Talk:Fimbulwinter
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No possibility of a folk memory of the last ice age then?
- Not of the Ice Age. The distance in time from the last Ice Age until the Viking Age when this mythology came about is about 10.000 years! The climate change during the Nordic Bronze Age is "just" 1000 years away. During the Weichsel Glaciation all of scandinavia was under ice and water and nothing could live there, so there was noone to remember these great winters. See this timeline of Swedish prehistory:
[edit] Timeline of Prehistoric Sweden
I wouldn't really bet on it,human memory is one of the strongest things that ever were and ever will be.Recent archeological finds also show,that a modern(or at least capable of metalurgy) peoples have existed long long before the "official" dates (although theese materials are being hidden in old depositaries or made to disapear,as not to ratle the curent theories). New Babylon.
[edit] Etymological Speculation
How plausible is this? I wouldn't immediately edit it away, but cites are definitely needed. Also, is wikipedia really the place for speculation like this?
- This idea is even present in a textbook of norse religion used in university courses. I will put in the reference. Nixdorf 19:53, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
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- Sorry I thought you meant the thing about a memory of the climate change. The etymological stuff I cannot talk for... Nixdorf 19:56, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
OK I have cut this out of the main page, it was too speculative, too unreferenced, and if referenced would be original research:
- The Old English cognate is fifel meaning "Giant, (Sea) Monster", thereby retaining the root sense of "Large, Vast in Extent". Thus, in both the Old Norse fimbul and Old English fifel we see the root word for the number "five". Now, in Greek, the word for five is "penta", and it gives us the Greek prefix "pan-" meaning "All Encompassing", from the sense of "All Five Fingers on One Hand" being a metaphor for "everything" (The Teaching Company lecture series on Linguistics). Therefore, it seems likely that the Germanic "fimbul-" is the exact cognate of the Greek "pan-", both meaning "Everything, All Inclusive". The fimbulwinter, then, was a winter that encompassed everything -- to wit, all lands in Scandinavia and Finland and, perhaps, the British Isles, all the lands the folk of the Nordic Bronze Age knew of.
