Misplaced Pages

#602397

40-622: The Old Saxon word compound Irminsûl means 'great pillar'. The first element, Irmin- ('great') is cognate with terms with some significance elsewhere in Germanic mythology . Among the North Germanic peoples , the Old Norse form of Irmin is Jörmunr , which just like Yggr is one of the names of Odin. Yggdrasil (Old Norse 'Yggr's horse') is a cosmic tree from which Odin sacrificed himself, and which connects

80-606: A cone on the cathedral square. The youth then used sticks and stones in an attempt to knock over the object. This custom is described as existing elsewhere in Germany, particularly in Halberstadt where it was enacted on the day of Laetare Sunday by the Canons themselves. Awareness of the significance of the concept seems to have persisted well into Christian times. For example, in the twelfth-century Kaiserchronik an Irminsul

120-427: A consonant, e.g. hēliand ' savior ' ( Old High German : heilant , Old English : hǣlend , but Gothic : háiljands ). Germanic umlaut , when it occurs with short a , is inconsistent, e.g. hebbean or habbian "to have" ( Old English : habban ). This feature was carried over into the descendant-language of Old Saxon, Middle Low German, where e.g. the adjective krank ( ' sick, ill ' ) had

160-512: A continuum which has since been interrupted by the simultaneous dissemination of standard languages within each nation and the dissolution of folk dialects. Although they share some features, a number of differences separate Old Saxon, Old English , and Old Dutch. One such difference is the Old Dutch utilization of -a as its plural a-stem noun ending, while Old Saxon and Old English employ -as or -os . However, it seems that Middle Dutch took

200-496: A number of different manuscripts whose spelling systems sometimes differ markedly. In this section, only the letters used in normalized versions of the Heliand will be kept, and the sounds modern scholars have traditionally assigned to these letters. Where spelling deviations in other texts may point to significant pronunciation variants, this will be indicated. In general, the spelling of Old Saxon corresponds quite well to that of

240-463: A vast system of underground gypsum caves beneath Eresburg, where they remained unnoticed until Charlemagne's people left. Though only a legend, the caves can still be seen, along with several watchtowers dated to the same time period (circa AD 800). Very near Eresburg is Priesterberg , a hill overlooking the valley of the Diemel. This was reportedly the location of Pagan sacrificial rites in

280-635: Is described as not being far from Heresburg (now Obermarsberg ), Germany. Jacob Grimm states that "strong reasons" point to the actual location of the Irminsul as being approximately 15 miles (24 km) away, in the Teutoburg Forest and states that the original name for the region "Osning" may have meant "Holy Wood". The Benedictine monk Rudolf of Fulda (AD 865) provides a description of an Irminsul in chapter 3 of his Latin work De miraculis sancti Alexandri . Rudolf's description states that

320-756: Is given in Old Saxon below as it appears in the Heliand . Obermarsberg Obermarsberg is one of seventeen quarters in the municipality of Marsberg , North Rhine-Westphalia , Germany . It is situated on the site of an Old Saxon hillfort and refuge castle , the Eresburg , on a hill 130m above the Diemel river, a tributary of the River Weser . The location was originally the site of an Iron Age hillfort , founded probably sometime before or during

360-589: Is mentioned in three instances: Concerning the origin of the Wednesday: ûf ainer irmensiule / stuont ain abgot ungehiure, / daz hiezen si ir choufman. On an Irminsul / stands an enormous idol / which they call their merchant Concerning Julius Caesar : Rômâre in ungetrûwelîche sluogen / sîn gebaine si ûf ain irmensûl begruoben The Romans slew him treacherously / and buried his bones on an Irminsul Concerning Nero : ûf ain irmensûl er staich / daz lantfolch im allez naich. He climbed upon an Irminsul /

400-729: The High German consonant shift , and thus preserves stop consonants p , t , k that have been shifted in Old High German to various fricatives and affricates . The Germanic diphthongs ai , au consistently develop into long vowels ē , ō , whereas in Old High German they appear either as ei , ou or ē , ō depending on the following consonant. Old Saxon, alone of the West Germanic languages except for Frisian, consistently preserves Germanic / j / after

