[gothic-l] Re: The Langobards on Gotland, now Odin

[Anthony Appleyard]

> Gendler wrote: (about Wotan/Odin)
> probably from Adonai, "lord." I have often noted that the Semitic pagan
> mythologies have a hell of a lot in common with the Germanic pantheon as we
> seem to know it.

That is an accidental linguistic resemblance. Also, people are much like other 
people, and their minds often run in the same sorts of tracks, and thus 
unrelated gods and heroes may well be similar. Woden / Odin / Wotan may have 
been originally a war-god and his name seems to mean "the mad or furious one", 
compare Anglo-Saxon {wo:d} = "mad"; loss of the W in "Odin" is an Old Norse -
ism. Hebrew {Adonai} means literally "my lords", likely being plural treated 
as singular same as "Hebrew "Elohim" is. There MIGHT be an old connection 
between IE and Semitic, but the separation was several thousand years BC, long 
before the IE-speakers broke up; likely when the Ice Age ended and Central 
Europe and the steppes became habitable enough to attract mass migrations from 
the Middle East.

  keth at online.no answered Gendler thus:-
> Another correspondence is between "Frey" and "Pharaoh".

  Accident. Old Norse {Freyja} and similar comes from a Germanic root "frew-" 
meaning "lord", and likely ultimately from IE {pr-} as in various prepositions 
for "in front".

> Those who know Hebrew may perhaps attest that there
> is a semitic word "pru" or something like that,

  "Pharaoh" is not native Hebrew but is from Egyptian: {p-r ayin-glottalstop) 
= "big house", which for a long time meant the palace, and later came to mean 
the king.

> The other day we were also discussing the Old Norse name of
> Athens as "Óðinsborg", "Oþinsborg" or some similar spelling.
> (source = Postulo sögur, an Icelandic Ms. dealing with the vitae of the
> apostles)

Thus some Viking may have distorted the name of Athens. but it is not the 
origin of the name of Athens, or of the name of Odin. The Vikings were good at 
"Ypres to Wipers" type distortions of foreign names: e.g. Elizabeth -> 
Ellisi:f = "old-age - wire"; Jerusalem -> Jo'rsala; Sicilia -> Sikiley = 
"sickle island".


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