Re: Spartacus, Hoby, etc etc

From: Torsten
Message: 66440
Date: 2010-08-12

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Torsten" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
>
> Improved Proposal:
> A good deal of the Roman utensils and weapons found in Germanic
> graves are loot from around Capua given as payment by Spartacus to
> the Cilician pirates, allies of Mithridates in the war, for taking
> his army to Pontus (for a journey to Sicily, as Plutarch states
> http://tinyurl.com/38kcgvw
> local fishermen or boats from his presumptive Sicilian associates
> would have sufficed) and later taken by troops remaining loyal to
> Mithridates after the final debacle in 63 BCE to the Przeworsk
> culture, whence to the supposed Germanic Lubiesewo princely graves.


So now I need to find out how Odin/Olthaces/Arivistus/Harigasti got the loot. I came across this:

John Lindow
Swedish Legends of Buried Treasure
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 95, No. 377
(Jul. - Sep., 1982), pp. 257-279

'The relative importance of buried treasure and its claim on the imagination is further indicated by attributes assigned to Odin, head of the Norse gods, by the medieval Icelandic mythographer Snorri Sturluson. In a euhemeristic account of Odin's founding of a kingdom in the North, Snorri wrote in his Ynglinga saga:

Odin knew all about treasure in the ground, where it was hidden, and he knew the charms which would open the earth and boulders and stones and mounds, and he bound with words alone those who dwelt there [scil. supernatural beings and/or the dead] and went in and took what he wanted .... Odin established those laws in his land which had previously been maintained among the Æsir. Thus he established that all dead men were to be burned on a pyre with all their possessions. He said that with such riches as he had with him on the pyre each would come to Valhalla, and those too he would enjoy, which he had buried in the ground [Aðalbjarnarson 1941:19-20; my translation].

The beliefs implicit in this passage have been adduced as one of the reasons for the large number of treasure finds from the Viking age, as part of the more general context that people regularly buried their valuables, particularly in times of unrest (Rasmussen 1957:244). '


If this is true, Odin was a grave robber.
Problem is, I can't find the first sentence of the passage in any version of the Ynglinga Saga online. Anybody recognize it?


Torsten