Gun - Wordorigins.org

Fuente:

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/gun/

Información:

gun

Dave Wilton, Wednesday, June 28, 2006

This word for a firearm most likely comes from a Scandinavian woman’s name. It was and is common practice to name siege engines and cannon after women. Two famous examples are Mons Meg, the 15th century mortar that can be seen at Edinburgh castle, and Big Bertha of WWI fame. In this case, a weapon or weapons seem to have been named after a woman or women named Gunnhildr, and the name generalized to mean all such weapons.

Both gunnr and hildr mean war in Old Norse, making it an apt name for a weapon, even though there is no historical personage of significance named Gunhildr. There is at least one known example of a particular siege engine named Gunnhildr. A 1330 munitions list from Windsor Castle reads:

Una magna balista de cornu quae vocatur Domina Gunilda.
(A large ballista from Cornwall called Lady Gunilda.)

There is also this from a somewhat earlier poem The Song Against the Retinues of the Great People, written in the opening years of the 14th century:

The gedelynges were gedered Of gonnylde gnoste; Palefreiours ant pages, Ant boyes with boste, Alle weren y-haht Of an horse thoste.
(The lackeys were gathered out of Gunnild’s spark; the grooms and pages, and boys with their boasting, all were hatched of a horse’s dung.)

Gonnylde here may be a transitional form between Gunnhildr and the Middle English gonne, and gonnylde gnoste appears to be a reference to some type of explosive (gnást being Old English for spark).

Variations on gonne, in the modern sense of a firearm, appear in English records written in Latin and French starting in 1339. The first recorded use of of gonne in an English language text is by Chaucer in The Hous of Fame (c.1384):

Went this foule trumpes soun As swifte as pelet out of gonne Whan fire is in the poudre ronne.
(Went this foul trumpet sound As swift as a pellet out of a gun when fire is running in the powder.)

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

The Northern World - Best Of Legends

Fuente:

http://bestoflegends.org/sagas/northern.html

Información:

Sagas & Sea-Kings

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Sigurd the Volsung · The Northern World · Vikings

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In the dawn of time there was a great void in the centre of the world. This abyss was Ginnunga-gap, and was cloaked in perpetual twilight. To its north was the realm of Nifl-heim - the source of mist and darkness, and also an eternal spring from which all other rivers flowed ...
[In the Beginning]

The Northern World

The Eddas. The great corpus of Scandinavian mythology is contained in the two volumes called the Eddas. The Elder or Poetic Edda as we know it was compiled in the thirteenth century in Iceland, but some of its tales (at least) date back to the period of the early German migrations. The Poetic Edda is also known as Saemond's Edda (Edda Sæmundar).

The Younger or Prose Edda (Snorra Edda)was written by Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) around 1230. Its two parts are Gylfaginning, an introduction Norse myths for poets, and Skaldskaparmal, a history of poetry.

The Sagas. Sagas are prose tales of kings, warriors, poets, and explorers; some are historical chronicles, some are pure fiction, and some (in the way of much medieval literature) partake of both fact and fiction.

The sagas are without doubt Iceland's most important contribution to world literature. They are medieval prose narrative, abounding in paradox and iron. Violence is abundant, but the style is subdued. Heroism is praised, but moderation is more highly prized. Much is said of fate, but the complex characters seem to control their own destinies. The world of the saga is pagan, but its sentiment is humanitarian. [Antti Lahelma, Icelandic Literature]

One of the best-known sagas is Heimskringla, a history of the kings of Sweden and Norway, also written by Snorri Sturluson.

Early Scandinavian literature, prose or poetry, is rich in heroic tales of kings, elves, seeresses, explorers, dwarves, magic-wielders and sword-bearers; its influence colors much of the imaginative literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here is our introduction to this magical world.

Tales and Essays

Balder's Death from the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, at D. L. Ashliman's Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts.

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The Ash Tree in Indo-European Culture. Explore the origins of Yggdrasil, the world-tree, in this fascinating essay by Darl J. Dumont, from Mankind Quarterly, Summer 1992.

The Eddas and Sagas

An Introduction to the Works of Snorri Sturluson for young people, in Iceland.

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Heimskringla, or The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway by Snorri Sturluson, a text based on the 1844 Samuel Laing translation, at the Online Medieval and Classical Library at Berkeley.

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Ása: Norse Mythology Source Texts includes the Elder or Poetic Edda, The Younger or Prose Edda, and other texts in English translation.

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Source Texts for Old Norse literature at Northern Winds.

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The Prose Edda, translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916), electronic text from the Internet Sacred Text Archive.

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OLDNORSENET "provide[s] a forum for discussion of problems that concern the medieval Scandinavian and North Atlantic societies ... open for contributions from researchers in all branches of medieval studies concerning the Nordic area." Their Discussion Archive is available to the public.

Norse and Germanic Mythology

Northern Mythology, Chapter 38 of Bulfinch's Mythology. New!

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A List of Norse Beings at Nicole Cherry's Norse Mythology page at CalTech.

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Germanic Myths, Legends, and Sagas by D. L. Ashliman at the University of Pittsburgh.

