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Thanks for pointing this out. If I'm inclined to follow the scholars who reject the Assur Toti story it does seem desirable to have a theory of how that name got into the Icelandic sources. So far as I can tell the saga writers rarely make up names. Occasionally I suspect that they've plugged in a generic name for an Irish king or a Scottish earl, one they've seen before, but more often they invent stories to fit the names they've got rather than vice-versa. I'd go for this particular theory a bit more easily if I could recall other cases of female fosterage, which certainly happened all the time for boys in both Norse and Celtic circles. Why a Danish princess would be sent as far north as Halgoland also seems hard to understand offhand. But it is an interesting subject for speculation. I do like to try and find theories that avoid a conclusion that they just made stuff up wholesale. One I've been dabbling with is the "second Ragnar" theory to account for chronological problems in descent lines traced from Ragnar Lodbrok. He's said to have a father and a son both named Sigurd, and if his father Sigurd was the son of another Ragnar-- plausible given the tradition of naming sons after grandfathers-- it would make better sense of those dubious lines that make his great-grand sons and his sons into contemporaries.
David
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