Selma

Selma carries a soft Mediterranean echo. In Arabic it derives from the root s-l-m, the same source as salaam, meaning peace or safety, and in Turkish and Bosnian usage it has long been a common feminine name. The eighteenth-century Scottish poet James Macpherson may have coined a separate Selma for his Ossian poems, which then traveled into Scandinavian literature, giving the name a parallel northern life. Swedish Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf secured it in the literary canon. Two compact syllables, the L lifting the center, it sits with equal ease in Istanbul, Stockholm, and Sarajevo.