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A Family Tree of the Norse Gods, part of Scott T.S. Trimble's Scandinavian Mythology site.

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The Scandinavian Mythology FAQ.

Runes

RuneType: the Rune Typology Project "computerizing the runic inscriptions at the Historic Museum in Bergen."

Fantasy and Philology

Tolkien and Iceland: The Philology of Envy, a lecture by Tom Shippey at the Sigurður Nordal Institute at the University of Iceland. "It is very easy now for us to forget or to underestimate the impact which Old Norse literature had on the learned world as it was rediscovered, from Icelandic sources, between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries..." New !

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Philology and Fantasy Before Tolkien by Andrew Wann, also at the Sigurður Nordal Institute, explores the saga-influenced novels of Ernest Ruckert Eddison.

"Eddison is an intriguing 'Before Tolkien' phenomenon. His sequence of three clearly interconnected 1920s books helps us to recognise two basic points about pre-Tolkien British novelistic responses to Icelandic medieval literary tradition: firstly, that there was a vigorous 'pre-Tolkien' tradition of such responses, and, secondly, that this tradition often had a strong philological underpinning." New !

• The Worm Ouroboros By E. R. Eddison
at Litrix.
• Classics of Fantasy: The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison
, commentary at Wizards of the Coast.

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16 June 2004

Vikings - Best Of Legends

Fuente:

http://bestoflegends.org/sagas/viking.html

Información:

Sagas & Sea-Kings

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Sigurd the Volsung · The Northern World · Vikings

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The Vikings, like other sea-rovers, are not as romantic as nineteenth-century fiction would make them out to be; neither are they exclusively the blood-thirsty ravishers depicted in the chronicles of the monks of England and Ireland who were (or feared to be) the victims of their depredations. They may not have worn horned helmets, but they did sail ships carved with dragons' heads and they ventured far out into the western sea in search of new lands and adventure.

The Viking World

The Vikings, an introduction by Dr. Arne Emil Christensen of the University Museum of National Antiquities in Oslo.

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Scandanavia and the Northern Seas: Vikings, an essay by Tamsin Hekala at ORB, the Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies.

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The World of the Vikings, "the definitive educational guide to viking resources on the internet".

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Viking Heritage, a network for Viking-related knowledge at Gotland College of Higher Education, Sweden.

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The Jorvik Viking Centre in York, England. New URL.

Viking Art and Ornamentation

Viking Art surveys the styles that of ornamentation that are labeled Oseberg, Borre, Jellinge, Mammen, Ringerike, and Urnes.

Ships and Explorations

The Lapuri Find, a Viking Age ship excavation in southern Finland.

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L'Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland may be the site of the Vinland settlement. New URL.

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The Viking Ship Home Page, by D. L. Ashliman at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Vikings in the New World by William Bakken includes an Overview.

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The Vikings in Vinland, an article from The Athena Review.

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The Vinland Map has been the subject of controversy for decades; here's an illustrated chronology of the debate to date by J. Huston McCulloch. There are photoreproductions of the map at Jim Siebold's Cartographic Images page.

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26 August 2005

Sagas & Sea-Kings - Best Of Legends

Fuente:

http://bestoflegends.org/sagas/index.html

Información:

Sagas & Sea-Kings

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Sigurd the Volsung · The Northern World · Vikings

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Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer is the hero of the anonymous thirteenth-century Icelandic prose epic Völsungasaga, based on legends of Old Scandinavian folk culture that survive in the Elder Edda (or Poetic Edda) and the Younger Edda (or Prose Edda). The story of Sigurd the Volsung in turn served as a source for authors from Richard Wagner to William Morris to J.R.R. Tolkien.

Contemporary with Völsungasaga is another version of the tale, the Middle High German epic the Nibelungenlied. Here the story of the hero (called Siegfried) takes on a High Gothic gloss of knighthood, where Völsungasaga retains the primitive and pagan force of its Eddic precursors.

The nineteenth century saw a real vogue for the saga tales, and the English William Morris and the German Richard Wagner represent the most important resurgence of the Eddic material and spirit ... [Robert W. Gutman, in the Introduction to Volsunga Saga, Collier Books, 1962]

William Morris's 1870 translation of the Volsunga Saga was the crowning achievement of his translations from the Norse sagas, and in turn fathered his lyric poem Sigurd (1877), a retelling of the Saga with elements from the Nibelungenlied contemporaneous with Wagner's Ring cycle. Morris's saga translations also influenced his Tale of the House of the Wolfings, and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse (1889).

When the young J.R.R. Tolkien won the Skeat Prize for English in the spring of 1914, he used the proceeds to purchase copies of Morris's Volsunga Saga and The House of the Wolfings:

In this book Morris had tried to recreate the excitement he himself had found in the pages of early English and Icelandic narratives. The House of the Wolfings is set in a land which is threatened by an invading force of Romans. Written partly in prose and partly in verse, it centres on a House or family-tribe that dwells by a great river in a clearing of the forest named Mirkwood, a name taken from ancient German geography and legend.... Its style is highly idiosyncratic, heavily laden with archaisms and poetic inversions in an attempt to recreate the aura of ancient legend. Clearly Tolkien took note of this, and it would seem that he also appreciated another facet of the writing: Morris's aptitude, despite the vagueness of time and place in which the story is set, for describing with great precision the details of his imagined landscape. [Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, 1977, p. 70]

The Tale

The tale of Sigurd Fafnirsbane is repleat with dragon-treasure, a broken sword reforged, shield-maidens, and a dwarf-ring that brings a curse on its wearers. The Story of Sigurd, from Andrew Lang's Red Fairy Book, at the University of Virginia.

