Aurvandill

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Aurvandill ( altnordisch Aurvandill ; altenglisch Ēarendel ; Lombard Auriwandalo ; althochdeutsch  Orentil, Erentil ; medium latin Horuuendillus ) is in the Nordic mythology a hero in only marginally Edda is mentioned. According to the Skáldskaparmál , the god Thor saved him from the icy rivers of the Élivágar and carried him in a basket on his back. But Aurvandill's toe peeked out of the basket and froze off. Thor then broke it off and threw it into the sky, where it has been shining as the star Aurvandils tá ever since . Thor himself told this story to the sorceress Gróa, the wife of Aurvandill. With joy, however, she forgot the spells that were supposed to cure Thor from an injury.

In the Danish Saxo Grammaticus , Horwendillus is the father of Amlethus , the literary role model of Shakespeare's Hamlet .

etymology

In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the word earendel in glosses is translated as “shine” and “morning star”. The etymology of the name also points to the latter interpretation . Germanic * Auza-wandilaz is derived from idg. * H 2 eus- “light”, in addition to this, the first member of the name also compares ancient Indian Uśanā , ancient Greek Heōios and Heōsphoros as well as Latvian Auseklis , all names of the morning star. The Anglo-Saxon poem Christ I calls Éarendel the most brilliant of the angels and thus takes up an image of the Advent O-antiphons , which Jesus Christ compares with the morning star.

A Gothic variant auzandil (without the expected ending -s ) appears in a palimpsest discovered in 2009 as a transfer of the Greek Eosphorus - the passage in question is, however, not clearly legible.

reception

In the German-speaking world, Orendel is the main hero of a crusader novel and is called "first of the heroes" in the hero book , a possible reference to the morning star as the first champion of the day. The medieval tradition has already been transformed so much that it can hardly be used for comparisons.

At JRR Tolkien , Earendil the navigator is a half-elf who was set in the sky by the gods with his ship and a shiny gem and appears as the morning and evening star. Two lines of the poem Christ I influenced the development of mythology into the fantasy world of Middle-earth : Old English Eala Earendel engla beorhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended , German 'Heil Earendel, brightest of angels, sent to people via Mittgard' , English Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, above Middle-earth sent unto men . Because a saying derived from this can be found in his trilogy The Lord of the Rings when the hobbit Frodo exclaims in the Elvish language Quenya in the darkness : "Aiya Earendil Elenion Ancalima!" - 'Heil, Earendil, brightest of the stars!' what illuminates a liquid in the vial he carries in his hand. Another occurrence is found next to the story about Earendil and Elwing in the Silmarillion in Tolkien's poem The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star from 1914.

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ Isaiah 14,12  LUT.EU.VUL.LXX - πῶς ἐξέπεσεν ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ ὁ ἑωσφόρος ὁ πρωὶ ἀνατέλλων ("How did the morning star fall from heaven, the early one")

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Carla Falluomini: . To Gothic II fragment from Bologna corrections and new readings. In: Journal for German Antiquity and German Literature. Vol. 146, No. 3 (2017), Hirzel, Stuttgart 2017, pp. 284–294.
  2. ^ The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature Through the Fiction of JRR Tolkien . Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, ISBN 978-1-137-45471-3 , 4.2.4 Christ I, II. 104-29 ( books.google.de ).