I grew up on a farm in northern Germany, whenever we slaugthered a sow (home slaugther was pretty much banned in the meantime) my grandpa would ask me to fling the sow's uterus and adhering parts (which was the only parts of the sow not otherwise used) into a tree for the crows and ravens to eat, i never new why we did that, it just had always been that way, until i went to university and learned that this custom was not only somewhat more widespread but also traced back to ancient thanksgiving sacrifices for Wodan/Odin

@ScottJB

2 жыл бұрын

Fascinating. Thank you for sharing. I wish someone would write a book about all these cool little traditions.

@libertycowboy2495

Жыл бұрын

I live in Texas so we don't have so many rules. Next time I slaughter a steer, I'll remember this! Good tradition.

Hello from Germany, I'm living about 50km away from the city of Merseburg, and was already as a child fascinated by the charms, especially that so many words are still kind of understandable (holza -> Holz, birenkit -> verrenkt, suister -> Schwester, conda -> konnte, ben -> Bein/Gebein, bluot -> Blut, geliden -> Glied, gelimida -> geleimt...).

Best of luck to you Dr. Crawford. Two decades ago as an undergrad with a passion for the Dorian Greeks I realized that there was maybe a handful of positions in the US where I would be able to teach, and we already had Dr. Hanson and Peter Connolly writing the material that had drawn me to the subject. So I went with my "fall back career" in computers, which has certainly paid the bills. I look forward to adding your translation of the Prose Edda to my collection and your future work through different mediums.

Didn't expect you would cover this topic, but i'm glad that you did! Many thanks from Germany Doc!

The last couple lines in my modern german dialect: Ben ze bene blut zu blut Glied'ze gliedern, so se gelemt sin. Love that

I looked at your language family tree and when I saw 'Elfdalian' I thought you were teasing us with a put-on, but I checked in google and there it was - 3,000 native speakers in the Dalarna area of Sweden!

@meadish

2 жыл бұрын

Yes, indeed. Fascinating language. It is less obvious when you write it in Swedish as 'Älvdalska'. The region is 'Älvdalen' which, back translated, means the River Valley.

Thank you for your information on this Second Merseburger Charm. I had already heard of the Hildebrandslied, and a couple of other incomplete documents from this misty period of German History, but for me, this was something new. It is amazing how these witnesses to another time tell us much, but still do not render a complete picture of this era.

That is very interesting! I had no idea that the Second Merseburg Charm could be linked to Old Norse in that way. Greetings from a German student (at a university in Germany)!😊

First of all... If you don't already consider yourself the Dumbledore of Old Norse, we have a bigger problem than your pronunciation of Hogwarts. Rock on, Crawford.

Thank you for your time and sharing,good health to you and your kin Sir,stay well and all the best.

Thanks for doing this channel. I love it. Please stay safe in these dangerous times.

Thank you Dr. C and best of luck on new ventures. You are a trailblazer right at the cusp of dramatic changes in higher education so you may open up new pathways for all of us who live to teach and learn. Blessings!

You’re one of the good guys... 🙏🏻 Thank you for mentioning the fearful fools and their ahistorical agenda as well as the mystical wahoos filling “gaps” in the lore with nonsense. I’m heathen in outlook and appreciate your measured manner of sharing the old lore as it is with NO fluff. Thank you and wassail.

So sad you can't make a living teaching something that interests a lot of people, but that is the way academia is going unfortunately. The humanities are important.

@inregionecaecorum

4 жыл бұрын

@Þórfinnr Karlsefni Þórðarson It is all about commercialism, students want courses that will maximise earning potential and Universities struggle to fund anything else. Modern languages have business utility. I have seen it with the diminishing and closure of sociology faculties, but I guess it is the same with extinct languages vs modern languages.

@johnnyappleseed1023

3 жыл бұрын

inregionecaecorum I for one would perfectly ok if all sociology departments closed at every university. Some humanities, primarily historical ones, are the only areas with any utility imo.

@melissahdawn

3 жыл бұрын

@inregionecaecorum I know it! You hit a nerve... In college, I took classes that had no practical value, but I was paying for it, so I wanted to learn it! My advisor was a tad upset that I wouldn't focus on my actual degree after 5 years(full-time), I still had no degree, and later had to go get one just for employment purposes, though, people often expressed amazement that I had no "degree" because I had the knowledge that comes from a solid humanities back ground (my actual degree is something they made up for me like Bachelor's of Humanities & Creativity. I was a music theory major initially(talk about undervalued to useless skill set). So, I bake cookies and watch YT.

@astnbllr92

2 жыл бұрын

College is prohibitively expensive, inefficient, and very quickly being replaced by the internet. I'm all for it. I bet he's going to be way happier writing, translating, and being the Old Norse, Colorado cowboy equivalent of Carl Sagan, instead of talking at a room full of uninterested rich kids, looking for an easy A.

