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Archive 1

Couple of Points for cleanup

The Bifrost pages says (and that is the way I remember it) that it goes from Asgard to Midgard. This article says it goes to Jotun.

There is already a list of giants in Category:Norse giants. It seems redundant to have a seperate list here rather than linking to the other.

PerlKnitter 14:51, 1 September 2006 (UTC)


I noticed this phrase in the section on character of this article;

and thought this was possibly too emotional, so I edited 'scum' to 'other giants'.

I've also come across mention that Surt may have actually been the first giant, before even Ymir, and is still supposed to be in existence. I shall try and find a reference for this, assuming that a reference is needed for it to be said that some people think this? Haloquin 18:11, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


List of names

I'm going to continue mining the Eddas and expanding the list of names but it'll probably need to be made into a separate article eventually, like with Odin and Thor. Cerdic 00:04, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

FuÞark Þurisaz, jotunn and hunger

For linking the fuÞark rune Þurisaz and giants, could you please take from the following text support for the argument. Looking comparatively with another Indo-European language, in this case Romanian, we find the a word similar to Þurisaz: "uriaş" which means "giant" [1]. Interestingly, the word for giant is linked in a number of ways with hunger: in a substratum related language, Albanian ( Origin of the Albanians ) "uri" means "hunger" [2]; compare to this wikipedia entry for a Jotunn “glutton” giant, where we find the Old Norse term [Þu]“risi”; this thematic link of giants (“rephaim” in Hebrew [3]) and hunger is also found in the Book of Enoch chapter XV. ... 11. “And the spirits of the giants ... cause trouble: they take no food, ⌈but nevertheless hunger⌉ and thirst, and cause offences.” [4]”; also the giant weilding his hammer/club/ass’ jawbone to bring rain and end hunger, such as Urion Orion (mythology) chasing the rainmaking Pleiades. Gabrieli 13:23, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Ivaldi

I removed Ivaldi from the list of giants since according to the Eddas the sons of Ivaldi are dwarves. However, if someone can point to a mention of him as a giant in the Saga literature then feel free to revert it. Cerdic 04:15, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Some scholars equate the Dvergar (or Svartálfar) "sons of Ívaldi" with the Jötnar "sons of Ölvaldi". But even per this hypothesis suggests Ívaldi is a Dvergr who took a Jötunn as a wife and had half-giant children. For Reaves suggestion, see Dark elves hypothesis. In any case, Ívaldi himself shouldnt be included among the giants. --Haldrik (talk) 15:56, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

What is the ö?

According to Old Norse#Orthography, ö is an "alternative" spelling which can unfortunately both be an ǫ or an ø. So which one is it? I'm guessing it's an ø but I cannot be sure. Please fix the article to use the standard spelling. Shinobu (talk) 11:01, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

ǫ and ø had merged into ö by around 1200 (so, before the Edda was written). But ö is also sometimes used to represent ǫ in printed (or electronic texts) that distinguish between the two phonemes. It is more widely available in fonts and character tables. Haukur (talk) 20:08, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Mimir's Species

This article mentions Mimir as "one of the giants", but both the article on Mimir and a Norse mythology book I am reading state that Mimir is a Vanir, rather than a giant (the Vanir are more like elvish-type fertility gods, if I understand correctly). Where did the idea of him being a giant come from? Aeonoris (talk) 06:50, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Err, actually, he's an Aesir, sorry, but that still is contradictory to this article citing him as a giant. -Aeonoris (talk) 06:59, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Mímir is among the Æsir during the Æsir-Vanir war described in Heimskringla, but outside of this continuity it's unclear where Mímir could be categorized. When it comes to Norse mythology, some people fall into this habit of where if someone is not explicitly described as a member of the Æsir or the Vanir they're automatically considered a jötunn, which is obviously very problematic. The state of this article is also pretty poor, so I'd take it with a grain of salt. I'll give give it a quick clean up in the mean time. :bloodofox: (talk) 08:30, 12 November 2008 (UTC)


Move?

