Re: Tor/Tur/(e)

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tolgs001" <george.st@...> wrote:

> >If the a people calls themselves "the people of Tur" (Hermun-duri
> >/Turingi)
>
> Is that really so? Thor > Thüringen?

No. *Tur > Thüringen (Thuringia). The question was *Tur >? Thor.

>
> >there must have been something or somebody called Tur.
> >I was wondering if it was a divine name and if that was behind
> >Snorri's mention of Thor's stay in Thrace. If that hypothesis is
> >true, then those peoples might have had a god named "Tur". To
> >which you counter that it isn't so because it isn't so.
>
> Snorri's mentioning the fictitious character called Thor
> isn't a bit too vague?

That's the general appearance of old legends.

>OTOH, isn't the geographical and
> ethnological difference too big between Thrace and Northern
> Italy?

Probably. But Snorri lets him travel outside of Thrace too.

The *tur thing might be a word that's reflected in Latin turris <
(*tursis), Germana Turm etc "tower". I believe Dionysos of
Halikarnassos says that Tyrrhenians were named from their towers.

> As for coincidences: throughout the territory of the former
> Hungarian kingdom there are lots of place names, even of
> hydronyms, containing <túr> (or even as simple as Túr). I
> don't know its toponymic meaning (I guess it has nothing
> to do with the verb that means "to dig, to root"). On top of
> that, there is an important town in Transylvania, Turda,
> in Hungarian Torda (perhaps a relic of the name of a Turkic
> clan or tribe Torta, I dunno). I don't expect these to be
> some signs of passing through those territories of various
> Germanic tribes (inter alia Bastarnae, Ostrogoths and
> Visigoths, Vandals, Gepids, Langobards).
>

Sounds like Kuhn's "Other Old Europe".

>
> >The inhabitants of Kreuzberg, a part of Berlin, aren't.
>
> The comparison here would fit only in the event that, due
> the present day majority of the inhabitants of that Berlin
> borough, Kreuzberg would be replaced by some other name
> alluding to this population (e.g. Turantepe).
>

Given my age, I probably won't see that day. But you never know.

Torsten