Happy Halloween! One of the ultimate horrors in Old Norse literature is the wolf, which Old Norse has a neutral-ish (úlfr) and a distinctly negative word for (vargr).
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Facinating! I was looking into this the other day when I tried to look closer at some parts of the older gulathing law, which bans you from calling yourself wolf or bear (Ulv og Bjørn) when proclaiming you found a dead body. The law also has quite a few examples of varg being used for criminals – like “firewolf” for arsonists and the famous “varg I veum”
Great video, as always.
Ulv 🐺
European Wolves of the Viking Age were gigantic, compared to the wolves of today. They were hunted to almost extinction and though now somewhat recovered, are smaller than the Eldar Ulfr. Skal!
I've always wondered whether the Latin for 'fox' – 'vulpes' derived from the same root or just looked so similar by coincidence… – it actually looks more like 'wolf' than 'lupus' does… and then when you were talking about the word for she-wolf, I was thinking about the English word 'vixen'…
Where is the text that nobody will read??! I want to read it!
When you drop little details like Jotun women who rode wolves and used snakes for reins, it makes me sad that we don't have a fuller corpus of Norse mythology to give more details, but grateful that we have as much as we do.
In Serbian, we have "Вук"/"Vuk", pronounced Wook. It comes from preSlavic v'lkos via Old Slavonic v'lk'.
Btw, very famous reformer of modern Serbian was called Vuk (Wolf), very popular name today, too. His parents gave him that name cause all of their children born before him used to die as infants so their rationale was that the witches are killing their kids and the only thing that a witch would fear would be a wolf.
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In the legend of the wolf of Gubbio. Saint Francis tames a wolf that had been terrorizing the inhabitants of the town of Gubbio in central Italy. In the legend a wolf (probably a pack) had discended on the town from the nearby forests during a particularly hard winter, wrecking havock with the townspeople herds and even carrying off small children left unattended and the occasional young woman. The legend reflects the terror that untamed nature inspired in our ancestors. In a subsistence economy where having animal products meant the difference between surviving the winter and starvation. A preator that could carry off herd animals and people was indeed the enemy.
Now, on to werewolf.
King and tyrant might be a good example of a neutral and negative word for the same thing in English.
In my time with the British Army of the Rhine in the 70s, I was friends with a German soldier called Wolfgang. He was a great guy, and although we called him Wolf for short, I wouldn't describe him as bad, quite the opposite.
What is the word that is the second part of Fenris as I usually see it translated as fen wolf?
Ulfr –> Rover (dog's name)?
As I recall, there's a line in Hrolf Kraki's Saga where a character wonders if a situation is a matter of "vargr með ulfum" or "wolf among wolves" (with the latter being the nastier connotation.)
An English example of neutral/negative names of an animal is dog/cur.
Interesting. I found an ancestor from the old English Danelaw who was named Ingolf or Ingulf- Ing's wolf.
Friggin love these, Jackson!
I grew up absolutely loving wolves. I grew up on a farm too. Theyre one of the most human animals outside of primates. Which is probably the cause of much fear. I always considered wolves as my spirit animal.
Anyone else very stressed that soneone runs by on the trail behind him at 10:35ish and just never comes out on the other side????