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was no consensus. Deacon of Pndapetzim (Talk) 06:33, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Jötunn → Jotun —

  • (Uppercase) Jotun most common spelling in English as shown by being listed first in dictionaries http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/jotun http://dictionary.infoplease.com/jotun — Espoo (talk) 15:14, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Page Jotun is a disambig. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 15:57, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Strongly Support with addition explained above. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:17, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Support, per Espoo. The renaming of the current Jotun page is easily accomplished. Tzu Zha Men (talk) 16:50, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Oppose - no reason to omit the diacritic, even Random House includes that spelling and Wikipedia is usually more diligent about those things than other English reference works - I see Zürich still has its diacritic. Haukur (talk) 17:43, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
    • There is reason; it's not usage. There is even more reason to omit the second n. The OED, and all but one of its quotations, spells jotun; the exception, and their etymological note, uses jötun - and their source is that well-known eccentric Sabine Baring-Gould. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:43, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
      • The three recent English-language handbooks on Norse mythology (Simek, Orchard and Lindow) all use a diacritic here. We should be relying on high-quality secondary sources, not other generic reference works (i.e. our competitors). As for the 'n', jötun is the accusative and for odd historical reasons the accusative of Old Norse words is sometimes used in other languages. But a dictionary lemma would always have two n's and that's what you will usually find in modern academic work. It's an Old Norse word, not a part of the common English vocabulary - in my opinion our article should italicize it. Haukur (talk) 19:13, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
        • As for the linguistic point: it is customary in English to use the root form of Old Norse words - as it is with Sanskrit; that's not odd, it's a combination of pronouncability and maximizing information. Anyone who cares about the forms terminal IE -s has taken in Norse is unlikely to need this article; most people who are reading this article don't care.
        • We are a work of general reference; we should do what works of general reference do: follow the general usage of lay readers, not of specialists. That's policy; see here. (Mentioning the various forms the name has taken is a different matter; that's encyclopedic information, and should have a paragraph.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:30, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
          • If there were a consistent convention of dropping the reflex of IE -s I wouldn't mind so much - but it's much more chaotic than that. The -r in Ægir is never dropped and the -r in Týr is rarely dropped while the -r in Freyr is occasionally dropped but not as commonly as the -l in Yggdrasill, the -n in Heðinn or the -r in Ragnarr etc. etc. even though all those endings are reflexes of IE -s. I'm fine with using Anglicizations which have become household words in English—I'm not pushing for moving Odin to Óðinn or Thor to Þórr—but for terms which haven't become native English words, like jötunn, we should use the accurate spelling you would find in high-quality reference works on the subject. That's what's Wikipedia's done in this area for many years, whatever a given attempt to describe policy may say on a given day. Lastly, I don't think that dropping the diacritic or the second n would help a reader at all to guess at the pronunciation. Haukur (talk) 22:44, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
        • Haukur, I'm all for using special characters whenever possible according to Wikipedia policy, but Zürich is a bad and illogical example/argument for using the spelling jötunn because one is the current official spelling of a name, i.e. a proper noun, in a language currently spoken whereas the other is the spelling of a common noun in a "dead" language (where it was in addition apparently spelled in more than one way and to cap it all originally apparently not with an ö). In other words, Zürich is a good and logical example/argument for why we should list that spelling first and then mention the most common English spelling Zurich and do the opposite for Jotun/jötun(n). A better example for defending your case would have been Ragnarök because that is spelled with an umlaut at least in works meant for the educated general public such as Encyclopaedia Britannica. Britannica's 2000 edition doesn't use the word Jotun/jötun(n) anywhere but it does have many instances of Jotunheim(en), which provides support in a modern version of Old Norse for use of Jotun in English and as the Wikipedia lemma. On the other hand, there may be a new publishing trend in English that is more open towards non-English letters since Britannica's 2009 online edition does have an article on Jötun with the mention "also spelled Jöten". I may thus have found a sufficiently reputable source and sufficiently convincing argument for helping you defend the ö in Jötun, but there's no hope so far for your goal of defending Jötunn or jötunn.
