Names, Names, Names;>.....

[mdehners]

For a Recon, today's world with it's internet access is great...as long as you have basic background to tell dross from gold. I learn something new at least weekly. One area I've been focusing on lately is Names(and their attendant heiti).
Back when I 1st "Came Home", the internet was in it's early days. It was still mostly through individuals, kindreds books and libraries. You were pretty much stuck with what was available where you lived. A lot of the stuff we had access to came with agendas or at least biases. I was at least familiar with the Eddas when I met my 1st Heathens to be VERY uncomfortable with, the image of Freya presented for an example. "Frolic" was not a term my reading of the Vanadis gave as appropriate;>!
Then there was the "real" issues. Names changed with time and location. Even when they kept the same spelling, the pronunciation DIDN'T. Add in the Victorians and their penchant to "tidy up" things and you get Blots that make Norse scholars CRINGE.
Oddly enough, while many Heathens place their Practice at the Migration or Conversion Periods, few bother to check if their spelling or pronunciation is time appropriate. A decade ago it wouldn't have been possible unless you lived near a university with a Scandinavian Studies dept and even today, unless yo make the effort you're not going to find the right Names and how they were pronounced(to the best modern linguists can make it out to be;>).
So, who gives a karp? Depends on how important accuracy is to your Practice. If it isn't, it's not. So...how Anal Retentive are you;>?
Cheers,
Pat

Comments

[weofodthignen]

OK, I'll chew on this a bit :-)

The best course of action might be to ask the regin themselves. I had Wulfy ask Ullr how to say his name and it turned out I'd been right. But I had him ask because I'm the highly educated Germanicist who was saying "hoof" instead of "temple"; and quite apart from human error (I won't say who is the deeply serious heathen who was saying "hallowed steed" for "stead", and may still be doing so), these reconstructions are ultimately a matter of conjecture. Vowels move about, someone guesses wrong which variant spelling to normalize something to, the origins of certain words, especially names, are lost in the mists of time and could be based on crazy things like misunderstanding a foreign word (Finnish, Basque ... look what happened to Attila's name in Old Norse and medieval German), a euphemism, perhaps for Xian consumption, or simply be misrecorded by the Latin speaker who first wrote them down (e.g.: Nerthus). Speaking of Latin, there's hefty debate about how to pronounce that! Scholars are also in disagreement. There are two rival methods for pronouncing Old Norse, and what proponents depict as the latest, most scientific reconstruction of Anglo-Saxon vowel values makes no sense whatsoever to me. (Quite apart from the fact that apart from Einar Haugen and some Indo-Europeanists, scholars of the Old Tongues tend to be people who weren't great at modern languages, partly because they couldn't see the value in mimicking pronunciation slavishly but were more interested in either reading or etymology and grammar ... when these people read quotes aloud at conferences, I don't hear these artful and carefully argued reconstructions, I hear their native accents: Australian Old Norse, upper-class London Anglo-Saxon, and I'm sure Jakob Grimm spoke Hessian Old Saxon, sigh :-)

Inge made a valuable point, too: the gods are not stuck in a holding pattern over Northern Europe. They speak English to us English-speaking yobs. But then again Inge has always used Swedish and Old Norse.

I would argue that in the old days, right up to the 20th century in many places, pronunciation is primary and does vary, and for names, especially of gods, spellings are snapshots: you can see the Victorians and the German scholars trying to normalize the spellings in their own languages, but even then they fail. (Even human names have many spelling variants, and some pronunciation variants, within languages.) One reason to have heiti is to evoke the wealth of story about a god or goddess; another may be that a traveler might have said the name differently and it got in the way of conversation! (We still do this with "Thunderer", for no other apparent reason.) But I also think we should care, and try to get the names right (though Wulfy could not say "Ullr". Luckily he knew him as Wulþor.) "Old Man" can be a bit chummy for addressing Yggr, and the latter name has a weight that seems to require an effort at correctness. Also carelessness can risk being disrespectful; I think they understand when we mean well, but the usual pronunciations among afficionados of the Marvel comics used to be cringe-worthy (and lead to some silly misspellings). We're talking to, and offering to these gods, and while we're not doing ritual magic via syllables of power (at least, those of us who aren't Edred I don't think are doing that stuff), I do think names, and effort, matter.

Frith,
M

[mdehners]

Honestly, nowadays I do it because I think it's fun.....which tells you what kind of weirdo I am;>! 20 yrs ago I'd be "railing" against the sad stuff from pop Heathen books with authors pushing various agendas(like Flowers as you pointed out;>) but like a lot of stuff I consider it all handed over to today's generation.Like the rest of the world, they will make of it what they will and I'll probably be watching from Hel to see how things go;>....
Cheers,
Pat