning "of the sea," which is also the root of English "marine." The ending is most likely a diminutive or pet-form suffix of the kind common in Romance-language names, so the name plausibly means something like "little sea-man" or "young son of the sea." Spenser, who drew on classical mythology and Italian models, was fond of such sea-related names, but the exact source of this particular formation is not something I can confirm.