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[books 2013] Early medieval history
72. Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World: Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons by Philip A Shaw
Given the subject matter, I expect it was![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cavalorn who brought its existence to my attention.
This is a short but extremely dense book. It's about the evidence for the two pagan goddesses mentioned by Bede, Eostre and Hreda, who have mostly been considered by scholars to have been made up by Bede.
But that was before a lot of the evidence of votive offerings throughout northern Europe was compiled.
There is a quick chapter on the archaeological findings and discussing the pitfalls of thinking of anything as "pan-Germanic" in the period, etc. The next chapter is a quick discussion of the linguistic principles - and I was really glad here that this is something I studied at postgrad level. I'd largely forgotten about i-mutation, Second Fronting, Grimm's Law etc, but it would have been a lot harder to follow the actual content if this was the first exposure I'd had.
The rest is really technical linguistic stuff about what may and may not be evidence of - well, anything. There's lots of attempted reconstruction of lost language, eg proto-Germanic. The verdict is that there is some evidence that some people in some parts of the Germanic world had some kind of religious affiliation to goddesses with these names, but that's about all that can be proved. And that we should think of most Germanic deities in terms of the social groups who worshipped them rather than function. And that early Christian Anglo-Saxons had a more complex attitude towards the pre-Christian past than they have previously been given credit for.
Even a couple of years ago I would have been too brain fogged to be able to follow this. However, the linguistics stuff came right back to me even though I abandoned this field of study in 1993. I'd almost forgotten that I used to be the kind of nerd who worked on reconstructing lost languages (usually early Northumbrian dialect of Anglo-Saxon).
Given the subject matter, I expect it was
cavalorn who brought its existence to my attention.This is a short but extremely dense book. It's about the evidence for the two pagan goddesses mentioned by Bede, Eostre and Hreda, who have mostly been considered by scholars to have been made up by Bede.
But that was before a lot of the evidence of votive offerings throughout northern Europe was compiled.
There is a quick chapter on the archaeological findings and discussing the pitfalls of thinking of anything as "pan-Germanic" in the period, etc. The next chapter is a quick discussion of the linguistic principles - and I was really glad here that this is something I studied at postgrad level. I'd largely forgotten about i-mutation, Second Fronting, Grimm's Law etc, but it would have been a lot harder to follow the actual content if this was the first exposure I'd had.
The rest is really technical linguistic stuff about what may and may not be evidence of - well, anything. There's lots of attempted reconstruction of lost language, eg proto-Germanic. The verdict is that there is some evidence that some people in some parts of the Germanic world had some kind of religious affiliation to goddesses with these names, but that's about all that can be proved. And that we should think of most Germanic deities in terms of the social groups who worshipped them rather than function. And that early Christian Anglo-Saxons had a more complex attitude towards the pre-Christian past than they have previously been given credit for.
Even a couple of years ago I would have been too brain fogged to be able to follow this. However, the linguistics stuff came right back to me even though I abandoned this field of study in 1993. I'd almost forgotten that I used to be the kind of nerd who worked on reconstructing lost languages (usually early Northumbrian dialect of Anglo-Saxon).