Talk:Scylding

moved
This has been moved from Shieldings to Scylding for the following reasons:
 * 1) Wikipedia standards urge a singular form of a national or group name for an article title.
 * 2) The forms "Shielding" or "Shieldings", though the sensible modern English counterparts, are in practice very rarely used in English except for occasional glosses explaining the forms Scylding/Scyldingas or Skjöldung/Skjöldungar.

Google hits returned for searches: Search Pattern                                       All languages   English only Scylding OR Scyldingas OR Scyldings                         12,600         12,200 Skjoldung OR Skjoldungar OR Skjoldunger                        523            316 Skjöldung OR Skjöldungar OR Skjöldunger or Skjöldungs          395             41

This obviously reflects translations and discussions of Beowulf, perhaps inordinately so. Because the actual Scyldings/Skjöldungs were Danish, I would myself prefer the form of the entry to be Skjöldung, but bow to actual usage. But within articles the forms Skjöldung and Skjöldungs should probably be used when speaking of Norse and Danish sources, usually appearing on first use as something linke "Skjöldung (Scylding)" providing both the link and the alternate form.

Jallan 23:13, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * OK, no problem. I'll try to tidy up.--Wiglaf 07:51, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Shield carriers
Claus Deleuran speculates in Illustrated History of Denmark for the People that King Scyld was made up to fit the name Scylding because -ing names often indicated descendants, whereas scyldings may well have meant shield carriers.


 * There is a tendency among historians to spill a lot of ink on claiming that legendary people never existed. Think about it, would it be reasonable to call a clan the "shield carriers" in a time when most people used shieds? Moreover, I don't know of any case when the the head of the noun (X-ing) did not stand for an ancestor.--Wiglaf 19:48, 1 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't call Deleuran a historian per se, he was more of an interested amateur. Anyway I am pretty sure there aren't any actual sources for a King Scyld aside from Beowulf. See for instance the quotation in said article. (Oh and I seem to have forgotten to sign the previous note) Mikkel 19:18, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
 * King Skjöld is mentioned in Scandinavian sources, as well.--Wiglaf 19:25, 26 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Don't most of these use the Beowulf as a source anyway? The eddas and Saxo are ~200 years younger than it.Mikkel 19:35, 26 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I consider that highly unlikely. I have written most articles relating to Beowulf and the Norse sagas, and they are too different for that. For instance, if the Norse sources had borrowed from Beowulf, Eadgils would have been called Auðgils (and not Adils), he would have fought his uncle instead of a Norwegian king, and he would have done so with Geatish forces and not with Danish. IMHO, everything points to a common tradition separated by hundreds of years in different parts of Northern Europe, and that is the most common opinion, in my experience.--Wiglaf 19:53, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

