"Old Norse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... king of the Burgundians in the fifth century. (5) "Gernot" was probably introduced by some minstrel in place of the historical "Godomar", who appears in the Norse version as "Gutthormr", though the names are not etymologically the same, as "Godomar" would be "Guthmarr" in Old Norse. (6) "Giselher" is the historical "Gislaharius". Although mentioned by the "Lex Burgundionum" as one of the Burgundian kings, he does not appear in the early Norse version, or in other poems dealing with these persons, ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... grand old fellow he was,—a fresh and hearty giant, holding his six feet two or three inches as uprightly at eighty as he ever had at eighteen. I believe that was his age, but may be wrong. Borrow was like one of the old Norse heroes, whom he so much admired, or an old-fashioned gypsy bruiser, full of craft and merry tricks. One of these he played on me, and I bear him no malice for it. The manner of the joke was this: I had written a book on the English gypsies and ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... "guiders," which, until the Rommany reached England, was voidas. In this instance the resemblance in sound between the words undoubtedly conduced to an union. Gibberish may have come from the Gipsy, and at the same time owe something to gabble, jabber, and the old Norse or Icelandic gifra. Lush may owe something to Mr Lushington, something to the earlier English lush, or rosy, and something to the Gipsy and Sanskrit. It is not at all unlikely that the word codger owes, through cadger, a part of its being to kid, a basket, as Mr Halliwell suggests (Dictionary ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... lover of the open-air life, the searcher after knowledge, the fighter that he was, he would have been in his element, foremost in the fray, most eager in the quest. But it was given to him to live in quieter times, to graft on the old Norse stock the graces of modern culture and the virtues of a Christian; and in a peaceful parish of rural England he found full scope for his gifts. There he taught his own and succeeding generations how full and beneficent the life of a parish priest can be. Our villages ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... and hands too were on the back of her chair, and she had turned from Gyda, and her face was out of sight. With a tender little smile, which she could not see, the old Norse woman stood beside her, and with tender fingers which she did feel, smoothed and stroked the hair on each side of her ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... exponent' of his investigations[2]. It is to Grimm that Kemble dedicates his volumes, and to him that he repeatedly acknowledges his indebtedness. Thus Kemble brought to the study of the poem not only a knowledge of the Old English poetry and prose, but acquaintance with Old Norse, Gothic, Old High German, and Old Saxon. It may sufficiently illustrate his scholarly method to instance examples of his treatment of the unique words in Beowulf. Take, e.g., the word hose in line 924. This word does not appear elsewhere in Old English; ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... that 1100 miles of railroad since New York was left behind, but still with many traces, under dust and seediness, of Scandinavian rustic fashion; altogether a homely people, but destined ere long to lose every vestige of their old Norse habits under the grindstone of the great mill they are now entering. That vast human machine Which grinds Celt and Saxon, Teuton and Dane, Fin and Goth into the same image and likeness of the inevitable Yankee—grinds him too into that image in one short generation, ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... strictly national theatre. This had been for a long time one of the many dreams which his active imagination had conjured up as a part of his mission. He was one of the earliest of that school of reformers, of whom we have heard so much of late years, that urge the readoption of the old Norse language—or, what is nearest to it now, the Icelandic—as the vehicle of art and literature. In the attempt to dethrone Dansk from its preeminence as the language of the drama, Ole Bull signally failed, and his Norwegian theatre, established at Bergen, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... described as the god who wields the thunderbolt, his natural representative in German would be Donar,(59) the Anglo-Saxon Thunar, the Old Norse Thor; and hence the dies Jovis would be called the day of Thor, or Thursday. If the fact that Jupiter was the king of the gods had been mentioned, his proper representative in German would, no doubt, have been Wuotan or Odin.(60) As it was, Wuotan or Odin was chosen as the nearest approach ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... his behalf, or why hostile deities should be disturbed to tumble seas into turbulence for such a voyager, is a query. He merits neither their wrath nor their courtesy. I confess to liking heroes of the old Norse mythology better. They, at least, did not cry nor grow voluble with words when obstacles obstructed the march. They possess the merit of tremendous action. Aeneas, in this regard, is the inferior of Achilles. Excuse us from hero worship, if ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... passivity of stupefaction, however, as one marvel after another was revealed to them. The first evening the architect sketched the plans of a picturesque building in the old Norse style, to match the romantic scenery of the lovely valley. The next morning he located it upon a knoll cooled by a steady breeze. The contractor made hasty inquiries about lumber, labor, and houses for his men, found that none of these essentials were at hand, decided to import everything from ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... we raided on the eve of Hallowe'en. A sneaking sympathy with roguery, however, is a very different thing from a delight in extravagance. That, too, is a universal passion, but not so native to the Teuton as to Celt or Finn or Oriental. Its absence is what most differentiates Old Norse literature from Old Irish, with which it so early came into contact. It is in travelers' tales and in the tales of seamen and in the writing that was based on these, in rare moments of religious or romantic ecstasy, or in borrowings from Celt or Oriental that you will find the most ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... is to a very limited extent a legislative body; it can make sundry regulations for the management of its local affairs. Such regulations are known by a very ancient name, "by-laws." By is an Old Norse word meaning "town," and it appears in the names of such towns as Derby and Whitby in the part of England overrun by the Danes in the ninth and tenth centuries. By-laws ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... saw this I looked on our men, who were in column again; and it seemed to me that the old Norse plan would be good, for it was certain that on this field ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as did the German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga writers long before that. And for the same thing sighed the early prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece. From all accounts, the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created. All I can say is that it ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... can subsist, and men by means of them and of what the sea yields; and it seems they were poetic men these, men who had deep thoughts in them, and uttered musically their thoughts. Much would be lost, had Iceland not been burst-up from the sea, not been discovered by the Northmen! The old Norse Poets were many of them ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Graham would recall him, as he stood there, his handsome head thrown back, looking the ideal of an old Norse viking, laughing and chatting with the merry, innocent girls around him, his deep-blue eyes emitting mirthful gleams on every side! According to his nature, Graham drew off to one side and watched the ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... had consumed and no lumberman plundered. Every trunk and limb and leaf lay where it had fallen. At every step the foot sank into the moss, which, like a soft green snow, covered everything, making every stone a cushion and every rock a bed,—a grand old Norse parlor; adorned beyond art ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe. lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... intact. One such vessel, discovered on the shore of Denmark, measured 72 feet in length. Another Viking ship, which was dug up in Norway, and which is preserved in the museum at Christiania, was 78 feet long and 17 feet wide. One of the old Norse sagas, or stories, tells how King Olaf Tryggvesson built a ship, the keel of which, as it lay on the grass, was 74 ells long; in modern measure, it would be a vessel of about 942 tons burden. Even if we make allowance for the exaggeration ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... introduced their own religious beliefs, which were largely phallic in character. The Teutonic god Frea was the same as the Latin Priapus; while Friga, from whom our Friday gets its name, because this day was sacred to her, was the Teutonic Venus. Frea is called Freyr in old Norse, and in old ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... of all to which the sable bird was put was to guide the roving pirates on their expeditions. Before a start was made a raven was let loose, and the direction of his flight gave the viking ships their course. In this manner, according to the old Norse legends, did Floki discover Iceland; and many other extraordinary things happened under ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... English-speaking race, because they belong to the world. And if one will but recall the close kinship of the Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon languages, he will not find it strange that the spirit of the old Norse sagas lives again in our English ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby |
