The claim has been made to me that the first element of the Norwegian or Danish word grønnskolling (meaning an inexperienced person) is not the same as grøn or grønn (green, as in the color), but is from an Old Norse word gron meaning “bare” or “barren”. The idea is that a grønnskolling is a person with a bare face (too young to shave). All I could find at the library are translation dictionaries without etymologies and one etymological dictionary with no entry for this word. I’ve checked several Old Norse and Icelandic dictionaries for gron (or anything remotely similar) that might mean “bare”, but came up with nothing.
I am inclined to believe the word does derive from the color, because the words for green can be used to mean “inexperienced” in English and German as well as Norwegian. But a citation from a good Norwegian or Danish dictionary would be nice.
I browsed around abit for it and found the following at http://www.hist.uib.no/kalkar/ (Dictionary on the danish language 1300-1700):
“Grønskalding, no. grønskolding; persolla, liden person, grønskalding. Colding, Etymol. 916; grøn om hagen, en grønskalding”.
“Grøn om hagen”, meaning green around the chin, seems to support the idea about a person to young to shave, but unfortunately I couldn’t find any other references to grøn meaning “bare”.
I first thought that it could be related to the Swedish word gröngöling, but that does not seem to be the case.
[url=“http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/saob/”]SAOB[/burl (the Swedish answer to OED) does however list grönskålling which seems to be a close relative. They have no doubt as to the meaning of the first element being the colour of unripe fruit. Parallells are drawn to the English greenhorn and German grünschnabel.