Thor's "True Name"

hi i'm old norse specialist dr jackson crawford and all day i've been worried about thunder or really about the lightning that thunder means it seems to come out of nowhere even when the sky is relatively blue or blue and one half of it like it is right now and the lightning can strike frighteningly close even when you haven't heard any before you know it seems to go from 4 000 feet away to right next to you especially in a forest of tall trees like this i get extra worried because even if the lightning doesn't hit me it just hits to hit one of these tall pines and maybe start a fire or knock one of these pines over on me or uh you know if i could hurt some other way knock it down in front of the road so i can't get out to the hospital that's 100 miles away so i understand based on experiences like i'm having this week why a thunder god would be a major force in the religion of a people close to nature and of course not just the norse with thor but many other cultures the world around have thunder gods or gods with thunder as part of their their godly portfolio one of my favorites is the well i don't know this is exactly a god but i think that it embodies a good a good sense of what hummingbirds really like the eastern shoshone a name they have for the hummingbird is domo yagat which is the sound of the thunder and of course and the beliefs of many u2 as tekken speaking peoples the hummingbird is a token of war and that reflects uh good observations of hummingbirds but anyway me uh opening up by bloviating about a fear of thunder and how a god of thunder might be an important part of a culture close to nature may seem to be at odds with the point that i've made pretty often and made even vociferously pretty recently which is that thor doesn't have that much to do with thunder but we have to draw a distinction that i'm often at pains to make and that i think it's it's i don't know maybe because i i have um all the persuasive abilities of a box turtle i seem to have a lot of trouble getting across which is that in our written sources for norse mythology what we can really call actually preserve norse mythology right the book's called era the poetic edda and the prose that are written down in the 1200s in iceland thor has almost nothing to do with thunder in terms of what he does right he shows up with thunder one time when he fights rooney on a story told in skull scupper mall in the pros at him his name means thunder his hammer's name probably means lightning as as i've discussed here and there and i'll discuss quite a bit in this video actually but by the time of say the late viking age that our poems in the poetic edda probably reflect uh the traditions of thunder has kind of been alienated out of his his duties his responsibilities his actions he's kind of only residually a thunder god and he's much more a personality a very well-rounded character really that you can get a sense of what it's like to sit down across the table from but not a sense of like what specific you know lightning bolt and thunderclap powers he has now that does not mean that earlier on he or or the conception preceding him and the pantheons of germanic and indo-european-speaking peoples was not a thunder god i think that quite likely he was and one of the best lines of evidence for that is the linguistic connection between what's probably one of his names and the name of thunder or thunder related gods and other indo-european languages so with that horrifically long-winded introduction let me talk about thor's origins in a thunder god very likely and how he's connected to thunder gods elsewhere in indo-european [Music] and of course before i continue any further let me say how delighted i am that i have a hermit thrush singing along in this video that's uh i don't think i've ever had a hermit thrush singing in a video and there's i think actually two pretty close to me right now one of the most beautiful bird songs in the world um a real treat to have that uh i hope coming across the microphone all right so i mentioned that one of thor's names or probably one of thor's names makes a connection to thunder gods elsewhere in indo-european likely what is that name well it is fjorgen with two ends now thor's mother is fjorgan with one n um but there is also a masculine fjorgan with two ends deity who is very very barely hinted at let's first of all mention um his mom fjorgan uh because of course she's a little bit better attested and horbert's the oath stands at 56 at the very end where odin has insulted thor and now they're pretty much done with each other and thor is about to leave and he's asked for directions part of what odinn says to him is hultu swall til vinstra vexins thar moon fjorgen hit hitta thor son sin so hold to the left road the road to the left until you get to the land of men there fjorgen will meet her son thor now elsewhere his mother is called simply your earth but they're clearly names for the same person and by the time of again the the kind of late viking age language that's attested in so much of the poetic edda we have fjorgan as another term for uh the earth so in uh aldernar groter in the poetic edda stands at 15 borgne uh says to aldrin uh ekfield i followed you on the earth the organs just used to mean earth we have an anonymous skull who calls uh the sea oas fjorgenyar the of the earth of the eel so that the earth's the earth of the eel is the sea it's where eels dwell but other than um i think the only two places at least in the poetic era where thor is called the son of fjorgen is that one stands in horror presidio and then in volospan sends a 54 he's called fjorganirbor right before he dies now the masculine version of this name the fjorgan with two ends is attested only once and it's in a really weird context and lokasena where loki's insulting all the gods sansa 26 and he says they thu freak ert fjorkensmeyer silent frigg you are fjorgen's girl now if this were the feminine name the name of thor's mom the genitive the possessive form befjorgenyar so we're not talking about her fjorgans is a genitive or possessive form of a masculine name and that would be fjorgan with two ends we never hear about who this is but it seems extremely likely that it is an old name of thor now what does it mean to call frigg thor's girl it is not impossible given how norsmith as we have it preserved in the eddas represents you know again probably late viking age traditions in iceland for the most part and and a heavy dose of norway which is of course where most of the icelanders came from it is not impossible that there were traditions in some places sometimes where thor was frigg's father that is usually what it means to call someone some man's marriage to say that he's her dad it can mean girlfriend but uh