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54-632: In the standardized Old Norse orthography , the name is spelled Níðhǫggr , but the letter ǫ is frequently replaced with the Modern Icelandic ö for reasons of familiarity or technical expediency. The name can be represented in English texts with i for í ; th , d or (rarely) dh for ð ; o for ǫ and optionally without r as in Modern Scandinavian reflexes. The Modern Icelandic form Níðhöggur

108-996: A Latin -a suffix to the names of goddesses. Obviously the various permutations allow for many possible spellings for a given name. Some authors, for example, replace þ with th and ð with th , dh or d but keep the accents; others may not replace ǫ with ö but prefer o . Thus, in addition to the various versions below, the name of Hǫðr could come out as: A list of some commonly encountered Old Norse names with variant spellings. * marks anglicizations. Proto-Germanic language Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc ; also called Common Germanic )

162-667: A common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age . The Proto-Germanic language developed in southern Scandinavia (Denmark, south Sweden and southern Norway) and the northern-most part of Germany in Schleswig Holstein and northern Lower Saxony, the Urheimat (original home) of the Germanic tribes. It is possible that Indo-European speakers first arrived in southern Scandinavia with

216-589: A consonant at the end of the word. Thus the Old Norse name Baldr comes out as Baldur in modern Icelandic . Other differences include vowel-shifts, whereby Old Norse ǫ became Icelandic ö , and Old Norse œ ( oe ligature) became Icelandic æ ( ae ligature). Old Norse ø corresponds in modern Icelandic to ö , as in sökkva , or to e , as in gera . There is also consonant lenition of final k and t to g and ð , e.g. mig for earlier mik and það for earlier þat . These distinct features are summarized in

270-432: A dialect of Proto-Indo-European that had lost its laryngeals and had five long and six short vowels as well as one or two overlong vowels. The consonant system was still that of PIE minus palatovelars and laryngeals, but the loss of syllabic resonants already made the language markedly different from PIE proper. Mutual intelligibility might have still existed with other descendants of PIE, but it would have been strained, and

324-475: A larger scope of linguistic developments, spanning the Nordic Bronze Age and Pre-Roman Iron Age in Northern Europe (second to first millennia BC) to include "Pre-Germanic" (PreGmc), "Early Proto-Germanic" (EPGmc) and "Late Proto-Germanic" (LPGmc). While Proto-Germanic refers only to the reconstruction of the most recent common ancestor of Germanic languages, the Germanic parent language refers to

378-555: A late stage. The early stage includes the stress fixation and resulting "spontaneous vowel-shifts" while the late stage is defined by ten complex rules governing changes of both vowels and consonants. By 250 BC Proto-Germanic had branched into five groups of Germanic: two each in the West and the North and one in the East. The following changes are known or presumed to have occurred in

432-492: A macabre Phoenix, or perhaps, lifting the bodies of the righteous rulers mentioned two stanzas before (the stanza immediately before is considered spurious by translator Henry Adam Bellows), so that they can dwell in Gimle, and then either Níðhǫggr sinks, or the völva sinks, depending on the translation, and the poem ends. Níðhǫggr is not mentioned elsewhere in any ancient source. Old Norse orthography The orthography of

486-629: A serpent in a list of names of such creatures: Snorri's knowledge of Níðhǫggr seems to come from two of the Eddic poems : Grímnismál and Völuspá . Later in Skáldskaparmál , Snorri includes Níðhǫggr in a list of various terms and names for swords. The poem Grímnismál identifies a number of beings which live in Yggdrasill. The tree suffers great hardship from all the creatures which live on it. The poem identifies Níðhǫggr as tearing at

540-468: A written runic form dates back to c.  AD 200–300 (with the Øvre Stabu spearhead traditionally dated to the late 2nd century), at this time still showing an archaic language form (similar to reconstructed Proto-Germanic ) termed Proto-Norse . Old Norse proper appears by c.  AD 800 . While there are remains of Viking runestones from the Viking Age , today they are rare, and vary in

