📖 À propos Selma
Selma a deux origines indépendantes : arabe (de Salma/s-l-m = paix, la racine de salām et shalom) et scandinave (des poèmes d’Ossian du mouvement romantique des années 1760) ; sa plus grande porteuse est la lauréate du Nobel suédoise Selma Lagerlöf (1909, première femme à remporter le Prix Nobel de littérature), auteure du Merveilleux Voyage de Nils ; et dans l’histoire, Selma, Alabama, est l’endroit où les marches pour les droits civiques de 1965 ont forcé l’adoption du Voting Rights Act.
📍 Détails
- OrigineArabic/Scandinavian
- Genre♀ Féminin
- SignificationVariant of Salma. Safe, peaceful
🔀 Variantes et Prénoms Associés
⭐ Personnes Célèbres
- Selma Lagerlöf — Swedish author (1858–1940), the first woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1909) and the first woman to appear on a Swedish banknote (the 20-kronor note, 1991–2015); her works draw on Swedish folk legend and landscape; her masterpiece The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906–1907) was commissioned as a school geography textbook and became one of the world's most beloved children's books; her debut Gösta Berlings saga (1891) remains a landmark of Swedish literature.
- Selma (city, Alabama — civil rights history) — The Alabama city that gave its name to the Selma to Montgomery marches of March 1965, among the most decisive events of the American civil rights movement; on 'Bloody Sunday' (March 7, 1965) police attacked peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge; the images of violence shocked the nation and accelerated passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; Ava DuVernay's film Selma (2014) brought this history to a new generation, starring David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr.
- Salmā / Selma in Arabic tradition — In the Arabic tradition, Selma/Salma derives from the root s-l-m (peace, safety, wholeness) — the same root as Islam, salām (peace), and the Hebrew shalom; Salmā was the name of the legendary wife of the founder of the Banu Hashim clan (ancestors of the Prophet Muhammad); as a given name Salma/Selma is widely used across the Arab world for the deep peace its root conveys, and the form Selma is common in North Africa and the Levant.
- Selma Bouygues / Ossian literary origin — In Scandinavian usage, Selma traces to the Ossian poems of James Macpherson (1760s) — purportedly ancient Celtic poetry, actually largely invented by Macpherson — where Selma was the name of a royal hall or castle; the Ossian poems were enormously influential in the Romantic movement across Europe, inspiring Schubert, Mendelssohn, Goethe, and Napoleon (who carried Ossian with him on campaigns); Selma entered Nordic naming through this Romantic literary channel and became genuinely naturalised.