that's less common and probably more difficult to explain than thor and some traditions being her dad i don't think that that's really the key issue here though uh whatever it means that fragrance fjorgan's girl if that means that she's thor's girl at all the name fjorgan has more of a connection to thor than anyone else because of course the closest thing to it is the feminine name fjorgan with one end being his mother it also looks extremely like the names of thunder gods or thunder related gods and other indo-european languages let me give you a quick word from my friends and partners at grand frost i'll come back and i'll look at all these names and more [Music] [Music] all right so in indo-european we have a root pair or paired that means strike all right now there is a word for the oak tree which um what i'm used to calling an oak is uh definitely a scrubbier lower thing than what's usually meant in europe the european trees designated oak it's interesting how words for trees kind of wander the world and get assigned to different kinds of trees even by speakers of the same language what's meant by oak in europe is one of the dominating trees in the forest and particularly susceptible i'm not a science person but from what i understand particularly susceptible to getting struck by lightning so curiously there is a word for the oak tree that's pretty well tested that is formed from the struck one right probably meaning struck by lightning and this struck name is uh begins perkwoo and put into european from it we get for example latin quirkus meaning oak the the qua and latin is actually what we would expect here um we have the ancient name for uh the forest and that includes today's black forest the uh herkinian forest that probably comes from something like gaulish air canyon forest we have reason to believe that gaulish eric means oak and of course in the celtic languages ps are lost at the beginning of words so that's exactly what we would expect and given grimm's law where ps become f's in germanic languages we see that we have a cognate in the gothic word faraguni meaning mountain probably originally uh woodland-covered mountain like the ones i'm in right now and it's old english cognate uh fjurgen now we have all right the the strzok word but we also can probably reconstruct a proto-indo-european name for a god that means striker and that would be percunos or percunos now this the the specific derivational suffixes and grammatical endings that are going to get applied to the common root name and different descendant languages are going to be different but mutatus mutant is with a little bit of differences in again the the stems we get from that germanic specifically old norse names like fjorgan fjorgan lithuanian percunaz thunder god latvian uh percuans thunder god old prussian percunos and modern day words like polish piorun czech peron meaning lightning bolt and sanskrit virginia in the vedas of thunder god uh i think that in the uh the old russian pronunciation is i'm not great at pronouncing russian off the cuff but i think that's right so these other deities who have names that look a lot like this name fjorgan that we see in the etta have portfolios that are very strongly inclusive of thunder most distantly we have in the rigveda 583 a hymn to parjanya the endic cognate of this route we see i'm going to give you some of my translations that have been checked but are not the responsibility of my good friend kaylee smith to a we see he breaks trees apart he kills knight creatures all existence fears him the carrier of the great weapon oh hell if you showed that to me in a headache or skaldic pullman old norris i would say they're talking about thor of course right uh he kills um these enemy supernatural beings right knight creatures i'm translating rakshasa but not too different in conception from the yeltsin's uh negative supernatural creatures in norse conception it carries a great weapon uh the breaking trees apart is probably related to the thunderbolt associations right he's striking things like oak trees or considering 6c uh facing this way go with that thunder sprinkling waters for us as father ashura so definitely a thunder associated being now pargenia's portfolio gets kind of absorbed by the much greater vedic god indra who becomes more the thunderer on the classic uh conception of the vedas and uh interestingly um his lightning bolt weapon indras is called the vajra the root of which name is shared by the verb for what thor does with his hammer when he um touches his goat's bones to bring them back to life or when he touches baldur's funeral pyre and the pros at him and that is the verb vikia which will usually translate something like bless or hallow so that's kind of cool and and um i'm very much indebted to an article by uh joseph nudge um excuse me i know joseph now she's the celtic professor ucla his brother uh gregory nudge who is at uh harvard i think anyway there's a great article by him in his book greek mythology and poetic so you wouldn't know to look for it there uh unless you were you know the kind of person who would dig around for this kind of stuff but he's got a great section on all of these cognates with these these words associated with with thor and cognate god so i'll show you the reference of that at the bottom of the screen for all you know the way that i'm rambling today maybe uh you could read that in shorter time but uh i'm not just ripping off his article you can get a whole lot more out of his article and you don't have to deal with my ramblings and conclusions now we also have pieroon the old slavic god strongly associated with thunder his enemy velez is a snake and a shape changer sounds a lot like loki indeed loki slash his son jormungandr the myth guy serpent and pirun's weapon is a mace so not exactly a hammer like thor although there seems to be actually some variation within scandinavia and the baltic and slavic countries exactly what uh unbladed weapon uh the thor or the thunder god uses it can be represented something looks more like an axe including in scandinavia russian names i haven't heard before uh not an unimpeachable source uh but interestingly wrote of oaks in eastern europe clearly used for religious purposes decorated with boar's jaws or teeth one of these is displayed at the history museum the queue i wanted to point this out because there's clearly some old associations with boars for thor that have been forgotten the most interesting piece of evidence for that is that as anatoly lieberman has argued i think persuasively thor's name chloride which occurs pretty often because it literates with the word hamar so it's going to come up in poetry when you want to talk about thor and mission as hammer and get a name for him that illiterates