From a Dane: We have no such word as Skjöld or Skjöldungar. Both those word seems to be invented by a Swede playing wise guy. The family in discussion here is Skjoldungerne, - one skjoldunge, several skjoldunger. So called after kong Skjold (our word for king is kong). Somebody writes: "Anyway I am pretty sure there aren't any actual sources for a King Scyld aside from Beowulf." This is nothing but nonsense, and I wonder when Wikipedia would become a reliable source - if ever - when such amateurs without knowledge are writing it. Skjold is mentioned by both the old historians, Sven Aggesen and Saxo Grammaticus. Obviously, you don't have a clou on Danish history, so why write about it? It's ridiculous. Jan Eskildsen, 18/2-08. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.57.198.234 (talk) 08:49, 18 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Getting back to the "shield carrier" issue, I think the question of whether "Sköldr" is a back-formation from "skjöldungr" (or whether "Scyld" is a back- formation from "Scylding") is a perfectly valid one, these sorts of back-formations being perfectly common in Scandinavian and Germanic legendary nomenclature (and, of course, elsewhere). In fact, I would suspect that this is the most common understanding in modern scholarship. Beowulf is certainly the earliest surviving source to use "Scylding" as a dynastic identification, and there is no surviving Viking-Age Scandinavian evidence of a Skjöldung dynasty. If Sæmundr Sigfússon composed a tally of Skjöldungar comparable to Ari's tally of Ynglingar, that suggests an understanding of the Skjöldungar as a legendary dynasty (comparable to the Beowulf poem's use of "Scyldingas"), among Icelanders by the early 12th century. However, roughly contemporaneous use of the term in Denmark by Sven Aggesen and Saxo Grammaticus suggests that a dynastic understanding of the term may not necessarily have been widespread at that time. Sven Aggesen, speaking of the legendary Skiold, says "A quo primum modibus Hislandensibus skioldunger sunt reges nuncupati", while Saxo Grammaticus wrote of Skyoldus "tantaque indolis eius experimenta fuere, ut ab ipso ceteri Danorum reges communi quodam vocabulo skioldungi nuncuparentur". From such passages, it is not really clear that either Sven or Saxo necessarily understood the term skjöldungr as anything more than a heiti for "king" that referred especially to Danish kings as a kind of honorific, despite their (probably erroneous) derivation of the term from the legendary Skjöldr's name. Roughly contemporaneous with Sven and Saxo is the Chronicon Lethrense, the earliest substantial Scandinavian narrative source for figures commonly identified as Skjöldungar. It does not mention any "Skiold", nor does it use a term like "Skioldunger". The earliest unquestionably dynastic use of the term skjöldungr in a Scandinavian context comes from Snorri's thirteenth-century Edda. Viking-Age poetry uses skjöldungr as a standard skaldic heiti for "king, leader", much in the way Sven and Saxo may have intended. In fact, it has been noted that this heiti is particularly used for Knútr inn ríki, Óláfr helgi, and Magnús góði, all leaders associated with English exploits, and sometimes the term seems to refer to these leaders' retinues instead of, or as much as, the leader himself.  As for the etymology of the term, although it has been suggested that skjöldungr derived from an early Low German word *skalda (> Middle Low German schalde), a kind of punt used on the Continent's North Sea coasts, so that Proto-Norse *skalding might be interpreted "boatman" and so have become a label for Scandinavian sailors, I think most scholars would in fact interpret the term as having originally had the sense "person associated with a shield", indeed perhaps "shield-bearer" (and a sense connected with a Germanic custom of raising a leader on a shield, best known from the Merovingian examples, might not be impossible either, or as well). In any event, there is little evidence for Scandinavian use of any terms in the -ing-/-ung- suffix to imply genealogical descent or dynastic association (as, in contrast, is common in Frankish, Anglo-Saxon, and Gothic contexts) before the twelfth century; instead, the most common Scandinavian use of the-ing-/-ung- suffix in Old Norse is to form words denoting people from a particular place or kind of place, for example: Íslendingar, útlendingar, etc. Snorri listed a number of skaldic heiti for "leader" employing the -ing-/-ung- suffix and explained these as dynastic titles modelled on a founder figure's personal name — however I think most scholars would understand many such "founder figures" (including "Skjöldr") to be late back-formations of some kind. Of course, some of the "king" heiti were certainly dynastic titles — but, significantly, they were borrowed from originally non-Scandinavian legends. Terms like völsungr, buðlungr, and niflungr are derived from the well-attested legendary dynasties of the "Völsung cycle", though obviously enough these terms are ultimately of Continental origin. If the Frankish or Anglo-Saxon dynastic use of -ing-/-ung- suffixed words influenced similar usage in Scandinavian contexts, it would be difficult to date when the trend was adopted. However, we may well be justified in suggesting that the term skjöldungr was most likely not originally a dynastic appellation referring to a historical "Skjöldr" figure as the surviving evidence is in fact not incompatible with an interpretation in which the term skjöldungr, denoting "leader" (and perhaps by extension "leader's retinue") acquired a dynastic sense in an Anglo-Scandinavian context. Although the Beowulf poem's use of the term "Scyldingas" suggests that a dynastic meaning for such terms may have been current in (Anglo-)Scandinavian contexts at some point during the Viking Age, the evidence of Sven Aggesen and Saxo Grammaticus suggests that skjöldungr need not have been automatically understood in a dynastic sense throughout Scandinavia even as late as the 12th century. So, in conclusion, I would be cautious about making assumptions regarding Skjöldr. :) We may easily find ourselves guilty (if led onwards in our transgression by 19th-century Romantically influenced interpretations) of simply repeating the back-formations and unsupported assumptions of our predecessors. Carlsefni (talk) 15:03, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Do you suggest that the use of -ing denoting ancestry was borrowed from the continent after the end of the Viking Age? Hellquist, who wrote the standard work on Swedish etymology (continually reprinted and revised since 1922), says that most Scandinavian place names with the suffix -(l)inge/unge are plural genitive forms that mean "of the descendants of X". These place names are from Proto-Germanic times. Likewise the Ynglingatal poem contains the same naming tradition and it is generally dated to c. 900. In addition, the -ing-/-ungr suffix in Old Norse konungr and the Proto-Norse kuningaz ("king") is a patronymic suffix which surely predated the Viking Age in Scandinavia. Why should a borrowing be assumed when the -ingr suffix is a cognate of the corresponding continental forms?--Berig (talk) 15:46, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Strange though it sounds, I am actually suggesting that the use of -ing to denote ancestry may not have the most common use for this suffix in Viking-Age Scandinavia :) but I have to admit that this is largely the result of looking at the literary (i.e. mostly skaldic) evidence -- and looking at the work of other scholars who have look primarily at this literary evidence. The note you raise about place-name evidence is interesting, and worth examining. However, I would start there by asking on what basis the names with -ing/-ung are dated early and identified as patronymics? (For example, on the basis of comparison with Old English place-names? Or ...?).  