        • In addition, you're misrepresenting the facts either because you have an ax to grind or because you're not as well informed as you claim to be. Luckily there's Google Books, so we "normal" Wikipedia editors who are not experts on this topic can check up on claims without spending hours going to libraries etc. Google Books shows that Lindow uses the spelling jötun, not jötunn. In addition, Google Books shows only part of a quote from Lindow that you can please complete: because this book is intended for a general audience, a decision was made to limit the use of the specialized characters usually... This sounds like exactly the kind of editorial decision we need to make for Wikipedia, and we'll have to draw the line at a very different level than Lindow because Wikipedia is intended for the general public whereas Lindow and the other specialised books you mentioned are for experts and fans of this topic. I've ordered Orchard to my local library but won't bother to get Simek because that's translated from German and published by Boydell & Brewer, who cater to a very different audience than Wikipedia. As Septentrionalis said, we are a work of general reference. That also means we should not make our subjects unnecessarily unapproachable due to something as unnecessary and trivial as an unnecessarily user-unfriendly article name.
        • An immensely bigger problem than this jötunn/Jotun problem is that Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Norse mythology) is violating core MOS and Wikipedia policies by demanding way too much of most users of Wikipedia by allowing lemmas with special characters that are completely incomprehensible to probably 99% of Wikipedia users. (When no particular Anglicized form can be said to be in common use in everyday English and English speaking scholars use the standardized Old Norse spelling, use the standardized Old Norse spelling) This kind of nonsense is supported by blatantly incorrect and illogical claims (Since Old Norse is written in the Latin alphabet no transliteration is necessary) that result in even more blatant nonsense like allowing use of lemmas including words such as Þorgerðr with non-English letters that are as incomprehensible as Chinese to about 99% both of users of Latin alphabets in English-speaking and of users of extended Latin alphabets in non-English-speaking countries!
        • Even worse, many pages on Norse mythology don't even follow the concession to the plebs in these already too snobby and exclusive guidelines (We should endeavour to supply every variant of Anglicized spelling somewhere within the article, in the first paragraph when that is practical.). A short look at articles on Norse topics shows that many if not the majority of articles on less well known topics, even important ones, that have non-English (and non-Latin) letters in the article name do not have any kind of transliteration or list of anglicised spellings or even pronunciation help in the lede! (Sometimes not even elsewhere.) E.g. Urðarbrunnr, Njörðr, Þorgerðr Hölgabrúðr and Irpa, Lóðurr, Nīþ... What an unbelievable mess and what blatant disregard of the needs of the vast majority of Wikipedia users! It looks like many Norse mythology and perhaps other Norse articles are written by and for a fanboy community... --Espoo (talk) 00:50, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
          • Espoo, please let's not do this. There's no need for a discussion on something as innocuous as the spelling of words to devolve into a collection of accusations and exclamation marks, ("ax to grind", "not as well informed as you claim to be", "nonsense", "blatantly incorrect and illogical", "blatant nonsense", "blatant disregard", "snobby", "fanboy community" etc.) Please, please, recognize that we're all doing the best we can. The people who have been heavily involved in writing articles about Norse mythology are doing so because they love the subject and would like to make accurate information on it as accessible as possible. No-one is grinding any other ax than that. We can have a civilized discussion about the best way to do these things while still recognizing that everyone wants the same things.
          • I'll gladly supply you with the full "note on orthography" from Lindow's work. It goes like this: "Because this book is intended for a general audience, a decision was made to limit the use of the specialized characters usually employed to represent the sounds of the older Germanic languages, including those of Norway and Iceland during the Viking Age and Middle Ages. Specifically, in names and titles the letter þ (thorn) is here represented as th, ð (eth) as d, and ǫ (o-hook) as ö. These letters have, however, been retained in discussions of specific terms, such as “þylja” and “goði.” Other characters, such as æ, œ, and ö, have been retained. In addition, the nominative singular final r has been removed from names, and the accent marks have been removed from the names “Odin” and “Thor,” since these forms are the most widely used in English. These compromises naturally create inconsistencies, but I hope they will not divert from the aim of the work, namely, to let the texts speak for themselves and to give the reader an idea of the main issues in the study of Scandinavian mythology." As you can see, there are some similarities and some differences with the way Lindow treats Old Norse words and the way we've evolved over on Wikipedia. He has goði while we're currently using gothi. We both render o-hook as ö and we both use Odin and Thor as lemmas. We both use æ and œ and we both use þ and ð in some places but not other places. Picking a page (p. 15) at random, here are examples of Old Norse words and names as they appear in Lindow's handbook: Húsdrápa, fornyrðislag, ljóðaháttr, skáld, Úlf Uggason, drápa, Bragi Boddason, Ragnar Lodbrók. As you can see, Lindow removes the nominative ending from names (Úlf Uggason rather than Úlfr Uggason) but not from other words (ljóðaháttr rather than ljóðahátt) - on Wikipedia we've usually kept it in both cases.
