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Words of Old Norse origin have entered the English language, primarily from the contact between Old Norse and Old English during colonisation of eastern and northern England between the mid 9th to the 11th centuries (see also Danelaw). Many of these words are part of English core vocabulary, such as egg or knife. There are hundreds of such ...
Note that the Finnish word seita and the Sami variants of the term sieidde refer to a human-shaped tree or a large and strangely-shaped stone or rock and do not necessarily reference magical power. There is a good case, however, that these words do derive ultimately from seiðr. [18]
It is a compound formed with the Old Norse word for 'gold' (gull), yet the second element–found in other personal names like Rannveig, Sölveig, or Thórveig–remains obscure. It could have meant 'power, strength' (cf. Icelandic veig , Faroese veiggj ), 'intoxicating drink' (cf. Norwegian veigja ), possibly 'lady' (cf. Norw. veiga ) or even ...
Although kings were formal heads of state, the Council was powerful. Their power and active rulership, especially as regents, have caused historians characterise this state as de facto a republic of the nobility (Norwegian: adelsrepublikk). This aristocratic power lasted until the Reformation, when the King in 1536 illegally abolished the Council.
In Norse mythology, the einherjar (singular einheri; literally "army of one", "those who fight alone") [1] [2] are those who have died in battle and are brought to Valhalla by valkyries. In Valhalla, the einherjar eat their fill of the nightly resurrecting beast Sæhrímnir, and valkyries bring them mead from the udder of the goat Heiðrún.
The word is ancestral to Modern English weird, whose meaning has drifted towards an adjectival use with a more general sense of "supernatural" or "uncanny", or simply "unexpected". The cognate term to wyrd in Old Norse is urðr, with a similar meaning, but also personified as a deity: Urðr (anglicized as Urd), one of the Norns in Norse mythology.
Gothi or goði (plural goðar, fem. gyðja; Old Norse: guþi) was a position of political and social prominence in the Icelandic Commonwealth. The term originally had a religious significance, referring to a pagan leader responsible for a religious structure and communal feasts, but the title is primarily known as a secular political title from ...
The Giant with the Flaming Sword (1909) by John Charles Dollman. In Norse mythology, Surtr (Old Norse "black" [1] or more narrowly "swart", [2] Surtur in modern Icelandic), also sometimes written Surt in English, [3] is a jötunn; he is the greatest of the fire giants and further serves as the guardian of Muspelheim, which is one of the only two realms to exist before the beginning of time ...