Talk:Midgard

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This page confuses two separate words that are present in a number of Germanic languages, and whose spelling has changed through time.

1) -gard, -geard, Ȝeard, -gardh or -garth with a semantic field of garden, garth, yard, fence, enclosure, etc. This attested in Old Norse as garðr.

2) -erde and -earth, meaning earth/ground. This is attested in Old Norse as jǫrð/jörð.

We need some way of explaining that "middle earth" is how the Old Norse/Old English phrase is commonly translated, despite the fact that the second word maps to meaning #1, not #2. This will avoid spuriously conflating two separate Germanic roots.

Old Norse/English dictionaries (Zoega, for example) translate miðgarðr as midgarth, the latter part of which Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as a small yard or enclosure. And the quote from Cynewulf references "middangeard," unambigiously garth not earth.

(It may very well be that the translation of the Cynewulf poem was done by Tolkien himself, and that's what the author meant by "the name was popularized in the form middle-earth...".)

We also need to be careful about saying things like "The name Middle-earth occurs half a dozen times in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf...", because of course that name doesn't occur at all, what occurs is middan-geard.

Finally, we should represent Old Norse words with normalized orthography, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse_orthography. This means getting rid of the dh's and replacing them with ð's.


  • Why is there no mention of Midgaard as used in the common backing for many MUD enviroments? There should at least be a link. - User:Grinick 1:54 Sep 20, 2005

The term mannheim, or OldIcelandic mannheimr, does not mean "home of men". In modern Icelandic, the word heimur means "world". Although "home" may possibly be part of the meaning back then similar to the Icelandic "heimili", the English word "world" surely is a much closer translation and the meaning that is given to the word "heim(r)" by any native speaker. HG August 7, 2006

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