with it um that name florida probably means pick writer and even though thor is not very associated with pigs in the eddas it suggests that he had some previous strong association with pigs that maybe goes back to inter-european times based on the boar's jaws and teeth that come up in these um oak shrines that seem to be associated with pirun ah byzantine emperor constantine the seventh porphyrogenitus in the first half of the nine hundreds described an oak tree on an island where the ruse of course of people with both slavic and norse roots uh would make sacrifices of birds uh bread uh meat maybe people i don't remember if he specifically wrote about human sacrifices but there are records of human sacrifices by the ruse of course uh there's also a nursing charter from 1302 by a galician western ukrainian in today's context who uses piarun's oak as a known boundary spot so implying that even though of course this would have been christian times in that part of the world uh they were still an oak that was associated enough with pirun for the tree to be associated with his name and uh very interestingly in northern russia at there is a great monastery from uh later times but also a pagan shrine that has been found that was abandoned in the late 900s there great fires of oak eight of them were made in a circle around a central idol and interestingly the hustin chronicle of 1600's ukraine also mentions an eternal fire of oakwood at perrin's purines shrine note that one of those eight fires the one to the east around the idol at purin um looked like it might have been kept burning uh eternally right like the jfk fire so that's a an interesting connection to make now a little bit closer to scandinavia and the baltic the lithuanian percunaz latvian percuans like the slavic god is mostly known uh from projecting backwards from focal or known from more recent times right from like 19th century folklore but to the extent that we can get much of a picture of this brief christian god we see him strongly associated with thunder and the oak like the slavic god his rival is uh his rivals a very similar name building a surveillance and he is a shape changer most notably and i think this is the real kicker he hurls a mace named lightning and we have this little snatch from a latvian song that naj quotes perco owns meth percolans throws his hammer milneum which is the name for the hammer it's nothing normal word for hammer and mace it's not the normal word for lightning but it is cognate with mjolnir it's from the very same word in indo-european just like uh undoubtedly uh russian malnea or welsh melt and there's a few other words in other indo-european languages that i can't recall top my head that come from the very same word for lightning um still the normal word for lightning in a russian or welsh connection not in latvian or norse but in latvian and old norse alike it becomes the name of the weapon of the god associated now or associated previously with thunder and to me that's really just the thunderbolt bit of information there i actually hadn't known about that until very recently until reading nudge article and i was just stunned by that little little fact i'm not sure that that name for the hammer and mace is attested more than that one time but it's still just you know proverbially dropping a hammer as it were now the name thor also uh does have of course a proto-indo-european heritage i've discussed in another recent video how it's the word for thunder in fact it is the exact same word that becomes thunder in english um it may well have been used as a name for this same god in indo-european times we see a celtic god named taranis which has a name directly from the same word for thunder or thor just has metastasis it would be from something like tonoros donaros um dona rose i'm not quite sure where the accent would be and put into your pen on that word now we don't know much about this god but he's you know kel with celtic we're in much the same position as we often are with baltic and slavic sometimes you know we know some names we know some later folklore that kind of points back at pre-christian times but uh not always all that much but we still have um in the modern celtic languages words for thunder from the same uh name so welsh taran and irish i believe so that would be pronounced tonya any irish speakers want to make fun of me uh feel free but i think that's pretty cool that in welsh thunder and lightning taran and melt are the exact same words in an indo-european context as for mjolnir right pretty cool even though of course uh thor and mjolnir weren't part of the welsh pre-christian pantheon it really attests to how interconnected these languages and the cultures speaking them were and that their their myths once were now again the past has passed a point that i make over and over and over again unpersuasively remember that you can't go back to just one single original time right uh every generation that you go back there's another generation before it so i'm not arguing that uh parakonos or even you know tonerose is thor's true name but probably the conception of thor goes back to a god named parquanos and ortoneros the same way that in uh the north sex we have in the editors he's called thoren and probably fjorgan many gods have many names and uh that this god had a strong association with thunder probably in into european times is very well supported by the thunderous records of his descendants in baltic slavic and celtic at least and certainly in norse but just remember that it's residually a norse it is possible that already in the viking age he wasn't really remembered as a god of thunder primarily but as a god of the common man of your you know your viking crew dranger or your uh you know your dranger at the farm you're hardworking kind of every man which is really the the character of thor that we need in the eddas where he doesn't have that much to do with lightning or thunder but like the thunder that he's named for he carries an echo of lightning from an earlier time all right that's enough rambling from grizzly country and hermit thrush country for you today i hope everyone out there is doing well and i thank my patreon supporters for the support that continues to make these videos possible it is an incredible privilege to have your support and and the ability to pay my bills with it and um everyone out there from high up in beautiful wyoming let me wish you all the best

Channel: Jackson Crawford

Views: 41,614

Keywords: education, norse, old, old norse, norse myth, norse mythology, odin, Óðinn, edda, havamal, hávamál, wanderer's havamal, wanderer's hávamál, viking, vikings, norse god, norse, gods

Id: BXoarBVgUXc

Length: 27min 11sec (1631 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2022