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The Story of the Volsungs with excerpts from the Poetic Edda, translated from the Icelandic (Old Norse) by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson (from the 1888 Walter Scott Press edition), at the Online Medieval and Classical Library at Berkeley.

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Völsunga saga in Old Norse.

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The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, excerpts from William Morris's epic poem, at Representative Poetry Online at the University of Toronto.

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Sigurd the Volsung, an essay on Sigurd's place in Morris's work, from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21), online at Bartleby.com.

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The Nibelungenlied, a text based the translation by Daniel B. Shumway (Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1909) at the Online Medieval and Classical Library at Berkeley.

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The Nibelungenlied, from In Parentheses, and Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Niblung: Siegfried & The Twilight of the Gods, both translated by Margaret Armour, c. 1910. New !

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The Story of the Ring has links to synopses and libretti of Wagner's Ring cycle; it's at Mike Rudolph's Walhall.

Studies

Sources in Medieval Literature of Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" and William Morris's "Sigurd the Volsung," a thesis by Jane Susanna Ennis of the University of London, excerpted by the author at the Richard Wagner Archive in Finland.

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All for the Tale: The Epic Macropoetics of Morris' Sigurd the Volsung [PDF] by Herbert F. Tucker, from Victorian Poetry Vol. 34, no. 3 (1996), a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to British and colonial poetics of the Victorian age (1830-1914).

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The Sons of Odin: A Heroic Analysis of the Volsunga Saga by Devyn Christopher Gillette, at Raven Online.

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10 July 2004

Could women be Vikings?

Fuentes:

http://www.missgien.net/vikings/female.html

http://www.missgien.net/vikings/female2.html

Información:

Female vikings

Could women be Vikings?

Strictly speaking, they could not. The Old Norse word víkingar is exclusively applied to men, usually those who sailed from Scandinavia in groups to engage in the activities of raiding and trading in Britain, Europe and the East. But some Vikings stayed behind in these regions, and Scandinavian colonies were also established in the North Atlantic (Faroe, Iceland, Greenland).

Women could and did play a part in this process of settlement. Iceland, for instance, was uninhabited, and a permanent population could only be established if women also made the journey there. In regions with an established indigenous population, Viking settlers may have married local women, while some far-roving Vikings picked up female companions en route, but there is evidence that Scandinavian women reached most parts of the Viking world, from Russia in the east to Newfoundland in the west.

Most journeys from Scandinavia involved sea-crossings in small, open ships with no protection from the elements. Families heading for the North Atlantic colonies would also have to take all the livestock they would need to establish a new farm, and the journey cannot have been pleasant.

The Viking colonists settled down to the farming life in their new home, or established themselves as traders and became town-dwellers. Both farming and trading were family businesses, and women were often left in charge when their husbands were away or dead.

There is also evidence that women could make a living in commerce in the Viking Age. Merchants' scales and weights found in female graves in Scandinavia suggest an association between women and trade, while an account of a ninth-century Christian mission to Birka, a Swedish trading centre, relates the conversion of a rich widow Frideburg and her daughter Catla, who travelled to the Frisian port of Dorestad.

Women of influence

Most women's lives were bounded by hearth and home, but they had great influence within this sphere. The keys with which many were buried symbolise their responsibility for, and control over the distribution of food and clothing to the household.

Some women made their mark through exceptional status or achievement. One of the richest burials of Viking Age Scandinavia is that of the Oseberg 'queen', buried in a very grand style with a richly-decorated ship and large numbers of high-quality grave goods in 834. Later in that century, Aud the 'deep-minded' lived a veritable Viking Age odyssey. The daughter of a Norwegian chieftain in the Hebrides, she married a Viking based in Dublin and, when both her husband and son had died, took charge of the family fortunes, organising a ship to take her and her granddaughters to Orkney, Faroe and Iceland. She settled in Iceland, distributing land to her followers, and was remembered as one of its four most important settlers, and as a notable early Christian.

The Christianisation of Scandinavia in the eleventh century gave women new roles which are reflected in the rune stones from this period. On the Dynna stone from Norway, Gunnvor commemorates her daughter Astrid with pictures of the Nativity, while the Stäket stone from Sweden commemorates Ingirun who went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Queen Emma sums up the cultural connections of the Viking Age. Her father was Duke Richard of Normandy, descended from its Viking founder Rollo, while her mother is said to have been Danish. Emma was married to two kings of England, the English Æthelred and the Danish Cnut, and was the mother of two more. With Cnut, she was a great patron of the Church, and after his death she commissioned the Encomium Emmae, a Latin account of Danish kings in England in the eleventh century, ensuring that her portrait was included in the manuscript.