Fascinating. Thank you for sharing. I wish someone would write a book about all these cool little traditions.

I live in Texas so we don't have so many rules. Next time I slaughter a steer, I'll remember this! Good tradition.

Yes, indeed. Fascinating language. It is less obvious when you write it in Swedish as 'Älvdalska'. The region is 'Älvdalen' which, back translated, means the River Valley.

@Þórfinnr Karlsefni Þórðarson It is all about commercialism, students want courses that will maximise earning potential and Universities struggle to fund anything else. Modern languages have business utility. I have seen it with the diminishing and closure of sociology faculties, but I guess it is the same with extinct languages vs modern languages.

inregionecaecorum I for one would perfectly ok if all sociology departments closed at every university. Some humanities, primarily historical ones, are the only areas with any utility imo.

@inregionecaecorum I know it! You hit a nerve... In college, I took classes that had no practical value, but I was paying for it, so I wanted to learn it! My advisor was a tad upset that I wouldn't focus on my actual degree after 5 years(full-time), I still had no degree, and later had to go get one just for employment purposes, though, people often expressed amazement that I had no "degree" because I had the knowledge that comes from a solid humanities back ground (my actual degree is something they made up for me like Bachelor's of Humanities & Creativity. I was a music theory major initially(talk about undervalued to useless skill set). So, I bake cookies and watch YT.

College is prohibitively expensive, inefficient, and very quickly being replaced by the internet. I'm all for it. I bet he's going to be way happier writing, translating, and being the Old Norse, Colorado cowboy equivalent of Carl Sagan, instead of talking at a room full of uninterested rich kids, looking for an easy A.

He's wasting his considerable talent and enthusiasm on the classroom.

@SteinbrecherBack That is a great explanation, and very clear. I also found, as a native English speaker, the Old High German much easier to understand than modern German! The use of "uu" at the beginning of words such as "Wodan" etc. seems to almost indicate that the heavy "v" sound was avoided. This is of course still the case in English and Dutch. Can you shed any light on why this might have been, or am I imagining things?

@SteinbrecherBack he said "At least for a layman like me"

@SteinbrecherBack "uuorun" = "fuhren" nicht "waren"! Illustrating one of the problems with the orthography used back then. :) In modern normalized Old High German as used in dictionaries the lines would be spelled like: pfol(?) enti wuotan fuorun zi holze dô ward demo balderes folen sîn fuoz birenkit

@SteinbrecherBack Thank you so much for your reply. By the heavy "v" sound, I do mean the pronunciation of the letter "v" at the beginning of the word, rather than the "w" which is more common in English and which in Dutch is not the full "v" sound but closer to a "w" as well. I can actually explain the conundrum of my finding it easier to understand older forms of German better than modern German (without actually being reasonably fluent in German. That is because I come from the northern half of Britain, and there still, whether you want to call it dialect, or whether you want to call it language remnants, the older style of pronunciation of English is very much used. The north of the UK and of Scotland were of course part of the Danelaw (and under Danish rule) or formerly part of Norway. So day to day, there are a lot of differences with standard English. For one thing, we wouldn't really make the "sh" sound at the end of a word all, so "English" becomes "Inglis". As in modern Danish, a lot of word endings are colloquially missed off, and letters aren't pronounced. So in many northern or Scottish dialects, you would simply "Ah'll hie an egg". In some places, you would say "Ah'll huff an egg" but in country dialects, the "v" sound is avoided. A lot of the words are pronounced slightly differently here. So "bone" would be "bane". The linking word "til" would be "ti". Cow would be "ku". House would be "hus". "would would actually be "wid". Some people even pronounce word endings with a "t" e.g. dropped is "droppit". The "ow" sound doesn't really exist at all, hence hus, moos for house and mouse. "ou" is always pronounced "u". And so on, and so on.

@@trondranorquoy5154 I'm not an expert either, but you're not imagining things about the w and v sounds. W was dropped in German dialects several centuries after the Merseburg charms. No idea as to why that happened, though, and I don't think anyone else knows, either. To the best of my knowledge, the w sound doesn't exist in North Germanic languages anymore, either, so maybe there was some mutual influence there, though I find it more likely that Germans were influenced by their other neighbours, such as the French and Italians, who also hardly, if ever, use a w sound. Btw, there are also southern German dialects that pronounce Haus as Hus, an interesting parallel to the English dialects of northern Britain.

And more dual-language texts with commentaries!

Hamrer Hippyer, right?

@@Xanatos712 yep

Not sure about Sinhtgunt, but in the case of Ulfberht h resembles the sound [x] (ch in German "ach"), so it has nothing to do with the voiceless th-sound [þ]. I'd thus assume Sinhtgunt to be pronounced [sinxtgunt], as /þ/ had also shifted to /d/ in Old High German (compare þing - thing - Ding) and would thus not appear in an OHG text.

HAMMRER HIPPYER!

I discovered the excellent Jackson Crawford as a result of discovering and really enjoying Heilung. Still not sure how I discovered Heilung, though - other than via KZfaq, obvs :-)

@@davee9506 To me it was mostly KZfaq. The Lifa concert took place at Castlefest and I was there. Just not at the concert but 200 meters away tending to my kids on a LARP field, completely unaware. It was the first time they performed in the way we now know. They formed the idea in the days before. KZfaq recommend Heilung after recommending The Hu. It was a road of recommendations an looking things up myself that went like this: BTS (although that was very much indirect) - Jambinai - Babymetal - Zhaoze - The Hu - Heilung/Wardruna - a lot of ritual and pagan folk.

Me☺️

Well this was written in Old High German, most likely in Fulda, which is not part of the saxon/low german regions.

Yes-a light trill In reconstructed OHG pronunciation. Bavarian and Austrian German dialects-“upper German”-preserve it to this day.

@@ae3898 oh, I didn't know about that. Thought it was a standard thing. Thank you

Love Heilung!☺️

It’s the same in English. We can understand pretty much all of texts written in Middle English, but Old English is almost entirely unintelligible - not least because it’s written somewhat differently. I understand from my Spanish friends that they suffer from the same sort of difficulty there.

I don't think. More like that the germanic people already had this religion before a part started to move southward and got splitted up in west germanic and north germanic. What religion had the east germanic Goths before they became christians?

@@12tanuha21 At 6:00 the video tells that the old high german name Friia is cognate with the Norse name Frigg, so I guess that Friia was originally the same god as Frigg. But the Norse name Freya sounds a little like the German name Friia, so I was speculating that the Norse name Freya could refer to "The German version of Frigg". In other words the mythologies of Scandinavia and Germany could have drifted apart, and at some point it could have been meaningful to portray them as separate gods. But this is just guesswork.

youtube comments have no chill

While I agree, Byzantium/Eastern Roman Eplmpire lived in a very different cultural milieu from the Germans. Just because the adventurers from Rus were known to well connected Romans doesn't mean that marsh-dwelling Germans minding their own businesses had any idea about the mythology of some pirates living across the sea. Although personally, I'd guess that there would be some contact, at least through trade, with the Scandinavians.