          • Some of the issues you've brought up are far-reaching and go beyond the question of rendering of Old Norse mythological name. Many have been discussed for a long time. For example, the question of whether thorn is acceptable in article titles touches modern Icelandic names as well as Old Norse names. For a sample discussion see Talk:Þingeyri.
          • I'm glad that you're ordering Orchard's reference works though it saddens me that you will not be looking for Simek - although both books have a number of errors, Simek's is the more useful. A sample page from Orchard (p. 21) has the following Old Norse word forms: Adils, Ægir, Yrsa, Hrólf kraki, Snorra Edda, Gymir, Rán, Bára, Blódughadda, Bylgja, Dúfa, Hefring, Himinglæva. And finally some samples from Simek (p. 331, though just a sample from that page): Þulr, Hávamál, þylja, Gunnwaldr Hróaldsson, Vafþrúðnismál. To reiterate: Simek is, in my opinion, the best reference work in English on this, please don't dismiss it because the original version is in German.
          • I never said that Lindow had two n's in his lemma for the word under question, I was just talking about the diacritic. From long experience on Wikipedia I imagined that the main sticking point was the diacritic, not the n. I'm happy to find out that this was wrong and that you now find the diacritic to have support.
          • If you check the archives of the talking page of the naming convention you'll see that a lot of these issues have been discussed at great length and debated vigorously. For another sample discussion see Talk:Níðhöggr/Archive 1. While spelling is a seemingly trivial issue it's easy to pour an enormous amount of time and energy into discussing it. I'm really hoping we're not going to have another round of all-about-debate across multiple articles and article groups.
          • I'm sorry that I was so brusk in reverting your initial forays into this article area. I should have done better. I can see that you are well-intentioned and hard-working and it's obvious that you aim to improve the articles you touch on. I'm hoping we can come to some sort of modus vivendi here and manage to work on article content productively in a cooperative spirit - that will be a much better use of our energy than debating the spelling of lemmas and it will yield a much greater improvement for our readers. Haukur (talk) 01:43, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
            • Haukur, thanks for these first kind words received since i started editing articles on Norse topics. Since you now realise you were too brusk in reverting the edits of a new contributor to a topic (which can be understood as a clear misunderstanding of one of the most important principles of WP and can be seen by the editor as a clear misuse of admin authority), you now can perhaps understand that i felt, and still do to only a slightly lesser degree, that i was being kept out by a club and being pushed around. Sorry i started yelling and getting aggressive back, but i definitely feel you and Bloodofox were aggressive first.
            • As a sign of goodwill and as an appreciation of your responsibility as an admin, please explain to Bloodofox that the claim of OR should not be used lightly and definitely not when talking about something one doesn't understand; the transcription of US dictionary spellings into IPA is explained in detail on the relevant WP pages and the opposite of OR, and major English dictionaries are the most reputable sources that exist for English pronunciations. I don't have time to analyse his extensive changes/reverts of my careful and well-sourced edits on Yggdrasil, but they seem at least at first glance to only pay lip service to his claim he's no longer refusing "outside" contributions to "his" article.
            • I also don't have time to discuss this move request now in more detail nor the more serious problem of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Norse mythology) violating core MOS and Wikipedia policies as explained above, but the Lindow quote alone is enough to show that the use of non-English letters in article names should be restricted to ones with diacritics, accents, and other small changes and should exclude incomprehensible letters like þ and ð. If even a book written for experts and fans of Norse topics doesn't use letters that are Chinese to English readers in names and titles, an encyclopedia meant for the general public like Wikipedia would be demanding even more and way too much of its readers if it made its lemmas even more difficult and repulsive than Lindow.--Espoo (talk) 14:39, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
