--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "Patricia" <originalpatricia@...>
wrote:
>

> That is very likely so - for the Romans were worse by a damned sight
- than
> the English for putting their pronunciation on things,


I was thinking more of the 18th century when Latin was a lingua franca
among European scholars, few of whom would have been acquainted with
the original texts. Just looked it up in the OED now, which does
indeed give Modern Latin Valhalla as the immediate source for the
English word. But when it was first used in Latin, or who by, it
doesn't say. The earliest quote is Gray, 1768. It also has a quote
from 1780 in which Odin / Óðinn appears in English with a Latin ending
Odinus. According to the Grimms' Deutsches Wörterbuch, the name was
first introduced into German by Schütze in 1750 as Walhalla, then
Gerstenberg used the form Valholl in 1766, but Walhalla seems to have
won out.


> only thing they did well
> was to classify and subclassify the plants and animals and give then
Latin
> names, they are well done


I thought that was a Swedish invention [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolus_Linnaeus ].