I remember that Stefan Brink has done a lot of recent work on place-names in Sweden in the Viking and pre-Viking period; perhaps he has touched on this issue.  Still, it has to be said that the literary evidence (from skaldic poetry, etc.) does not support dynastic -ings/-ungs very well — or at least it is ambiguous.  Describing some king as a "ylfing" ... is that a person descended from wolves, associated with or having the characteristics of wolves, descended from a guy named Ulf ..... some combination of those.  The -ing/-ung suffix is widespread throughout the Germanic world, as you note, but there are variations in how it can be seen to be used at different times and different places.  We can't simply draw one-to-one correspondences across time and space because we can see that there are variations in its function, so we need to be sensitive about making too many assumptions. So, my suggestions above start from, not Skjöldr and Skjöldungar in later historical legend, but what we can see about the earliest uses of these kinds of terms. And I think it's fair to say that most scholars would see Skjöldr as a back-formation from skjöldungr (which is surely at the least a not terribly controversial suggestion), and that the early usages are not clearly dynastic, which then raises the question of what is a skjöldungr?  A dynastic association after all? A title or honorific?  And looking at this kind of construction — in the skaldic corpus, and even Sven and Saxo — there is relatively little that demands a dynastic understanding. So perhaps we've been mislead by the common later medieval usages.  But then, as I say, my analysis is based heavily on literary material, and the place-name evidence is worth looking at — though in any event, it's clear that this suffix would not only mark a dynastic function, but could and did have others.  (As for *kuningaz, I'm not sure everyone necessarily sees that suffix as specifically patronymic in function, for all that Rígsþula would have it that way. :) And we do not know where in the Germanic world that term was first coined in comparison with where it later spread to.)  The -ing/-ung suffix is found in cognate forms throughout the Germanic world, but it is not clear that they were always used in the the same way. Based on the evidence I've seen, there is little to show that the suffix was used to mark dynastic association in Scandinavia until surprisingly late, and so I do wonder if it was a usage influenced by English or Continental models. That's not really such a bizarre idea — Vikings were known to get around, and take souveniers home to refashion in their own way. :) But, again, looking at the place-name evidence is something I should do ....  Well, that's why I raised this on the talk page, after all! Carlsefni (talk) 20:05, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, the suffix was not used solely to mark descent, and I guess it had a more general meaning such as "the people of", and Skjöldung may have been a kenning for warrior. However, I think it is a mistake to consider the Viking Age to be *the* period of cultural contact between Scandinavia and the continent, when the most important period of contact between Scandinavia and the continent was actually before the Viking Age. Norse culture did not really begin to distinguish itself from continental Germanic culture until the continent had become Christianized, and it was when religion had begun to set the north and the south apart that we can talk of the evolution of a special Norse culture. During pagan times, the elites of the Germanic countries were materially and dynastically closely connected, whether they lived in the north or in the south. There is preciously little that we know of Scandinavian customs before the appearance of runestones and Adam of Bremen, Saxo and Snorri et al, but as far as I know scholars do not assume that there were any great cultural differences between north and south Germanics during the iron age. These people thought strongly in terms of kinship and descent and I do not see why they would popularize a term for it when it was important to begin with.--Berig (talk) 20:41, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
 * So, after many months of being distracted by other things, I have returned a little (not much!) wiser to this topic (to distract me from other distractions! :)). For one thing, I've done some background work on the place-name angle that Berig brought up, consulting such works as Carl Ivar Ståhle's Studier över de svenska ortnamnen på -inge, Studier till en svensk ortnamnsatlas, 3 (Uppsala: Lundequistska bokhandeln, 1946); Stefan Brink's "Part Two - Northmen: Identities and State Formation in Scandinavia", in Franks, Northmen, and Slavs: Identities and State Formation in Early Medieval Europe, ed. by I.H. Garipzanov and others (Brepols: 2008), pp. 87-112; Vibeke Christensen (later Dalberg) & John Kousgård-Sørensen, Stednavneforskning, vols I & II (København, 197279), especially the first 1972 volume;  Kristian Hald, Vore Stednavne, 2nd edn (København, 1965); Stefan Brink, "Sociolinguistic perspectives and language contact in Proto-Nordic", in The Nordic Languages, ed by Oskar Bandle, Lennart Elmevik, and Gun Widmark, 2 vols (Walter de Gruyter, 2002), I: 685-690; Svante Strandberg, "The Development of Proto-Nordic Place-names", also in the first volume of The Nordic Languages, pp. 671-685.  There is lots of fun stuff in these works, but the general upshot is (pace Helquist) that, in contrast to West Germanic place names in -inga- (familiar from examples in Germany and England), the Scandinavian -ing(e)- names never seem to have had a personal name as the qualifier in the first element. Scandinavian place names with -ing-/-ung- suffixes (of which there are a few related variants) do seem to indicate a group, but the group is most typically naming itself after an object, such as (perhaps most commonly) a topographical feature, and not after a person.  So, as relates to Scyldings, there is for example a place Sköldinge in Södermanland, which probably does contain Ancient Nordic *skeldur "shield" with -ing-ia suffixation, but most likely means something like "place of the people of the shield" or "place of the people of a topographical feature named for or shaped like a shield" rather than "place of the people of the guy named Shield" (see Strandberg, p. 676). Clearly it remains the case that our records of Scandinavian nomenclature and terminology in the pre-Viking (or even Viking period) remains extrordinarily limited.  But the idea to use place-names as a window (however cramped and foggy) into this topic was a very good one -- though, as it happens, the results tend to match what I was see from a review of early literary usage (e.g. skaldic poetry) pretty well! I am still not sure there is much evidence that Scandinavian names with -ing-/-ung- suffixes were used in a specifically dynastic sense until this usage was at some point imported from England and/or the Continent (the Völsung legends, etc.).  Indeed, I am not sure that the creation of the concept of a "Shielding" dynasty (that is, people descended from a guy named "Shield" was not a perhaps an English feat -- or the feat of English poets/scholars/lore-masters who heard about some Scandinavians who (perhaps) called themselves "people of the shield" and interpreted this name in the light of familiar (to them) West Germanic dynastic senses of the -ing-/-ung- suffix to generate a legendary (and fictional) dynastic founder "Scyld", the idea of whom was then imported back to Scandinavians who found the idea of a dynastic founder named "Skjöldr" attractive and/or useful for whatever reason .... Carlsefni (talk) 21:47, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Verifiability of Beaw
I'm not well educated on the subject, but I thought I might bring this up so that somebody can fix or axe it.