594-463: Is also sometimes seen, with special characters or similarly anglicized. The Danish forms Nidhug and Nidhøg can also be encountered; or Norwegian Nidhogg and Swedish Nidhögg . The English cognate would be Nithhewer. According to the Gylfaginning part of Snorri Sturluson 's Prose Edda , Níðhǫggr is a being which gnaws one of the three roots of Yggdrasill . It

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648-437: Is identified as a dragon and a serpent. The context and meaning of this stanza are disputed. The most prevalent opinion is that the arrival of Níðhǫggr heralds Ragnarök and thus that the poem ends on a tone of ominous warning. It could be, however, as the prevalent themes of Norse mythology are those of change and renewal, that this could be a 'redemption' of the serpent, 'shedding' the corpses and beginning life anew, much like

702-807: Is largely a matter of convention. The first coherent text recorded in a Germanic language is the Gothic Bible , written in the later fourth century in the East Germanic variety of the Thervingi Gothic Christians , who had escaped persecution by moving from Scythia to Moesia in 348. Early West Germanic text is available from the fifth century, beginning with the Frankish Bergakker runic inscription . The evolution of Proto-Germanic from its ancestral forms, beginning with its ancestor Proto-Indo-European , began with

756-533: Is marked and umlauted vowels are unambiguously represented. The standardized spelling employs a few characters that were not available in early electronic character sets , so replacements were often used. The most consequential was the use of ö instead of ǫ ; the latter being present in Unicode v1.0 (1991) as U+01EA. The following table associates the phonemes of the language to its orthographic representations. Vowel nasalization and length are not distinguished in

810-423: Is not necessarily held by every writer. For example, an author may only distinguish some vowels by length, and orthographic devices could be mixed and matched. Where the table lists a long-or-short phoneme /(ː)/ , a specifically short // or long /ː/ phoneme represents additional spellings not covered by length marking rules. Likewise, a phonetic entry only lists spellings not used by the equivalent phoneme(s). N/A

864-586: Is sometimes believed that the roots are trapping the beast from the world. This root is placed over Niflheimr and Níðhǫggr gnaws it from beneath. The same source also says that "[t]he squirrel called Ratatoskr runs up and down the length of the Ash, bearing envious words between the eagle and Nídhǫggr [the snake]." In the Skáldskaparmál section of the Prose Edda Snorri specifies Níðhǫggr as

918-413: Is termed Pre-Proto-Germanic . Whether it is to be included under a wider meaning of Proto-Germanic is a matter of usage. Winfred P. Lehmann regarded Jacob Grimm 's "First Germanic Sound Shift", or Grimm's law, and Verner's law , (which pertained mainly to consonants and were considered for many decades to have generated Proto-Germanic) as pre-Proto-Germanic and held that the "upper boundary" (that is,

972-412: Is that several shortcut forms for common words, syllables, and grammatical endings developed. One example is the use of the rune named maðr (man) for the word maðr . Another is the use of a special glyph for the various r-endings so common in Old Norse. These scribal abbreviations are categorized as follows: These abbreviation conventions and a majority of the signs are inherited from

1026-695: Is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages . Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branches during the fifth century BC to fifth century AD: West Germanic , East Germanic and North Germanic . The latter of these remained in contact with the others over a considerable time, especially with the Ingvaeonic languages (including English ), which arose from West Germanic dialects, and had remained in contact with

1080-564: Is the question of what specific tree, in the tree model of language evolution, best explains the paths of descent of all the members of a language family from a common language, or proto-language (at the root of the tree) to the attested languages (at the leaves of the tree). The Germanic languages form a tree with Proto-Germanic at its root that is a branch of the Indo-European tree, which in turn has Proto-Indo-European at its root. Borrowing of lexical items from contact languages makes

1134-548: Is typical not of Germanic but Celtic languages. Another is * walhaz 'foreigner; Celt' from the Celtic tribal name Volcae with k → h and o → a . Other likely Celtic loans include * ambahtaz 'servant', * brunjǭ 'mailshirt', * gīslaz 'hostage', * īsarną 'iron', * lēkijaz 'healer', * laudą 'lead', * Rīnaz 'Rhine', and * tūnaz, tūną 'fortified enclosure'. These loans would likely have been borrowed during

