Dear Llama Nom and Runadis,


Your last mail on Valkyrie was really very informative; especially what
you wrote on Svanhild’s and Glám’s gaze reminds me on the sirens
from Ulysses.

I was trying to point out that not ’VAL’ means ’choosing’ or ’selecting’,
but ’KYR or KÜR’, as in my examples ’Kurfürst’ and ’Willkür’.

The word stem ’VAL’ though sounds very similar to the New High
German ‘Wahl’ or New Swedish ‘val-‘ which both mean ‘electing,
choosing’, but in this case ‘VAL’ is the stem of ‘VALR’ and means ‘slain,
fallen’. There are numerous mythology related words that I’ve found in
the Icelandic-English Dictionary, by Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand
Vigfusson, 1874. pp. 675-676.
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/oi_cleasbyvigfusson_ab
out.html#images

E.g.
val-dögg: dew of the slain (blood)
val-fall: fall of the slain
val-föđr: father of the slain (Odin) /I brought the example ‘Walfater’ in
my last mail, which is same, but in German).
Val-hölla: Hall of the Slain, Valhalla
val-keri: the prober of the slain
and
Val-kyrja: the chooser of the slain.


There is also an other word for Valkyrja, it is ‘Valmćr’, at least the entry
of this word in the mentioned dictionary points to see the entry
of ‘Valkyrja’, though Val-mćr literally means ‘virgin/maiden of the slain’;
that doesn’t make difference, because Valkyrja expresses the ‘choosing
of the slain’ and Valmćr rather expresses those who choose the slain.

As to your presumption on the connection of the ON ‘val’ and
Latin ‘vellere’, you may be right that these words are related to each
other, but may be the cause of this is that these two words both
originate from a common proto-Indo-European word. I couldn’t
imagine ‘VAL-r’ being a loan-word, because things beginning with the
word stem ‘VAL-‘ mean very basic mythological and faith-related
phenomena of the ON. It would be strange to think that Old Norse
people have taken a loan-word from Latin to express their own type of
religious belief. We should check the etymology of ‘vellere’.

Anyway, I should not forget about mentioning that many words
beginning with ‘Val-’ do not belong to our case of discussion,
because ‘Val-‘ also stands for ‘Welsh’, like ‘Valland’, ‘the land of the
Welsh’ or the dictionary I’ve consulted also has words in which ‘val-‘
stands for ‘choosing’, like ‘val-menni’, ‘chosen men’. The latter I think is
simply homophone.

Tomorrow I’m going to check ‘Valkyrja/Valkyrie’ in some etymological
dictionaries.
If I’ve misunderstood anything in your letter, - a lots of examples, you
must have really done a great research in this topic - please tell me
about it.

Imre