Hello,

A few words on Norondr and his friends.

At first I thought 'norondr' was a pure nonsense
word - but now I think I've figured out how Dæg
made it.

nor-ond-r

nor: a prefix meaning 'north', used in 'Norvegr'
ond: spirit
r: noun/nominative/masculine suffix

None of this is, I'm afraid, entirely correct.

The word for north is 'norðr', not just 'nor'.
It may have been shortened to 'nor' in 'Norvegr'
due to frequent use. Or perhaps the 'nor' in Norway
isn't from 'north' at all. One story tells us that
the land is named after a fellow named Nóri.

One of the Norse words for spirit is 'önd'.
It is related to the word 'anda' meaning 'breathe'
like the latin noun 'spiritus' to the verb 'spiro'.

There is no reason for tacking an r-ending to 'önd'.

In a synthetic language, like Icelandic, you cannot
form a compound word simply by running together any
old words in any old way. The language has certain
rules that has to be followed.

Generally the first noun in a compound word has to
be in one of three cases: accusative singular,
genitive singular or genitive plural. The nominative
case is definitely out.

For example if I want to make a compound noun out
of 'maðr' and 'dómr' I have three choices:

manndómr (accusative singular)
mannsdómr (genitive singular)
mannadómr (genitive plural)

In this case two of the words exist; 'manndómr'
means, roughly, 'manhood' and 'mannadómr' is something
like "the judgement of men". The form *maðrdómr is
definitely not possible.

As another example the person who asked the original
question on The Spirit of the North signed her letter
"Úlfheiðr Njorðrdís". In this case the first name is
correctly formed since 'úlf' is the accusative case
of 'úlfr' (*Úlfrheiðr would be incorrect) but the second
name is not correctly formed. To form a compound word
with 'Njörðr' as the first element the form taken would
have to be either 'Njarðar' or 'Njarð'. You might ask if
'Njörð', the accusative form, would do. I'm afraid the answer
is no due to one of the quirks of u-mutation. I won't go
further into that here. I'm afraid *Njorðrdís is incorrect
but either Njarðdís or Njarðardís seem fine to me.

As for the actualy question on The Spirit of the North
I more or less agree with Óskar. I think the concept of
this spirit is alien to the Norse mindset as I know it.

For a few words that start with n-o-r I cut out a page
from the dictionary (kudos to everyone involved in that
project) and used it as a front for the group's homepage
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/norse_course/.

I'm rejecting a few letters pertaining to the norondr matter.
Please don't take it personally.

Kveðja,
Haukur