440-562: The Nine worlds . 19th century scholar Jakob Grimm connects the name Irmin with Old Norse terms like iörmungrund ("great ground", i.e. the Earth) or iörmungandr ("great snake", i.e. the Midgard serpent ). A Germanic god Irmin , inferred from the name Irminsûl and the tribal name Irminones , is in some older scholarship presumed to have been the national god or demi-god of

SECTION 10

#1732768946603

480-532: The West Germanic branch of Proto-Germanic in the 5th century. However, Old Saxon, even considered as an Ingvaeonic language, is not a pure Ingvaeonic dialect like Old Frisian and Old English, the latter two sharing some other Ingvaeonic characteristics, which Old Saxon lacked. Old Saxon naturally evolved into Middle Low German over the course of the 11th and 12th centuries, with a great shift from Latin to Low German writing happening around 1150, so that

520-502: The six distinct cases of Proto-Germanic : the nominative , accusative , genitive , dative and (Vestigially in the oldest texts) instrumental . Old Saxon also had three grammatical numbers ( singular , and dual , and plural ) and three grammatical genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ). The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only and referred to groups of exactly two. Old Saxon nouns were inflected in very different ways following their classes. Here are

560-570: The Irminsul was a great wooden pillar erected and worshipped beneath the open sky and that its name, Irminsul, signifies universal all-sustaining pillar. Clive Tolley has argued that Widukind of Corvey in a passage of his Deeds of the Saxons (c. 970) is in fact describing an ad hoc Irminsul erected to celebrate the Saxon leader Hadugato 's victory over the Thuringians in 531. Widukind says

600-525: The Old Saxon a-stem ending from some Middle Low German dialects, as modern Dutch includes the plural ending -s added to certain words. Another difference is the so-called "unified plural": Old Saxon, like Old Frisian and Old English, has one verb form for all three persons in the plural, whereas Old Dutch retained three distinct forms (reduced to two in Middle Dutch). Old Saxon (or Old Low German) probably evolved primarily from Ingvaeonic dialects in

640-715: The Roman Mars and the Greek Hermes do not correspond. Tolley supposes that the name Hirmin, of which Widukind does not know the meaning, is not to be related to Hermes, but to Irmin, the dedicatee of the Irminsul. Under Louis the Pious in the 9th century, a stone column was dug up at Obermarsberg in Westphalia , Germany, and relocated to the Hildesheim cathedral in Hildesheim , Lower Saxony , Germany. The column

680-691: The Romans due to the practice of interpretatio romana . Comparisons have been made between the Irminsul and the Jupiter Columns that were erected along the Rhine in Germania around the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Scholarly comparisons were once made between the Irminsul and the Jupiter Columns; however, Rudolf Simek states that the columns were of Gallo-Roman religious monuments, and that

720-547: The Romans have agreed to ascribe all marvels anywhere to Hercules' credit. Tacitus states that while Drusus Germanicus was daring in his campaigns against the Germanic tribes, he was unable to reach this region, and that subsequently no one had yet made the attempt. Connections have been proposed between these "Pillars of Hercules" and later accounts of the Irminsuls. Hercules was probably frequently identified with Thor by

760-491: The Saxons set up an altar to their god of victory, whose body they depicted as a wooden column: When morning was come they set up an eagle at the eastern gate, and erecting an altar of victory they celebrated appropriate rites with all due solemnity, according to their ancestral superstition: to the one whom they venerate as their god of Victory they give the name of Mars, and the bodily characteristics of Hercules, imitating his physical proportion by means of wooden columns, and in

800-466: The Saxons. It has been suggested that Irmin was more probably an aspect or epithet of some other deity – most likely Wodan ( Odin ). Irmin might also have been an epithet of the god Ziu ( Tyr ) in early Germanic times, only later transferred to Odin, as certain scholars subscribe to the idea that Odin replaced Tyr as the chief Germanic deity at the onset of the Migration Period . This was

