Having zero expertise on any linguistic question,
I've been lurking harmlessly on this list; but
recently something caught my eye:
koenraad_elst wrote:
> Wow, [Snorri]'s pretty sophisticated.
> ... Of course, the immigration of Germanic
> from the east was already pretty far removed in time from Snorri, a
> few thousand years ...
Snorri focused on myths of Odin, not Tuisto.
He may have been able to "remember"
a journey from Asia because it had happened
only hundreds, not thousands, of years earlier.
There is archaeological evidence in Scandinavia,
beginning in 5th century AD, of Scythian/Sarmatian
artifacts and burial practices, and the R1a
Y-chromosome haplogroup present in Scandinavia
could be explained by immigration of originally
Iranian- or Hunnic-speaking warriors.
The 6th-century historian Procopius explicitly
writes of a 5th-century defeat of Heruli-Goths
in Illyria by Romans, after which some Goths,
led by their royalty and presumably accompanied
by Sarmatians or Huns, journeyed back to Thule.
Snorri's stories refer to Huns, and there is
even a curious parallel involving the display
of a severed head, between a myth of Odin
and the factual slaying of Gainas by Uldin the Hun.
I have no expertise on these matters either, so
view this post as "asking" rather than "telling."
James D. Allen