-SM Stirling, The Sea Peoples (New York, 2017), Chapter Four, p. 57.
"'...tell me about your Wodan character in fourth century eastern Europe.'
"'He still has two eyes,' I explained..."
-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465 AT p. 390.
"...how did you happen to lose your eye, Lord?'
"Eodan smiled. It was a wry smile, not ungentle, but wholly without youth. He had known too much ever to be young again. He said, 'I gave it for wisdom.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Golden Slave (New York, 1980), XXI, p. 279.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I like the bit you quoted from THE GOLDEN SLAVE. And I think it's very plausible that Wodan/Odin began as a human king whose followers came to think he was a god as centuries passed.
Sean
Around 300 CE, btw., the early Gothic term would probably have been something closer to Proto-Germanic *Wothenjaz, rather than Wodan. At that time the various dialects of Germanic were rapidly diverging, but were still mutually understandable and would remain so down to the Migration Period.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Now that's interesting, that Wothenjaz/Wodan/Odin, etc., was traceable as a god only as far as about AD 300. I had thought it would only need a shorter time for Eodan be transformed into a god.
Sean
Sorry, I wasn't clear. 300 CE would be the tail end of Proto-Germanic/Common Germanic. The *-jaz/az ending would be in the process of wearing down as the nominal inflection system was simplified.
The term itself is much older, ultimately derived from a nominalized form of the adjective *wōđaz, meaning roughly "prophetic, quality of being a seer", and probably goes back to an Indo-European original concept of spirits of the dead being used in divination and possessing the living.
The term is also cognate with words in other IE languages meaning "inspiration", "fury".
Nobody knows precisely how the ancient Germanic pantheon arose.
Parts of it are transparently Indo-European; Tyr is derived from , *Dyēus Ph₂tḗr, "Sky Father", through a series of regular sound-shifts in early Proto-Germanic, (via Grimm's Law), precisely equivalent to Vedic Dyaus Pitar, and Greek and Latin Zeus Pater and Jupiter. And Thor is linguistically related to the PIE thunder-God, known in Baltic and Slavic as Perkun/Perkunaz.
Wodan/Odin is a bit more obscure.
One of the problems is that theonyms are a bit unstable because of the linguistic phenomenon of "taboo avoidance" -- not using words with powerful associations, but using a description or euphemism instead. That's why our word "bear" derives from a term meaning "the Brown One" rather than from the PIE root *rkto, "bear"; you didn't say "bear" aloud lest the beast appear, and ultimately the word vanished.
The same thing happened with divine names sometimes.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Again, very fascinating comments from you. What you said about PIE/Proto Germanic theonyms reminded me of a similar practice among the Hebrews/Jews. Their name for God, YHWH, came to be held as too sacred and numinously awesome for everyday use. So YHWH came to be replaced with "Adonai" (LORD, in most English OT translations. Only the High Priest could declare aloud, once a year, the true Name of God.
Sean
And somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd book of the Nantucket series, William Walker is asked how he lost one eye and Walker replies "I gave it up to gain wisdom".
(As best I recall without finding the passage)
Kaor, Jim!
Which goes to show even a villain like Walker can be well read, if he was that familiar with Germanic/Scandinavian myths.
Ad astra! Sean
Mr. Stirling does write *smart* villains.
Kaor, Jim!
Think of what a nightmare we would be living in if Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler had been like Stirling's villains!
Ad astra! Sean
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