Talk:Naglfar

StarCraft?
No, StarCraft does not have any Terran ship-type named Naglfar. It is possible that the storyline contains a craft that is named Naglfar, but whoever edited that should correct it back.

Putting it away for the time being (to not confuse others) -213.89.141.235

Yes it does, in the storyline as you mentioned. It really annoys me when people don't even bother to check up the appropriate articles when they're linked to on the page itslef! --91.105.56.120 22:08, 2 September 2007 (UTC) (Guy who added original starcraft bit)

Banned trivia
According to WP:Trivia, I've removed all that "references in literature" and "video games" crap... --Attilios 22:57, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

A mythological ship?
Please provide info on why Snorri Sturlason, a Christian living in a society that had been Christian for two centuries, should present heathen mythology. St.Trond (talk) 05:15, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Naglfar. Read it. bloodofox: (talk) 12:11, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Snorri Sturlason is not a reliable source on Norse mythology. What about his story about the sea serpent Olaf II slayed and landed on Syltefjellet? St.Trond (talk) 12:22, 24 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh, Wikipedia. Trond, please pry your foot from your mouth long enough to realize that Snorri didn't compose Völuspá (which is in this book we call the Poetic Edda, check it out sometime....), from which he based his description in his Prose Edda (and, that said, he definitely had access to traditional material now lost to us). Secondly, Snorri is absolutely a primary source for Norse mythology, Euhemerisms aside. Third, nobody is putting forth a claim anywhere that this refers to an actual ship (and if such a theory were to be somehow pushed by a scholar somewhere, then it would need to be appropriately cited—not advanced by slipping in little hints), especially since it has Indo-European mythical cognates and connections to Indo-European religious practices involving fingernails, toenails, and hair (which have not yet been added since I'm away from my books). bloodofox: (talk) 12:38, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Suggestions for improvement

 * Etymology

The article may stress the "dispute" a little too much. The idea that there is a folk etymology at play here is the mainstream opinion, and continues to be regularly cited (cf. Simek, for example) as such. Lincoln is certainly welcome here, however, and I would even appreciate full citations on Feist and Sturtevant, if possible.

One arguably noteworthy reference is from Alexander Haggerty Krappe (1964:327-328):

"The story of Naglfar owes its origin to a false etymology; yet it could not have assumed its extant shape had it not been for the custom of cutting the nails of the fingers and toes of the deceased before burial and for the desire to inculcate this custom as a pious duty which must not be neglected."


 * Krappe, Alexander H. (1964). The Science of Folklore. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

I would not include this in the article body, but merely mention it in one of the existing footnotes as a "cf. also".


 * Archeological record

There may be another object which carries a depiction of Fenrir and Naglfar. The following is from:


 * Wilson, David Raoul (1992). Anglo-Saxon Paganism. London: Routledge. ISBN: 0-415-01897-8.

"On a probably seventh-century pot from Caistor-by-Norwich is a freehand drawing which has been described as "of a wolf or a dog with long curving tail and open jaws apparently barking at a retreating boat which is shown with high prow and stern paddle and thirteen vertical strokes representing either oars of the upright spears of the crew" (Myres & Green 1973:118). Although one might quibble over the number of vertical strokes, the interpretation is ingenious and may well be correct, and it has been suggested that the decoration is of an incident from a northern myth, depicting a scene from the day of the Doom of the Gods, the boat being Naglfar 'the ship made of dead men's nails - and the wolf Fenrir, one of Loki's offspring'." pp. 153-154.

Wilson includes a drawing of the pot on [http://books.google.ch/books?id=QKkOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA154&dq=naglfar&hl=en&ei=CSOPTNTyOJGQOPqu4PAM&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q=naglfar&f=false pg. 153]. The reference to J. N. L. Myres and B. Green is to their The Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries of Caistor-by-Norwich and Markshall, Norfolk, 1973.


 * Interpretations and theories (Parallels)

I was able to locate one of Simek's sources:


 * Krohn, Kaarle (1912). "Das schiff Naglfar" in: Krohn, K., Setälä, E. N. & Wichmann, Y. Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen: Zeitschrift für finnisch-ugrische Sprach- und Volkskunde, Vol. 12, pp. 154-155.