All Old English texts call Scyld's son and successor Beaw or some similar name. (The name was expanded to Beowulf in the poem Beowulf, probably in error by a scribe who thought it was an abbreviation for the name of the poem's hero, who is quite a different person). Halfdan/Healfdene seems to be the direct son of Beaw in the poem. But all Scandinavian sources that mention both Skjöld and Halfdan put Halfdan some generations after Skjöld and make no mention of King Beaw (save for a genealogy in the Prologue to Snorri Sturluson's Edda which is taken from English traditions).

That paragraph, with the exception of the final reference to a Prologue, does not appear to source this theory of the Beaw -> Beowulf hypothesis. Could somebody please add a source, or remove this paragraph? Michael Sheflin (talk) 05:34, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Rurik and nationality
Given the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the old imperial Muscovy’s rather late use of the name Russia, should one not change the text to maybe Ukrainian or old Rus? 84.211.198.97 (talk) 22:38, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Even though it can seem to be a somewhat far of theory to claim, that the Rurik dynasty were direct descendants of the Scyldings, both this theory as well as what we in addition to that know about the rurikids, strongly implies a special connection to the Scandinavian culture, so perhaps a third and possibly better choise would be to use the Old Norse term Garðaríki? Oleryhlolsson (talk) 23:44, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Since no one made protests or commented further I went ahead and made the change. Oleryhlolsson (talk) 14:12, 7 March 2023 (UTC)