Reading Snorri’s account of Ragnarǫkr this noon over blunch, and I was struck by this poetic phrase in Snorri’s prose: Þórr berr banaorð af Miðgarðsormi “Thor bears the baneword from Midgard’s Serpent”.
illustration from the D’Aulaires’ Norse Gods and Giants
Old Norse orð is cognate with English word, both of them derived from PIE *wer– “speak”, making them cognate with verb, verve, irony, and the rhe– in rhetoric. I also wanted it to be cognate with weird “doom” but Watkins and the AHD gave me no comfort there, saying it comes from a different PIE root *wer– meaning “turn, bend”. Since speech occurs serially, like road or a string or anything that might bend, it seems to me that the “speak” root may actually be an extension of the “bend” root. That’s just speculation, but it gave me a great title for this blogpost (and maybe someday a Morlock story).
In ON, orð can be “summons”, “verdict” or “message”. Probably it means the latter here: Thor brings away from his fight with Jormungandir the news that the mighty Worm is dead.
But he doesn’t bring it very far: ok stígr þaðan braut níu fet. Þá fellr hann dauðr til jarðar fyrir eitri því er ormrinn blæss á hann “and he walks nine steps away from there. Then he falls dead to the Earth because of the poison that the Worm breathed on him.”
Nine is a magic number (3×3) and the Earth is Thor’s mother, so in a sense he lies dead in her arms. There are a lot of layers in this mythic onion.