Krohn describes parallel traditions regarding nails, the dead, the devil, ships and the end of the world from Icelandic and Danish (as well as Finnish and Russian) folklore, concluding that "die Vorstellung von einem Nagelschiff scheint somit bei den Skandinaviern allgemein verbreitet zu sein" ("the notion of a nail-ship thus appears to have been widespread among Scandinavians").

Good work on the article so far. With a few minor tweaks, I see nothing to prevent it from passing review. Cheers, --80.218.71.231 (talk) 09:04, 14 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Etymology
 * A few comments "Naglfar" as a folk etymology: first, we should always keep in mind the flaws of Simek's handbook. Note only are these entries frequently out of date (most don't seem to have been updated since the 70s), but they're also sharply opinionated by Simek, and sometimes the entries outright contradict one another. Of course, the lack of index and false referrals to categories that do not exist further confuse things.


 * Anyway, regarding Naglfar and Simek, Simek builds on this notion of Naglfar as a folk etymology by presenting a possible link to Scandinavian boat burials. However, attempts at connecting Naglfar to these boat burials has been rejected by Crumlin-Pedersen, for example, who concluded that the burials and stone ships were symbols of the Vanir, and this notion was later accepted by Marcus Gerds when doing his own surveying of Scandinavian boat burials and stone ships.


 * Regarding the theory, Orchard says that the folk etymology is a possibility. Lindow goes off into another direction entirely, backing the notion that the "nail" in Naglfar should refer to nails in planks, citing Hallvard Lie. So, it seems mainly to me that we have three strains here, and I don't think that any of them can really be considered more "modern" or "mainstream" than the others. Of course, the fact that the three major dictionaries on the subject ignore the Indo-European cognates nor mention the rejection of the folk etymology further blurs what the "mainstream" interpretation may be, but clearly some changes need to be made to reflect these things, and I do probably also need to bring in Lindow's backing of plank-nails as well.


 * I highly recommend the Lincoln work that I cite in the article ("Treatment of Hair and Fingernails among the Indo-Europeans"). It's on JSTOR.


 * Archaeology
 * Interesting, I had never heard of this. Our ability to dig these obscure things up and put some light on them is one of the reasons why I think these Wikipedia articles are so great. This needs to be added.


 * Interpretations and theories (Parallels)
 * We definitely need to bring in more information about these apparent nail-ship cognates. Do you have any more information about this? Are there examples of ships made from body-nails? I was trying to track down more about this in the past, but couldn't come up with much.


 * As always, thanks for the help. bloodofox: (talk) 15:23, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Personally, I doubt the folk etymology argument - it is simply my impression that this theory is still (uncritically) repeated in otherwise respectable sources, with little to no mention of alternatives. In my opinion, Krohn's work here shows that, rather than some invention on the part of Snorri, the motif of a ship made with the nails of the dead was well-established and wide-spread, and Naglfar in the Edda is simply its North-Germanic manifestation.

What follows is mostly based on the older scholarship as far as I could track it down. There's also discussion of Naglfar in Lorenz's critical edition of the Gylfaginning which I have not yet evaluated. (Note: this would involve examining the relevant work of A. Holtsmark, H. Rosén and O. Schoning, as well as tracking down A. Olrik's Om Ragnarok, referred to below.)

Sigurdur Nordal (1980:96-97), in his critical edition of the Völuspá, comments on v.50 regarding Naglfar. I don't know if he's read Krohn (he's not listed in the bibliography), but what he says makes it clear that he supports seeing the motif as one that is very old. He also mentions a passage in the Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur which tells a tale of a ship made of fingernails. This leads him to conclude: "Aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach handelt es sich hierbei um eine uralte Vorstellung, so dass man nicht noch nach einer anderen Erklärung zu suchen braucht" (In all likelihood, this has to do with a very old conception, so that one need not look for any other explanation), and then goes on to make mention of Detter, and those who came after him, as proposing such an unnecessary alternative explanation in his suggestion to read Naglfar as "Leichenschiff" (corpse-ship).