              • I must reject your serious accusation that I have committed "clear misuse of admin authority". At no point in our dispute over the lede of the Yggdrasil article did I use any admin tools, nor did I at any time imply that I might use admin tools. In fact I never even alluded to the fact that I have the admin bit set. Admins are to be treated as any other editors when it comes to content disputes, we have no special authority in matters that we are personally involved in.
              • Again I ask you to refrain from loaded, hyperbolic language. Repulsive lemmas? Seriously?
              • My friend Bloodofox has done excellent work in writing articles on Norse mythology topics. I know that he takes quite a strict view of what constitutes original research and we've had some minor disagreements on that in the past. But I'm sure you are yourself more than capable of defending your own views on this matter.
              • Our understanding of Wikipedia naming policies and practices is obviously quite different. A wide variety of opinions exists on these matters and I realize where you are coming from. In naming disputes in the past, my views have sometimes come out on top and sometimes not. Haukur (talk) 16:53, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
                • I never said anything about admin tools. Administrators are expected to lead by example and to behave in a respectful, civil manner in their interactions with others. Administrators are expected to follow Wikipedia policies... Removing valuable, well-sourced info found only in the lede based on a technicality such as that this info should also be in the article is a clear violation of some of the core ideas and policies of WP, as i pointed out already several times. You apparently haven't yet understood that most edits are made by casual readers who are not experts and who simply happen to notice a problem that they can fix. WP suffers greatly if these changes are not welcomed and instead simply reverted for trivial reasons. Especially as an admin, you should have either moved the info from the lede to the article yourself or asked Bloodofox to do that. According to the very definition of a general reader and the purpose of the lede, most edits will be in the lede and the general reader will not have the time and energy to plow through the article to see where this info should be added. By deleting valuable info, these edits are not only lost because most casual readers will not check to ensure that their additions remain there; worse still, such reverts discourage most casual editors from editing anything except articles on which they are experts, and that gnaws at the very root of Wikipedia.
                • Since you're from Iceland, you apparently have a very hard time understanding how turned off 99% of all WP readers are by use of letters like þ and ð alone, instead of as interesting and exciting extra information in an original spelling after a comprehensible one. In fact, you truly don't seem to get that þ and ð are completely and entirely incomprehensible to almost all WP readers. Don't get me wrong, i think the letters are wonderful, but they are definitely repulsive to almost all readers. It makes them feel completely helpless, stupid, and uneducated. You don't want that, i'm sure. Perhaps you can understand if you imagine a lemma with ⴳ or Ħ or ⴱ (for b or v!) or ⵎ (for m!) etc. I hope you can understand that describing this kind of situation as impossible and in violation of core WP policies and plain usefulness is not loaded, hyperbolic language. And when use of incomprehensible letters in lemmas turns people away from instead of reading about Norse culture and your wonderful country, it's not an exaggeration to say they are indeed repulsed and find these letters repulsive. By trying to force the Wikipedia community to continue to accept incomprehensible letters like þ and ð, you're running the very real risk of provoking an extreme reaction that will try to ban all accents and diacritics too. Believe me, you'd do best to promote the kind of compromise Lindow presents. I'm pretty sure that at some point in the future his slightly snobby attempt to use Norse letters as much as possible without turning off the "general" audience as he says will look like a wonderful chance missed and a wonderful goal that you cannot attain because all or most non-English letters may be banned based on the most common usage in general English publications, not rare scholarly works. ("Slightly snobby" because using ð etc. a little too much - consistent replacement of ð with a phonetic spelling like dh instead of confusing d would have made the text more accessible and made it more, well, consistent and less confusing.)
                • By being intransigent, life becomes very hard and you stand to lose much more than by compromising. One entry with ö in Britannica is not enough to save the spelling jötun when most dictionaries and texts for general readers use Jotun. You'd be best advised to try to get WP to adopt a policy like i'm hoping for, banning only incomprehensible letters in lemmas and headings because only then do we have a chance of saving all the accents, diacritics, and other strange, beautiful, but comprehensible letters, hopefully even capital Ð. --Espoo (talk) 19:21, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