@astnbllr92

2 жыл бұрын

He's wasting his considerable talent and enthusiasm on the classroom.

I really hope you include talk about Germany and it's culture in your Great Courses. It's a fascinating region.

This is pretty magical. Gods are such an etymological thing, so the fact that you've found them in High German makes sense! That's awesome that they exist here in this charm. Thanks for sharing it with us and keeping these Gods alive!

Thank you always and be well

One of these days I need to take the time and watch all your videos. I am fascinated with Norse mythology/history but so much of what I know is just made up pop culture. But my interest in the subject goes so deep that I want to know the real deal. Thank you for your dedication to your viewers/students, it is inspiring.

Really appreciate this. So little information out there on the early Germans

Thank you. Wishing you all the best in what you do.

Very interesting for me as a german native! Also very interesting that old high german bears almost no resemblance to modern day german (at least for a layman like me).

@trondranorquoy5154

4 жыл бұрын

@SteinbrecherBack That is a great explanation, and very clear. I also found, as a native English speaker, the Old High German much easier to understand than modern German! The use of "uu" at the beginning of words such as "Wodan" etc. seems to almost indicate that the heavy "v" sound was avoided. This is of course still the case in English and Dutch. Can you shed any light on why this might have been, or am I imagining things?

@MaleficaWitch

4 жыл бұрын

@SteinbrecherBack he said "At least for a layman like me"

@moritzm6470

4 жыл бұрын

@SteinbrecherBack "uuorun" = "fuhren" nicht "waren"! Illustrating one of the problems with the orthography used back then. :) In modern normalized Old High German as used in dictionaries the lines would be spelled like: pfol(?) enti wuotan fuorun zi holze dô ward demo balderes folen sîn fuoz birenkit

@trondranorquoy5154

4 жыл бұрын

@SteinbrecherBack Thank you so much for your reply. By the heavy "v" sound, I do mean the pronunciation of the letter "v" at the beginning of the word, rather than the "w" which is more common in English and which in Dutch is not the full "v" sound but closer to a "w" as well. I can actually explain the conundrum of my finding it easier to understand older forms of German better than modern German (without actually being reasonably fluent in German. That is because I come from the northern half of Britain, and there still, whether you want to call it dialect, or whether you want to call it language remnants, the older style of pronunciation of English is very much used. The north of the UK and of Scotland were of course part of the Danelaw (and under Danish rule) or formerly part of Norway. So day to day, there are a lot of differences with standard English. For one thing, we wouldn't really make the "sh" sound at the end of a word all, so "English" becomes "Inglis". As in modern Danish, a lot of word endings are colloquially missed off, and letters aren't pronounced. So in many northern or Scottish dialects, you would simply "Ah'll hie an egg". In some places, you would say "Ah'll huff an egg" but in country dialects, the "v" sound is avoided. A lot of the words are pronounced slightly differently here. So "bone" would be "bane". The linking word "til" would be "ti". Cow would be "ku". House would be "hus". "would would actually be "wid". Some people even pronounce word endings with a "t" e.g. dropped is "droppit". The "ow" sound doesn't really exist at all, hence hus, moos for house and mouse. "ou" is always pronounced "u". And so on, and so on.

@fartsofdoom6491

3 жыл бұрын

@@trondranorquoy5154 I'm not an expert either, but you're not imagining things about the w and v sounds. W was dropped in German dialects several centuries after the Merseburg charms. No idea as to why that happened, though, and I don't think anyone else knows, either. To the best of my knowledge, the w sound doesn't exist in North Germanic languages anymore, either, so maybe there was some mutual influence there, though I find it more likely that Germans were influenced by their other neighbours, such as the French and Italians, who also hardly, if ever, use a w sound. Btw, there are also southern German dialects that pronounce Haus as Hus, an interesting parallel to the English dialects of northern Britain.

I remember reading this text in school. Good thing that older german is somewhat closer to swiss german than to standard high german nowadays sometimes, but the spelling is hard to read when you don't know what word to expect

Thank you again for sharing your knowledge!

All the Heilung fans get the horns out. ❤ Great as always, Doc.

That Old High German pronunciation was actually acceptable. Not bad!

Thank you Dr. Crawford

Sorry to hear the U doesn't cut it for making a living. It should, but I guess it's what we have. Best of luck with your projects! You are a rare fellow. Looking forward to your next videos.

Thanks Dr Crawford. Take care of yourself.