The reference to Detter is to his 1886 article Nahanarvali in the E. Steinmeyer's (1887) Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, Vol. 31, pp. 207-208, where he discusses the possible etymology of Naglfar (pg. 208). Detter is of the opinion that Naglfar is to be understood as "ship of the dead", and postulates the form *naȝwál as original. Detter's article was probably the one most responsible for the popularization of the "folk etymology" theory among scholars of the late 19th century.

Noreen, for example, considered this etymology secure enough to use it as an example in his grammar of Old Norse, though he does add a question mark to note his own scepticism. Golther's (1995:534) Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie cites precisely Detter's article in the ZfdA and Noreen's Grammar in support of his claim that Naglfar is to be understood as "ship of the dead", and repeats Detter's suggestion of a link to Gk. νέκυς. He also refers to Grimm's Mythology (pg. 775 in the original pagination) where Grimm interprets the concept of a ship built entirely of human fingernails to (1) express the enormous length of time necessary before the ship will be completed, and (2) mythologically justify the folk custom of cutting the nails of the dead and disposing of them properly. Golther, however, does not mention that Grimm nowhere suggests a wrong interpretation on the part of Snorri - though one could get this impression without checking up on Grimm's actual words.

As I see it, this means that we are more than warranted in taking Detter's ignorance of the information presented by Krohn in 1912 into consideration, and justified in doing so by virtue of the conclusions of contemporary scholars such as Nordal.

If we were allowed to indulge in OR, I would say that Snorri is innocent of fabricating the idea of a "ship of nails" to fit his supposed misinterpretation of the word Naglfar. Grimm (as usual) does the sources justice. Detter, in his eagerness to expand upon a note in Müllenhoff's 1853 article Verderbte Namen bei Tacitus (ZfdA, Vol. 9, pg. 255), lets his etymological imagination get the better of him, and it was picked up by several important scholars of the time. Golther's work was widely read, spreading the idea to a whole new generation of scholars. Krohn's article, on the other hand, received very little attention - which is understandable, as it appeared in a journal devoted to Finnic-Ugric research - and never found its way into major reference works. This brings us to Simek, who (as usual) does a very good job researching the literature, and properly cites Krohn, but fails to appreciate the significance of the article. Luckily, Nordal - either having read the article or not - takes the reports of parallel traditions seriously, and thus concludes that we don't need to resort to an alternative theory regarding a supposed "folk etymology" at all. I would assume that anyone later than, say, 1980, who still maintains and/or defends the folk etymology argument is doing so on the grounds of authority rather than solid reasoning.

If we want to find more information on the parallels found in Icelandic, Danish, Finnish and Russian folk culture, we would need to dig up Krohn's sources. If you can read German, you can find the article here, on page 154. I'll see what I can dig up using the bibliography in Lorentz's Gylfaginning. Cheers, --80.218.71.231 (talk) 20:20, 14 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Aha, excellent. Looks like there's plenty more to be added here! I get the same impression about the folk etymology business. It doesn't have much going for it. Unfortunately, as I am now far more pressed for time than when I put this review up, I can't fully respond to this insightful post and I cannot take the time to address the rest of the points made by the reviewer. If someone wants to go ahead and finish this up, they are welcome to it, but otherwise I will need to renominate it in the future. bloodofox: (talk) 23:26, 15 September 2010 (UTC)


 * sounds good to me. I'll still give it the full 7 days in case someone else has time to put the work in. This article initially struck me as one of those subjects that is so obscure that there isn't much coverage out there (so not very difficult to get to GA). More material is being uncovered on this obscure legend during this process, which is cool even if it doesn't make it this time. Aaron north (talk) 01:50, 16 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Excellent. My apologies, and I appreciate the time put in, all. bloodofox: (talk) 22:35, 16 September 2010 (UTC)


 * I'll go ahead and fail today, but this article can probably be a good article with more work on coverage.Aaron north (talk) 17:55, 19 September 2010 (UTC)