                  • You've now done exactly what I pleaded with you not to do and launched a general campaign of moving a bunch of unrelated articles you've never edited or shown any interest in. Here are some more lemmas for you: Pekw'Xe:yles, Stó:lō, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, X̲á:ytem, Kwakwaka'wakw, Kwagu'ł, St'a7mes. Are these repulsive to you too? Do you think these articles were written by snobs and fanboys? I really, really hoped we could have some useful conciliatory dialogue here and you've instead chosen to escalate in all directions. Since this is what you have chosen I see no purpose in engaging in further dialogue with you here - if all you want to do is to lob self-righteous accusations at me and pick fights on every front then there's nothing I can do to stop you. But I'm really saddened that it went this way. Haukur (talk) 22:21, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
                    • No, i have not launched a campaign of moving a bunch of unrelated articles. First of all they are not unrelated since the problems in their lemmas are the same or very similar. Secondly, you apparently have still not understood that the whole point of Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(use_English)#Modified_letters is that we need to at least at first deal with individual lemmas, not general discussions, at least as long as that policy is in effect.
                    • I specifically explained that i do not find these or any other letters repulsive and wrote Don't get me wrong, i think the letters are wonderful. On the contrary, i explained that i'm trying to help you salvage as many non-English letters as possible, but that the intransigent attitude you and some others have will probably result in the opposite. It seems you read or at least understood almost nothing of what i said in the previous post. We're more or less on the same side here, but we're going to have to be willing to compromise because the overwhelming majority of native English users of Wikipedia no doubt want to rid its lemmas of all non-English letters. So far, the community of editors is a very select group of people who are not at all representative of the average English native speaker. Unless we ban incomprehensible letters before we get large numbers of new editors, they will most probably ban all accents, diacritics, etc. If incomprehensible letters are banned before we get large numbers of new editors, we can probably get them used to and even enjoy those letters that at least resemble English letters. --Espoo (talk) 00:51, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
                      • This is an odd alarmist scenario. I've been discussing these things on Wikipedia for five years, during which time there has been a huge influx of new editors of all sorts. There has been no movement towards 'banning' more characters, on the contrary the consensus seems to have moved toward broader acceptance of more special characters. I remember when ASCII-only was a fairly popular view, even if it was in the minority. Now it is essentially a fringe position. I see no believable scenario which will change this in the way you suggest, certainly not to the point where we need to make pre-emptive concessions against what we think is best. You keep telling us what 99% of the readers of such and such an article think about things. I'm still curious what your silent majority has to say about Sḵwx̱wú7mesh.
                      • But even now we could disengage from this huge timesink of a debate and do something more productive instead. You've pointed out a list of articles which are missing potentially helpful Anglicized forms. Okay, that's a legitimate concern. If we can put the move requests on hold and instead discuss your concerns about special characters in some centralized location that would free up time I would be entirely willing to spend fixing up Anglicizations where needed. What do you say? Haukur (talk) 01:09, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
  • Oppose - being named first in a dictionary is an incredibly weak and tenuous justification for a move - it's hardly indicative of widespread use in reliable sources (which is the true deciding factor). Knepflerle (talk) 12:59, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
    That's a surprisingly widespread totally misinformed opinion among WP editors; surprising because most WP editors should be educated enough to know better: Dictionaries base their entries and the order of alternative spellings on huge databases of citations. Attempts to determine common usage based on Google searches and even based on Google Books searches are hopelessly amateurish in comparison and should be banned and classified as OR unless 1) there are no entries in major dictionaries, encyclopedias, or other reference works, 2) dictionaries etc. disagree (UK dictionaries with UK dictionaries or US with US; otherwise it's a clear WP:ENGVAR case), 3) it's a new buzzword or expression, 4) Google searches can demonstrate widespread colloquial usage is different than in dictionaries (which base their choices mostly on printed sources), 5) other good reasons. Even attempts to prove dictionary choices wrong based on quotes from several scholarly publications on the topic are a joke and OR because WP policy is to base lemma choices on common general usage, not only in scholarly works. The huge databases of dictionaries include citations from all published sources, and their editorial staff and usage panels include people from many different professions to ensure an objective description of current English usage. --Espoo (talk) 22:39, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Silly Question