When you achieve such a specialized profession it almost feels imperative that you share such insights! Thank you, it truly gives us all peace of mind... I'll go wash dishes and bake cookies knowing that such comparisons are made by those who actually know what they are talking about. :)

So impressed by the similarities of the trajectory of someone so passionate about such a recondite subject, life-long arduous studies (without financial reward) leads to such an interesting position. Money there ain't but interest aplenty. The academic machinations are of so little interest really and without them promotion is not so easy. Too much marking, too much administration and pointless paperwork devised by quivering bodies of bureaucrats who have never taught and who despise anyone teaching ... wyrd bið ful aræd ... but there is still fun in the old editions and the ever present challenges of reading slowly for oneself.

Grimfrost is great. I have ordered many items and I have always been pleased.

Thank you so much for postings!!!

Release more books with more translated sagas!

@ae3898

4 жыл бұрын

And more dual-language texts with commentaries!

Because horses are always going lame, even in the pampered lives we give them now, let alone the hard work across rough country our ancestors put them to a millennium ago.

Thank you, this is used in one of my favorite songs :)

@Xanatos712

4 жыл бұрын

Hamrer Hippyer, right?

@pedestrian0101

4 жыл бұрын

@@Xanatos712 yep

You should do the old English Nine Herbs Charm next

Sehr interessant, Herr Crawford. ;)

That spelling of "ht" where you might expect "th" (as here in Sinhtgunt) is also found on the famous Ulfberht swords.

@taramungoognumarat2989

4 жыл бұрын

Not sure about Sinhtgunt, but in the case of Ulfberht h resembles the sound [x] (ch in German "ach"), so it has nothing to do with the voiceless th-sound [þ]. I'd thus assume Sinhtgunt to be pronounced [sinxtgunt], as /þ/ had also shifted to /d/ in Old High German (compare þing - thing - Ding) and would thus not appear in an OHG text.

THANK YOU! You have helped me so much reconnect and fill in some gaps with my anscetory! Tussien Talk! ☺

That was awesome. Thank you!

It feels like there's a distinction between gods like the Aesir, Vanir, and Jötnar, and the personifications of natural phenomena like Máni and Sól. Is this accurate, or did the people of the time view them all equally as the same type of gods?

Great subject

Still snowing there damn ....

It's astonishing how much of old high German is still intelligible to modern day German speakers. didn't people pronounce the 'th' in old high German as an aspirated "t" ? At least that's what I was taught. The dental fricative that was used in the video was supposedly only used in "Voralthochdeutsch" (pre- old high German) and disappeared in the shift that marked the beginning of "old high German" but it was beautiful to listen to your reading of the poem. Unfortunately it is really hard to find places to study old high German in depth (in europe they focus mainly in middle high German - which is also interesting bit definitely not as cool)

Any Heilung fans around?:)

@Xanatos712

4 жыл бұрын

HAMMRER HIPPYER!

@davee9506

4 жыл бұрын

I discovered the excellent Jackson Crawford as a result of discovering and really enjoying Heilung. Still not sure how I discovered Heilung, though - other than via KZread, obvs :-)

@ErwinBlonk

4 жыл бұрын

@@davee9506 To me it was mostly KZread. The Lifa concert took place at Castlefest and I was there. Just not at the concert but 200 meters away tending to my kids on a LARP field, completely unaware. It was the first time they performed in the way we now know. They formed the idea in the days before. KZread recommend Heilung after recommending The Hu. It was a road of recommendations an looking things up myself that went like this: BTS (although that was very much indirect) - Jambinai - Babymetal - Zhaoze - The Hu - Heilung/Wardruna - a lot of ritual and pagan folk.

@volkischfraulein2957

3 жыл бұрын

Me☺️

Hello Mr. Crawford - am i allowed to post this to social media?

Hey, don't forget to plug those translations and where we can get them when they're done. *Insert "take my money" meme here*

I think I've come up with a good reason for why uu is both w and f. Namely, because the writer pronounced both w and f bilabially, with two lips. This is highlighted further by the fact he once writes the f sound ph, the p being also bilabial. This also makes the first sentence sound a bit more special, as the bilabial sounds almost seem to alliterate. "PHol ende UUodan PHorun i holza". The only part that makes me wonder then, is why he writes uolun, with one u. Were these sounds actually distinct? I wonder.

Out of the ivory tower! Skål! From Bohuslän Sweden (Ranriki)

Anyone know where i can find written translations of the merseburg charms?

As a german i barely understood the text... time consumes everything :(

I’m so sorry to bother you, sir, but I have been using your channel to study and was wondering if you had a video of the actual Symbols and what they mean and/or the power behind them? If not, I would be ever so greatful if you could make one. Thank you so much for helping me learn. :-)

I like your deep voice. It helps sooth me. It calms me down. I have a special condition and this helps it. Sound waves are healing me. I imagine you as one of the old Norse men sitting around talking around a campfire. They may have been chatty people full of poots AND chummy speakings. I like learning. Do you have videos on Lief Erkson and Eric the Red, and other times? I love this! I hope I find a bearded beautiful one like you with a calming voice and tranquil skin who stands in heavenly places of snow that encourages and teaches me cool things- and whom also puts me to sleep at night with lullabye from a voice like this. Gah. Will you? I need a touch of grace and love in my life- and some warming tones for the soul. Please speak old Norse again! I think it's healing my past life soul winds. I wish I find something good for my life if I can't be you or like you or others I admire. Maybe I can find someone to rest under their branches and find peace near. Thanks and goodwill to you..

