User:Rsradford/World Mill
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The World Mill is a widely-recurring figure in Indo-European and other mythologies.
Clive Tolley has examined the significance of this mytheme in Indo-European and Finnish mythology.[1] Tolley concludes that “It is clear that the cosmic mill was not, in extant Norse sources, a widely developed mythologem. Nonetheless, the myth of Mundilfæri connects the turning of the cosmos via a 'mill-handle' with the regulation of seasons, and the myth of Bergelmir suggests the concept of a creative milling of a giant's body, associated in some way with the sea,"[2] further noting that "the image of a cosmic mill, ambivalently churning out well-being or disaster, may be recognized in certain fragmentary myths."[3] Richard M. Dorson expresses a similar view in the 1999 History of British Folklore.[4]In 2000, the theory is again discussed in the German Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, bd. 3, p. 839, in regard to the Eddic poem, Grottasöngr.
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- ^ Tolley, Clive (1995), "The Mill in Norse and Finnish Mythology." Saga-Book 24:63-82.
- ^ ibid., p.77.
- ^ ibid, p.73
- ^ History of British Folklore, Vol. II, Routledge, p. 174. “A similar conception underlies the Eddaic Mundilföri, the giant who makes the heavens turn round in its daily and yearly revolutions by moving (færa) the handle (mundil, möndull) of the great world-mill— that being the Teutonic idea of the revolving vault of heaven. [Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology, 396-7; M. Müller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, 40, 651] Mundilföri, the axis-mover and heaven-turner, is a solar being who has his children Máni and Sól (i,e, Sun and Moon). As fire-producer by turning, he was identified with Lodhurr, the fire-kindler. [Rydberg, 412; Du Chaillu, Viking Age, i. 38; C.F. Keary, The Vikings, 65. In the Finnish Kalevala the sun is called ‘God’s spindle’ (Grimm, T.M., 1500)].”