The connection between Old English word ent "giant", Old Norse jötunn "giant" and Finnish jätti "giant" is not certain, but does certainly not seem too far fetched[citation needed], when remembered that Finno-Ugric languages are still spoken nearby the areas of Tibetan language.

Can't help but ask: Could there be any possible connection between 'Jaetti' and 'Yeti' (the legendary, large Himalayan snow-man) ?

'Jätti' is a loanword from Old Nordic. Finnish preserves many Germanic forms that even predate the Viking Age - it's been helpful in reconstructing proto-nordic due to old Germanic loans being barely changed. As jätti is a loanword due to close contact it is not present in any form in other Finno-Ugric languages i.e 'óriás. BodvarBjarki (talk) 18:24, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Magical Trolls and Trollish Magic

The suggestion currently made in this article that the term "troll" is derived "from the term for 'magic'" is clearly nonsense, and should be deleted. ON troll, perhaps from a PGmc *trullan, is of unknown origin; cf. Vladimir Orel, A Handbook of Germanic Etymology (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 410. Terms like ON trolldómr "witchcraft, sorcery" are secondary; trolls were associated with and/or assumed to have supernatural powers, but there is no indication that name troll itself is in any way derived from a term for "magic" (as the article implies), if only because the origin of the term is obscure. (It is to be noted that the article on trolls itself wisely eschews any such wild assertions.) Carlsefni (talk) 15:34, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Where is the difference?

Between this Jötunn and the stub Hrimthurs? Seems to be very similar at the disc Ice giant: The frost giants (hrímþursar) of Norse mythology, see also Hrimthurs greetz --WissensDürster (talk) 18:19, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Jötunn in Icelandic

This article says:


This is not true. There are several words for strength in Icelandic, but Jötun is not one of them. In Icelandic, a big, strong man can be galled a "jötun" or "risi", meaning giant. In old-fashioned and poetic Icelandic, someone "going berserk", exerting extravagant strength and being very angry can be said to be in "Jötunmóður", which roughly translates to Giant-mode (e.g. the poem "nú er frost á fróni" (e. it is frost in Iceland) "...kveður kuldahljóð, Kári í jötunmóð...", which roughly translates: "...makes cold-sounds, the wind in Jötunmóður...")


Björn Ómarsson — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.208.247.2 (talk) 1:45, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I changed this sentance to: "In modern Icelandic jötunn kept its original meaning" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.208.247.2 (talk) 12:15, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Etymological Issues

Though this article is titled "Jötunn", it seems like it is really trying to cover a number of semi-interchangeable ON terms for monsters. This is not necessarily a bad idea, but it suggests considerable reorganization of the material (and perhaps retitling?) might be in order.

Turning more particularly to the etymology of ON jǫtunn, I think we can do better. The idea of "eater" is on the right track, but we could better reference the suggestions of Michael Janda, Eleusis: Das indogermanische Erbe der Mysterien, lnnsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 96 (Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 2000), pp. 110-111, which boil down to a PIE *h1ed-uno- "eater" (built from PIE *h1éd-u̯r "eat" and a -uno- suffix also found in the Indic name Varuna), providing a Pre-PGmc *eduno- (perhaps borrowed into Finno-Ugric at this stage) > PGmc (after the First Sound Shift) *etuno-, whence Runic Swedish iatun, classical ON jǫtunn, OE eoten, etc. Joseph Harris includes a wide-ranging discussion of the term (including Janda's suggestions, of which he approves) in an article "The Rök stone's iatun and the mythology of death", in Analecta Septentrionalia: Beiträge zur nordgermanischen Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte, ed. by Wilhelm Heizmann, Klaus Böldl, and Heinrich Beck (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 467–501 (pp. 488-493); Harris concludes that the term "perhaps originally designat[ed] a demon who consumes (the dead)" (p. 493). This is, perhaps, more likely that an origin in a concept like "glutton, big eater", regarding which Harris notes "it seems unlikely that such an early mythological term would have taken its name merely from human gluttony or from its projection onto the appetite of 'giants' such as we encounter in the comical forms of folktales" (p. 491). Carlsefni (talk) 15:23, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Merger proposal

Following along the button listed above in "What's the difference?", I've proposed that stub be merged into this article. This article already references hrímþursar in the Etymology section. 67.40.38.105 (talk) 09:54, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

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