Jackson, could you interview a Germanist in the future?

Winter is coming!

8:37 Widukind spend some time with the Danish king. Later Otto I married Eadgyth of Wessex because his father Heinrich wanted him to marry a Saxon. Saxons in the 10. century were very aware of both the story of Widukind and their connection to the Saxons in England. Even in the 10. century Saxons considered themselves very different from the other Germans and were very nationalistic. Saxon emperors wore Saxon clothes etc. German Saxons also knew about say Hedeby. They have sent many Christian missions later to Scandinavia. Their connection to it was never lost.

@onurbschrednei4569

Жыл бұрын

Well this was written in Old High German, most likely in Fulda, which is not part of the saxon/low german regions.

So the one time you need the hat you leave it at home? ;)

Ph in old high german I believe represented /pf/, so maybe it is related to Pfuhl? Anyway, Phol would have to come from PGMC *p. I would guess pullaz as a possible source.

Have you applied to the University of Washington?

Hopefully you see this- could the healing chant be related to one of Odin's 18 spells in Havamal? The 2nd one?

'i like and approve of this message. i shared a short clip to my page, but get few views,, so mention your work and books. ( i wait for it to come out in movie)...

The further from the Mediterranean you go, the greater the gap of my recognition grows. This requires more research.

I am wondering if we could have an Old Norse language-learning/communication server. Are there any good ones that currently exist? I've looked it up, but I didn't want to enter it without any input.

Uvular R in Old High German = modern Icelandic pronunciation of Old Norse?

I'm here cause of Heilung..

@volkischfraulein2957

3 жыл бұрын

Love Heilung!☺️

I'm so surprised that Old High German is so different from Standard High German.

@rmcewan10

4 жыл бұрын

It’s the same in English. We can understand pretty much all of texts written in Middle English, but Old English is almost entirely unintelligible - not least because it’s written somewhat differently. I understand from my Spanish friends that they suffer from the same sort of difficulty there.

So the R letter in OHG is pronounced like in Spanish, then?

@ae3898

4 жыл бұрын

Yes-a light trill In reconstructed OHG pronunciation. Bavarian and Austrian German dialects-“upper German”-preserve it to this day.

@roicervino6171

4 жыл бұрын

@@ae3898 oh, I didn't know about that. Thought it was a standard thing. Thank you

They wouldnt know about norse culture even tho they lived so close together? I am thinking of Jutland

Immediately heard Heilung's Hamrer Hippyer in my head

Wait, Sunna is just the sun, (de Sonne).

So could Freya be a linguistic import from Old High German to Norse

@12tanuha21

3 жыл бұрын

I don't think. More like that the germanic people already had this religion before a part started to move southward and got splitted up in west germanic and north germanic. What religion had the east germanic Goths before they became christians?

@anotherelvis

3 жыл бұрын

@@12tanuha21 At 6:00 the video tells that the old high german name Friia is cognate with the Norse name Frigg, so I guess that Friia was originally the same god as Frigg. But the Norse name Freya sounds a little like the German name Friia, so I was speculating that the Norse name Freya could refer to "The German version of Frigg". In other words the mythologies of Scandinavia and Germany could have drifted apart, and at some point it could have been meaningful to portray them as separate gods. But this is just guesswork.

The sounds of your voice are likened unto a rumble a roll of rocks like thunder of the ground . ...as avalanches and if glaciers could roar they may speak like that. Would you like to get married and let me move to Colorado? Thanks, Your lil Kari.

@ziloj-perezivat

11 ай бұрын

youtube comments have no chill

Who's scared and angry, I dare ask?

Around nine hundred, noone knew about the vikings? ~ I seriously doubt that! Fifty year prior vikings laid siege to Byzanz, and in the peace settlement got that viking ships were allocated twice as much silk as all other ships this end of the silk road. Cheers from Denmark - and good luck with your next career!

@FiikusMaximus

4 жыл бұрын

While I agree, Byzantium/Eastern Roman Eplmpire lived in a very different cultural milieu from the Germans. Just because the adventurers from Rus were known to well connected Romans doesn't mean that marsh-dwelling Germans minding their own businesses had any idea about the mythology of some pirates living across the sea. Although personally, I'd guess that there would be some contact, at least through trade, with the Scandinavians.