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1188-610: Is used when no specific spelling is used, e.g. where all long vowel spellings are found using the rules for deriving long vowel spellings from the short vowel, or no general spelling is used, e.g. when short and long vowels are always spelled differently. Legend: The low/low-mid vowels may be indicated differently: Dialect-specific sounds: When dialectal mergers such as OEN monophthongization took place, regional spelling often changed to reflect this. Sometimes, both phonemes' spellings would be used, but confused. The epenthetic vowel had different regional spellings. In East Norse it

1242-677: The Corded Ware culture in the mid-3rd millennium BC, developing into the Nordic Bronze Age cultures by the early second millennium BC. According to Mallory, Germanicists "generally agree" that the Urheimat ('original homeland') of the Proto-Germanic language, the ancestral idiom of all attested Germanic dialects, was primarily situated in an area corresponding to the extent of the Jastorf culture . Early Germanic expansion in

1296-503: The Funnelbeaker culture , but the sound change in the Germanic languages known as Grimm's law points to a non-substratic development away from other branches of Indo-European. Proto-Germanic itself was likely spoken after c. 500 BC, and Proto-Norse , from the second century AD and later, is still quite close to reconstructed Proto-Germanic, but other common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo-European suggest

1350-540: The Latin language itself, and were common to the Latin alphabet in other languages. However, other signs or conventions are specifically Norse, such as the er zig-zag. "Normalized spelling" can be used to refer to normalization in general or the standard normalization in particular. With normalized spelling, the manuscript spelling is altered to adhere to be more strict and regular. These respellings are designed to be phonemically precise rather than representative of

1404-637: The Norse . A defining feature of Proto-Germanic is the completion of the process described by Grimm's law , a set of sound changes that occurred between its status as a dialect of Proto-Indo-European and its gradual divergence into a separate language. The end of the Common Germanic period is reached with the beginning of the Migration Period in the fourth century AD. The alternative term " Germanic parent language " may be used to include

1458-681: The Pre-Roman Iron Age (fifth to first centuries BC) placed Proto-Germanic speakers in contact with the Continental Celtic La Tène horizon . A number of Celtic loanwords in Proto-Germanic have been identified. By the first century AD, Germanic expansion reached the Danube and the Upper Rhine in the south and the Germanic peoples first entered the historical record . At about the same time, extending east of

1512-621: The Vistula ( Oksywie culture , Przeworsk culture ), Germanic speakers came into contact with early Slavic cultures, as reflected in early Germanic loans in Proto-Slavic . By the third century, Late Proto-Germanic speakers had expanded over significant distance, from the Rhine to the Dniepr spanning about 1,200 km (700 mi). The period marks the breakup of Late Proto-Germanic and

1566-463: The glide j as in giald ("payment"). In this standard, the u-umlauted a represented by ǫ is not usually considered, but rendered as the underlying a , as in the name Anundʀ . Another difference is the representation of the phoneme ʀ , instead of simply r as in West Norse, where the ʀ phoneme merged with r earlier. However, even if they render the transcription according to

1620-484: The "lower boundary" was the dropping of final -a or -e in unstressed syllables; for example, post-PIE * wóyd-e > Gothic wait , 'knows'. Elmer H. Antonsen agreed with Lehmann about the upper boundary but later found runic evidence that the -a was not dropped: ékwakraz … wraita , 'I, Wakraz, … wrote (this)'. He says: "We must therefore search for a new lower boundary for Proto-Germanic." Antonsen's own scheme divides Proto-Germanic into an early stage and

1674-556: The 2nd century CE, as well as the non-runic Negau helmet inscription, dated to the 2nd century BCE), and in Roman Empire -era transcriptions of individual words (notably in Tacitus ' Germania , c. AD 90 ). Proto-Germanic developed out of pre-Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe. According to the Germanic substrate hypothesis , it may have been influenced by non-Indo-European cultures, such as

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1728-429: The Germanic subfamily exhibited a less treelike behaviour, as some of its characteristics were acquired from neighbours early in its evolution rather than from its direct ancestors. The internal diversification of West Germanic developed in an especially non-treelike manner. Proto-Germanic is generally agreed to have begun about 500 BC. Its hypothetical ancestor between the end of Proto-Indo-European and 500 BC

