LL-L "Literature" 2009.01.20 (04) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 20 January 2009 - Volume 04
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From: Luc Hellinckx <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Etymology"

Beste Joachim,



You wrote:



De uutdrücke annerer völker, wan sik iere lüüe in de möüte kuomen, sint wat
fründlickeren oorsprunks, tomindest im latiinsken gefolge:

Salve, salutazione, ti saluto,
also wünske for gesuntheyt, passt dan wual stimmiger met dem »cordiale«
tohaupe, wat da na mangens met verbunden werd.



Definitely.



I truly loooved that wonderful performance of Beowulf that Ron posted
earlier on, but at the same time it does show that horrid and grotesque
topics must have fascinated the minds of our Germanic forefathers. The world
it pictures is so violent, gloomy, grim, moody and vengeful. It sounds as if
trouble and danger were always imminent and few people, if any, could be
trusted.



So I was thinking to myself, maybe this is just sign of the times, maybe the
late second half of the first millennium was globally a dark era. Therefore
I had a brief look at what other great epic poems in other civilisations
were talking about. Some examples like the story of "One Thousand and One
Nights", the Persian "Shahnameh" and the Hindu "Bhagavata Purana" clearly
show that this is globally not so much the case. Of course, a hero will be a
hero, therefore battles/struggles of some sort will always be around, but
still there seems to be more balance in these Oriental stories. Another one
of them, the Bhattikavya, written in Sanskrit, actually tries to promote the
four aims of human life: righteousness, "wealth and power", pleasure and
"spiritual liberation".



On the other hand, there's an Old English epic story, called "The Battle of
Maldon". One of the keywords, when describing heroic behavior is of course
the word "courage". The hero here, Byrhtnoth, is said to have had "ofermod"
(~ Dutch "overmoed", German "Übermut"), excessive courage (_not_ "infinite
courage"!). Today, some still refuse to believe that this could have been
the original meaning of the word, as they want to believe that heroic
"ofermod" as such cannot not exist.

Anyway, Byrthnoth died on the so called field of honor and the Anglo-Saxons
lost.



Kind greetings,



Luc Hellinckx
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