German 2313 Northern Myths and Legends

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German 2313 Northern Myths and Legends

• Welcome to German 2313!
• Northern Myths and Legends
• No Prerequisites
• Instructor Dr. Charles A. Grair
• Office FL 260
• Charles.Grair_at_ttu.edu
• Office Hours Monday and Wednesday 1200-200,
  and by appointment.
• Full text of Syllabus, Course Plan, and Lecture
  notes are available online.

Course Websitehttp//www.depts.ttu.edu/classic_m
odern/german/germ2313.php
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• Johann Gottfried Herder
• 1744 - 1803

A major figure of German intellectual history, he
influenced romantic age conceptions of culture
and history. Champion of folk culture and folk
literature.
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• Jacob (1785-1863)
• Wilhelm (1786-1859)
• Grimm

Interested in German history and cultural
identity. They studied folk tales, sagas,
mythology, and especially language and language
history.
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• What is a myth?
• From the Greek word mythos, literally
  utterance.
• Colloquially, myth often denotes a common, though
  untrue story.
• Originally a traditional story of gods and
  goddesses in a cosmic setting in a remote past.
• An oral phenomenon, often survives in several at
  times contradictory versions (esp. the case for
  Germanic myth).
• Myth separate from religious beliefs and from
  ritual practices, though often closely connected
• Myths represent a communitys distinctive view of
  the world, its values and its goals, things of
  collective importance.

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• What is a Legend?
• From a Latin root referring to collecting or
  reading.
• Traditional stories of mortal heroes instead of
  divine figures.
• Legends usually regarded as history by
  pre-literate peoples, often have actual
  historical basis (though greatly fictionalized).
• Legends celebrate people at the top of a society,
  such as heroes, kings, dynasties, and are usually
  linked with specific places and times.

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• What is a folktale or a fairy tale?
• Folktales generally refer to stories about common
  people, such as peasants and villagers.
• Fantastic elements are common, but feature only
  lesser figures of popular imagination, witches,
  giants, trolls, elves, dwarfs, etc.
• There is no historical basis to folk tales the
  events are timeless and set in a land far far
  away and long long ago.
• Folk tales represent a peasant perspective rather
  than the heroic perspective of legends or the
  cosmic perspective of myths.

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• What is a saga?
• Collections of long narratives about a particular
  individual, enterprise, locale, or family are
  often termed sagas.
• A more precise definition refers to the prose
  tales composed in Iceland from 1150 to 1450 CE,
  based on traditional oral sources.
• Many different kinds of sagas were written in
  Iceland, such as sagas of kings and saints, or of
  ancient heroes.
• Icelandic family sagas are based on local history
  passed down from the Viking age.

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• What can we learn from a myth?
• Myths provide a basic foundation for religion.
• Myths provide a context for cosmic and social
  order.
• Myths reveal what is important or sacred in a
  society.
• Myths provide continuity in belief and social
  stability, thus also a legal or constitutional
  function.
• Myths provide the structure for rituals that
  define and maintain identity.
• Myths thus help to guide behavior and give
  meaning to life.

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• How can one interpret a myth?
• Anthropological Perspective
• This approach examines the functions the myths
  play in the lives of people in a particular
  culture. In this context, myths reflect cultural
  beliefs.
• What phenomena or events are explained in myths?
• What values are promoted by myths?
• What rituals celebrate or reenact myths?
• What cultural beliefs are supported or justified
  by myths?

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2. Psychological Perspective This approach
focuses on myths as projections of the human
psyche, as a way of speaking about the human
condition in ways not otherwise possible.
Sigmund Freud used Greek myths to describe the
processes of the unconscious mind, as a way of
dealing with instinctual drives by objectifying
them. Carl Jung saw archetypal myths,
universal characters and themes that recur in the
mythologies of different peoples and that reflect
ideal and timeless models of the human view of
ourselves.
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3. Theological Perspective This approach views a
societys myths as their struggle to comprehend
the divine. Some theological scholars condemn
all mythologies except their own as heretical or
demonic, while others view each mythology as
simply another facet of the revelation of the
divine presence in the world. Comparative
mythologists have traced images and attributes of
ancient gods and goddesses that are still alive
in contemporary religions.
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4. Aesthetic Perspective This approach, common
in older treatments of the myths, looks at the
value of the myths for art and music. Because
mythological figures represent the way a society
imagines supreme power and perfection, these
figures often represent normative standards of
beauty. Classical mythology has been a recurring
source for artistic inspiration from the
Renaissance until the contemporary age.
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5. Comparative Perspective Comparative
mythologists analyze myths from different
cultures and periods to discover the underlying
similarities in mythological traditions. Joseph
Campbell (e.g. The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
1949) stresses the formal, literary properties of
myths, the fixed narrative patterns or structures
that recur in many western myths. The danger in
many such readings is the reductionist tendency
to ignore the cultural specifics of a myth in
order to reveal more general patterns,
mono-myths or meta-narratives.
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• What can myths tell us?
• Myth and folk stories, legends and sagas will
  allow us to see how these people viewed
  themselves, how they envisioned their society,
  their world and the cosmic order. Rather than
  reduce the stories into rigid patterns or
  universal archetypes, we will examine the myths
  to see what they reveal about the people who told
  these stories.
• What can myths teach us about their culture and
  their world?
• In what ways are their perspectives similar or
  dissimilar to our own views of the world?
• What do they tell us about the worldview of their
  heroes?
• What virtues or goals inspire them? What do they
  fear?
• What details seem especially important to the
  poets and their audience?
• And why?