1782-522: The Old Norse language was diverse, being written in both Runic and Latin alphabets, with many spelling conventions, variant letterforms, and unique letters and signs. In modern times, scholars established a standardized spelling for the language. When Old Norse names are used in texts in other languages, modifications to this spelling are often made. In particular, the names of Old Norse mythological figures often have several different spellings. The first appearance of an ancestral stage of Old Norse in

1836-489: The beginning of the (historiographically recorded) Germanic migrations . The earliest available complete sentences in a Germanic language are variably dated to the 2nd century AD, around 300 AD or the first century AD in runic inscriptions (such as the Tune Runestone ). The language of these sentences is known as Proto-Norse , although the delineation of Late Common Germanic from Proto-Norse at about that time

1890-498: The dates of borrowings and sound laws are not precisely known, it is not possible to use loans to establish absolute or calendar chronology. Most loans from Celtic appear to have been made before or during the Germanic Sound Shift . For instance, one specimen * rīks 'ruler' was borrowed from Celtic * rīxs 'king' (stem * rīg- ), with g → k . It is clearly not native because PIE * ē → ī

1944-414: The development of a separate common way of speech among some geographically nearby speakers of a prior language and ended with the dispersion of the proto-language speakers into distinct populations with mostly independent speech habits. Between the two points, many sound changes occurred. Phylogeny as applied to historical linguistics involves the evolutionary descent of languages. The phylogeny problem

1998-432: The earlier boundary) was the fixing of the accent, or stress, on the root syllable of a word, typically on the first syllable. Proto-Indo-European had featured a moveable pitch-accent consisting of "an alternation of high and low tones" as well as stress of position determined by a set of rules based on the lengths of a word's syllables. The fixation of the stress led to sound changes in unstressed syllables. For Lehmann,

2052-480: The entire journey that the dialect of Proto-Indo-European that would become Proto-Germanic underwent through the millennia. The Proto-Germanic language is not directly attested by any complete surviving texts; it has been reconstructed using the comparative method . However, there is fragmentary direct attestation of (late) Proto-Germanic in early runic inscriptions (specifically the Vimose inscriptions , dated to

2106-496: The erosion of unstressed syllables, which would continue in its descendants. The final stage of the language included the remaining development until the breakup into dialects and, most notably, featured the development of nasal vowels and the start of umlaut , another characteristic Germanic feature. Loans into Proto-Germanic from other (known) languages or from Proto-Germanic into other languages can be dated relative to each other by which Germanic sound laws have acted on them. Since

2160-545: The history of Proto-Germanic in the wider sense from the end of Proto-Indo-European up to the point that Proto-Germanic began to break into mutually unintelligible dialects. The changes are listed roughly in chronological order, with changes that operate on the outcome of earlier ones appearing later in the list. The stages distinguished and the changes associated with each stage rely heavily on Ringe 2006 , Chapter 3, "The development of Proto-Germanic". Ringe in turn summarizes standard concepts and terminology. This stage began with

2214-532: The local pronunciation, the Rundata project presents personal names according to the previously mentioned standardized spelling in English translations. Here follows an example from the Orkesta Runestone (U 344) : Standardized spelling: The rendering of Old East Norse: But when translating into English, the standardized spelling is used: In many modern Icelandic publications of Old Norse works,

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2268-406: The manuscripts. The degree of normalization may vary, but in general the text is at the end reduced to limited deviation from a regularized system, perhaps at the expense of some dialectal character. For various reasons 19th century scholars came up with a standardized normalization of Old Norse which remains in use. It is primarily based on the so-called First Grammatical Treatise . Vowel length

2322-401: The modern Icelandic spelling is used. The orthography is essentially the same (since it was intentionally modelled after the aforementioned normalized Old Norse in the 19th century), but changes from Old Norse phonology to Icelandic phonology are incorporated in the translation that may not have been in the source text. One such difference is the insertion of u before r, when it is preceded by