840-405: The comparative forms krenker and kranker . Apart from the e , however, the umlaut is not marked in writing. The table below lists the consonants of Old Saxon. Phonemes written in parentheses represent allophones and are not independent phonemes. Notes: Notes: Notes: Unlike modern English, Old Saxon was an inflected language rich in morphological diversity. It kept five out of

SECTION 20

#1732768946603

880-1184: The cross on one of the Extern Stones seems to show what Teudt interpreted as a tree being withered by the cross (less imaginative researchers consider it to simply be an elaborate chair) ... [the symbol] joined the runes and the swastika as one of the foremost symbols of the anti-Christian völkisch identity at the time and remains a motif treasured among German neopagans today. Et inde perrexit partibus Saxoniae prima vice, Eresburgum castrum coepit, ad Ermensul usque pervenit et ipsum fanum destruxit et aurum vel argentum, quod ibi repperit, abstulit. Et fuit siccitas magna, ita ut aqua deficeret in supradicto loco, ubi Ermensul stabat; et dum voluit ibi duos aut tres praedictus gloriosus rex stare dies fanum ipsum ad perdestruendum et aquam non haberent, tunc subito divina largiente gratia media die cuncto exercitu quiescente in quodam torrente omnibus hominibus ignorantibus aquae effusae sunt largissimae, ita ut cunctus exercitus sufficienter haberet. Old Saxon Old Saxon ( German : altsächsische Sprache ), also known as Old Low German ( German : altniederdeutsche Sprache ),

920-518: The development of the language can be traced from that period. The most striking difference between Middle Low German and Old Saxon is in a feature of speech known as vowel reduction , which took place in most other West Germanic languages and some Scandinavian dialects such as Danish , reducing all unstressed vowels to schwa . Thus, such Old Saxon words like gisprekan ( ' spoken ' ) or dagō ( ' days' '  – gen. pl.) became gesprēken and dāge . Old Saxon did not participate in

960-471: The endings for dag , ' day ' an a-stem masculine noun: At the end of the Old Saxon period, distinctions between noun classes began to disappear, and endings from one were often transferred to the other declension, and vice versa. This happened to be a large process, and the most common noun classes started to cause the least represented to disappear. As a result, in Middle Low German, only

1000-820: The era of the Roman-Germanic wars ; including the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (circa AD 9) and the Battle of the Weser River (circa AD 16). Although it is unclear whether the surrounding area was controlled by the Cherusci , Chatti , or perhaps Marsi (as described by Tacitus ), no particular reference to the Eresburg is known prior to the Saxon Wars (AD 770–785). During the Saxon Wars ,

1040-587: The favored view of early 20th century Nordicist writers, but it is not generally considered likely in modern times. Irminsuls are attested in a variety of historic works discussing the Christianization of the continental Germanic peoples: According to the Royal Frankish Annals (772 AD), during the Saxon Wars , Charlemagne is repeatedly described as ordering the destruction of the chief seat of their religion, an Irminsul. The Irminsul

1080-460: The first Christian church was constructed in Eresburg proper. Although the current church in Obermarsberg only dates to the 13th century, it is at least the second or third church to be built over the remains of Charlemagne 's original church. 51°28′N 8°51′E  /  51.467°N 8.850°E  / 51.467; 8.850 This Hochsauerlandkreis location article is

1120-442: The former weak n-stem and strong a-stem classes remained. These two noun inflection classes started being added to words not only following the historical belonging of this word, but also following the root of the word. The Old Saxon verb inflection system reflects an intermediate stage between Old English and Old Dutch, and further Old High German. Unlike Old High German and Old Dutch, but similarly to Old English, it did not preserve

1160-510: The hierarchy of their gods he is the Sun, or as the Greeks call him, Apollo. From this fact the opinion of those men appears somewhat probable who hold that the Saxons were descended from the Greeks, because the Greeks call Mars Hirmin or Hermes, a word which we use even to this day, either for blame or praise, without knowing its meaning. Widukind is confused, however, about the name of the god, since