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Where does Germanic mythology begin?Where did
the Germans come from? The term Indo-European
(or Indo-Germanic) is linguistic, and describes
the languages that descend from a common tongue
(Proto-Indo-European, or PIE). Proto-Indo-European
probably originated around 4500 BCE in the
steppe region between the Black and the Caspian
seas. By 2500 BCE, this language had separated
into various dialects that gave rise to a large
number of daughter languages. PIE was an
inflected language like Latin, Russian, and
German. It was first postulated in 1786 by a
British judge in India, Sir William Jones, who
found systematic similarities between Sanskrit,
Greek and Latin.
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Pontic-Caspian Region
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Indo-European Reconstruction
PIE has been reconstructed by comparative
linguistics. A good example is the semantic field
for a cart or wagon in which terms can be found
in daughter languages kwekwlos is a
reconstructed term that means disk, wagon,
circle, or (English) wheel in various
Indo-European languages. rot-eh2- is another
term with cognates in Old Indic and Avestan
meaning chariot, and with cognates that mean
wheel in Latin, Old Irish, Welsh, Old High
German (Rad), and Lithuanian. Similar terms for
axle, thill (harness pole), and going by
vehicle suggest that PIE speakers bred horses,
traveled by wagons and (probably) fought in
chariots.
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Indo-European History
PIE was spoken c. 4500 BCE in the Pontic-Caspian
region by tribes sharing a linguistic unity with
India (Vedic, Sanskrit), Persia, Greece, the
Italic languages as well as the Celts, Slavs and
Germans. Many Indo-European tribes and languages
died out in antiquity (Hittite in Turkey,
Tocharian in western China, etc.). The oldest
texts in an Indo-European language are from
Anatolia c. 1920 BCE. Hittite and related
languages represent an early branch with few
close relatives. The Indo-Iranian and Greek
branches separated later these tribes settled to
the east and the west of the Indo-European
homeland. Germanic groups were among the last
branches to radiate from the steppe region.
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European Haplogroups
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• Indo-European Mythology
• Some parallels between Germanic and Greek myths
• Well developed polytheistic system (Germanic less
  systematized than Greek mythology).
• Human-like gods living as extended families
  ruled by a patriarchal male sky-god.
• Competitive and individualistic gods, with
  ordinary human flaws.
• Struggle with monstrous beings (Titans /
  Frost-Giants) for control of the earth.
• Generally favorable attitude toward human
  affairs, desire prayers and sacrifices, but do
  not demand exclusive obedience.
• Generally amoral, certainly not embodiments of
  goodness, morality, or transcendent justice.
• Not omnipotent, but ruled by fate just as humans
  are not eternal.

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• Differences between Greek and Germanic myths
• Greek myths preserved in many written, highly
  literary works. Homer and Hesiod provided
  authoritative accounts of mythological figures.
• Stable versions of the Greek myths thus
  preserved.
• Germanic myths were rarely recorded in writing.
• All Germanic myths were recorded in the Christian
  era, no longer part of an active belief system.
• Mixed feelings of writers about past pagan
  mythology.
• Transformation of myth from oral to written
  literature.
• Much of the mythological lore of the Germanic
  tribes was lost.

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What makes German German? Germanic languages are
distinguished from other Indo-European languages
by the First, or Great Consonant Shift, which had
probably occurred by 500 BCE. Jacob Grimm
described the Sound Shift, now named Grimms
Law. Sound Shift 1,2,3 Germanic and Latin
(unshifted) cognates P gt F piscis / fish T
gt TH pater / father K gt H cornet / horn B
gt P lubricate / slippery (better examples in
Slavic pairs) D gt T dentist / tooth Here,
these consonants shift to G gt K grain /
corn replace the ones lost in the first
consonant shift. BH gt B such aspirates
(bh, dh, gh) in PIE died out in Latin and DH gt
D Greek as well, though in different ways, so
there are GH gt G no neat word pairs to
illustrate this sound shift, though it can be
illustrated with cognates from Sanskrit bharâm
i / bairan (OHG) to bear, carry
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Germanic Languages

• The Second Germanic Sound Shift
• separates High German from Low and North
  Germanic, probably already accomplished by 300
  AD.
• Indo-European Gothic (first sound
  shift) Hochdeutsch (second shift)
• P T K F TH H (ch) V/F D
• B D G P T K PF/FF Z/SS K/ch
• SC / SK SH
• Compare the following
• Triads of simple words duo two zwei
• from Latin, English, and German tres three
  drei
• Word Pairs with (unshifted) Low German and High
  German
• that / das pepper / Pfeffer
  cake / Kuchen tide / Zeit deed / Tat
• Germanic always accents first syllable, as in
  Veróna gt Bérn
• This practice led to a sloughing off of suffixes
  and endings in general, and led Germanic poetry
  to emphasize alliteration rather than end rhyme.

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• Who are the other peoples in the North?
• The Finns, members of a different linguistic
  group (the Asian Finno-Ugric family), lived in
  present-day Finland, parts of Sweden, and along
  the Baltic coast.
• The Saami (Laplanders) are linguistically related
  to the Finns, but have a distinctly different
  cultural lifestyle. They are indigenous
  European tribes.
• The Celts originally ranged over most of Western
  Europe, but by recorded history had been pushed
  to the margins of their territory, living in
  Ireland, Brittany in France, Cornwall and Wales
  in Britain. They had great interaction with
  Germanic peoples.
• The Slavs inhabit large areas around the Baltic
  sea and throughout eastern Europe.