Re: Baldr

--- On Sat, 1/3/09, etherman23 <etherman23@...> wrote:

> From: etherman23 <etherman23@...>
> Subject: [tied] Baldr
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Saturday, January 3, 2009, 7:27 PM
> I've been thinking about Baldr lately. Where did the
> name come from?
> What type of god was he? I've been poking around on the
> Internet and
> it seems that there are lots of ideas out there. But
> hopefully people
> around here can shed some light on the subject.

Darkness and mistletoe are both characteristic of winter, so I'd look at words for "bright, bold, bald (in the archaic sense of 'white', i.e. 'bald eagle)", etc. I've always seen it ety'd as "bold, bright" in popular works, and since they tend to agree, they are probably getting this from a common source. But given "leaf, flower", the meaning could be polysemic.

>
> First, the name. Here,
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/11698
> Chris Gwinn
> derives the name from the PIE root *bHel, to blow. I
> don't know if
> there's any well accepted etymology, but I can think of
> two other
> possibilities that seem at least as promising. There's
> *bHelH (that
> might be H2 but I'm not sure), meaning light or bright.
> There's also
> *bHolH (whith H1 perhaps?) which means leaf or flower. Why
> are these
> promising?
>
> Baldr's main claim to fame is that he was invulnerable
> to everything
> except mistletoe. Loki fashions a dart out of the stuff and
> Baldr's
> blind brother throws it at him and kills him. After
> Ragnarok Baldr is
> raised from the dead. This death-rebirth motif is pretty
> common among
> vegetation gods, and presumably solar deities (though
> off-hand I can't
> think of any). There doesn't seem to be much to link
> Baldr to either
> of these types of gods. But there's not nothing.
> Baldr's link with
> mistletoe is suggestive of vegetation. On the flip side
> Baldr is slain
> by a blind god. This blindness could indicate night. Night
> could be
> said to kill the day (which is later reborn as a new day).
> Unfortunately, my two possible etymologies could both work!
> I don't
> know of anything in the myth cycle that would link Baldr to
> blowing
> (or swelling).