2376-413: The period marked the definitive break of Germanic from the other Indo-European languages and the beginning of Germanic proper, containing most of the sound changes that are now held to define this branch distinctively. This stage contained various consonant and vowel shifts, the loss of the contrastive accent inherited from PIE for a uniform accent on the first syllable of the word root, and the beginnings of

2430-552: The reduction of the resulting unstressed syllables. By this stage, Germanic had emerged as a distinctive branch and had undergone many of the sound changes that would make its later descendants recognisable as Germanic languages. It had shifted its consonant inventory from a system that was rich in plosives to one containing primarily fricatives, had lost the PIE mobile pitch accent for a predictable stress accent, and had merged two of its vowels. The stress accent had already begun to cause

2484-539: The relative position of the Germanic branch within Indo-European less clear than the positions of the other branches of Indo-European. In the course of the development of historical linguistics, various solutions have been proposed, none certain and all debatable. In the evolutionary history of a language family, philologists consider a genetic "tree model" appropriate only if communities do not remain in effective contact as their languages diverge. Early Indo-European had limited contact between distinct lineages, and, uniquely,

2538-511: The separation of a distinct speech, perhaps while it was still forming part of the Proto-Indo-European dialect continuum. It contained many innovations that were shared with other Indo-European branches to various degrees, probably through areal contacts, and mutual intelligibility with other dialects would have remained for some time. It was nevertheless on its own path, whether dialect or language. This stage began its evolution as

2592-489: The slight variances resulted in various spellings. Thus the same name might be spelled several different ways even in the original manuscripts. Letters unique to the language existed, such as a modified version of the letter Wynn called Vend that was used briefly for the sounds /u/ , /v/ , and /w/ . In particular, the length of vowels was only sporadically marked in many manuscripts and various umlauted vowels were often not distinguished from others. Another complication

2646-464: The table below: For the convenience of English writers and readers the Old Norse characters not used in English are commonly replaced with English ones. This can lead to ambiguity and confusion. Diacritics may be removed (á → a, ö → o). The following character conversions also take place: Another common convention in English is to drop consonant nominative endings : Sometimes a j is dropped after ey . Other quirks sometimes seen include adding

2700-481: The table when distinguished in neither orthography, nor is /æi/ distinguished from /æ/+/i/ . When transcribing Old Norse texts from Danish and Swedish runestones , many scholars, but not all, use an orthography that is adapted to represent Old East Norse, the dialect of Old Norse in Denmark and Sweden . The main differences are the diphthong æi instead of ei as in stæinn ("stone") and i instead of

2754-415: The tree from beneath and also mentions Ratatoskr as carrying messages between Níðhǫggr and the eagle who lives at the top of the tree. Snorri Sturluson often quotes Grímnismál and clearly used it as his source for this information. The poem Völuspá mentions Níðhöggr/Níðhǫggr twice. The first instance is in its description of Náströnd . Níðhöggr/Níðhǫggr is also mentioned at the end of Völuspá , where he

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2808-545: The use of orthography depending on when they were created. Rune stones created near the end of the Viking Age tend to have a greater influence from Old English runes. An understanding of the writing system of Old Norse is crucial for fully understanding the Old Norse language. Studies of remaining rune stones from the Viking Age reveal many nuances about the spoken language, such as the constant use of alliteration . A comparison of various whetstones from this time period with

2862-588: The works of Snorri Sturluson reveals that alliteration was common in many Old Norse writings, and were not only present in skaldic works. This would then suggest that the Vikings closely tied their language to their auditory sense, which in turn would have helped with the continual transfer of their cultural memory, which was also closely tied to their language. The following table gives various attested spellings of sounds and their IPA transcription. In general usage, an orthographic distinction of phones or phonemes

2916-470: Was commonly spelled as ⟨e⟩ or ⟨a⟩ , while in West Norse it was often spelled ⟨u⟩ , just like in Iceland. The original Icelandic manuscripts , which are the main source of knowledge of Norse mythology , did not employ a unified system of spelling. During the Viking Age, many dialects of Old Norse were spoken. While they appear to have been mutually intelligible,

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