From Germanic 'Hrōþirīks' meaning 'famous ruler.' Used in Spanish as Rodrigo.
Roderic is an ancient Germanic name built from two powerful roots: hrod, meaning "fame" or "glory," and ric, meaning "ruler" or "power." It is the direct ancestor of the more familiar Roderick and is cognate with the Spanish Rodrigo and the Old Norse Hróðríkr, from which the name Rurik also descends — the same Rurik who founded the dynasty that would give rise to Kievan Rus in the ninth century.
In the Visigothic kingdom of Iberia, Roderic (known in Spanish as Rodrigo) was the name of the last Visigothic king, whose defeat at the Battle of Guadalete in 711 AD opened Spain to Muslim conquest and set the stage for centuries of the Reconquista. The name achieved mythic literary status through the legends surrounding Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, the eleventh-century Castilian knight whose campaigns against Moorish rulers were immortalized in the Cantar de Mio Cid, one of the earliest and most celebrated works of Spanish literature. In the English-speaking tradition, Walter Scott's poem "Roderick Dhu" and Tobias Smollett's novel The Adventures of Roderick Random kept the name in literary circulation through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The spelling Roderic, lacking the final k, feels slightly more archaic and continental than Roderick, closer to the medieval original. It suits parents who want a name with genuine heroic pedigree — something that sounds like it belongs in a chronicle or saga — without the slight stuffiness that sometimes clings to its more common cousin.