1200-528: The other ancient Germanic languages , such as Old High German or Gothic . Only a few texts survive, predominantly baptismal vows the Saxons were required to perform at the behest of Charlemagne . The only literary texts preserved are Heliand and fragments of the Old Saxon Genesis . There is also: A poetic version of the Lord's Prayer in the form of the traditional Germanic alliterative verse

1240-639: The peasants all bowed before him ABBOT DE LUBERSAC (Abbé de Lubersac): Discours sur les Monuments Publics (Speech on Public Monuments) The abbot place the Irminsul in Stattbergen, Bavaria. (P.183) A number of theories surround the subject of the Irminsul. In Tacitus ' Germania , the author mentions rumors of what he describes as " Pillars of Hercules " in land inhabited by the Frisii that had yet to be explored. Tacitus adds that these pillars exist either because Hercules actually did go there or because

Irminsul - Misplaced Pages Continue

1280-417: The pre-Christian era. It is also thought to be the home of Irminsul , a sacred tree or pillar which represented the Germanic central pillar of the world. In AD 772, Charlemagne destroyed the Irminsul on Priesterberg (elsewhere reported as "near Paderborn " or "near Eresburg"). The Irminsul was replaced by a stone structure, possibly a tower, the crumbling remains of which can still be seen. Around AD 800

1320-587: The reported location of the Irminsul in Eresburg does not fall within the area of the Jupiter Column archaeological finds. The medieval Externsteine relief , located on a rock formation near Detmold , Germany, features a shape often identified as a bent tree at the feet of Nicodemus . In 1929, German lay archaeologist and future Ahnenerbe member Wilhelm Teudt proposed that the symbol represented an Irminsul. However, according to scholar Bernard Mees : A medieval relief depicting Christ's descent from

1360-523: The stronghold was repeatedly occupied by Widukind , leader of the recalcitrant Saxons (those refusing to adopt Christianity and the overlordship of the Franks ), and then abandoned to Charlemagne 's forces as the Saxons retreated to the home of Widukind's in-laws, today Denmark . Local lore states that as Charlemagne's forces approached, the town's common folk would move into the Drachenholler ,

1400-432: The third weak verb class includes only four verbs (namely libbian , seggian , huggian and hebbian ); it is a remnant of an older and larger class that was kept in Old High German. Old Saxon syntax is mostly different from that of modern English . Some were simply consequences of the greater level of nominal and verbal inflection – e.g., word order was generally freer. In addition: Old Saxon comes down in

1440-446: The three different verb endings in the plural, all featured as -ad (also -iad or -iod following the different verb inflection classes). Like Old Dutch, it had only two classes of weak verb, with only a few relic verbs of the third weak class (namely four verbs: libbian , seggian , huggian and hebbian ). This table sums up all seven Old Saxon strong verb classes and the three weak verb classes: It should be noticed that

1480-592: Was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German (spoken nowadays in Northern Germany , the northeastern Netherlands, southern Denmark, the Americas and parts of Eastern Europe ). It is a West Germanic language, closely related to the Anglo-Frisian languages. It is documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it gradually evolved into Middle Low German . It

1520-419: Was fully inflected with five grammatical cases ( nominative , accusative , genitive , dative , and instrumental ), three grammatical numbers ( singular , plural , and dual ), and three grammatical genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ). The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only. In the early Middle Ages , a dialect continuum existed between Old Dutch and Old Saxon,

1560-462: Was reportedly then used as a candelabrum until at least the late 19th century. In the 13th century, the destruction of the Irminsul by Charlemagne was recorded as having still been commemorated at Hildesheim on the Saturday after Laetare Sunday . The commemoration was reportedly done by planting two poles six feet high, each surmounted by a wooden object one foot in height shaped like a pyramid or

1600-428: Was spoken throughout modern northwestern Germany, primarily in the coastal regions and in the eastern Netherlands by Saxons , a Germanic tribe that inhabited the region of Saxony . It partially shares Anglo-Frisian 's ( Old Frisian , Old English ) Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law which sets it apart from Low Franconian and Irminonic languages, such as Dutch , Luxembourgish and German . The grammar of Old Saxon

#602397