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Names of the ages come from Völuspá

Posted By: sailmaker (rbuckle.adsl.wizards.co.uk)
Date: 7/1/2004 at 12:02 a.m.

Hi all,

In an unrelated discussion of Aragorn's pre-battle speech at the Black Gate of Mordor in the "Return of the King" film, someone pointed out a deliberate reference to the ancient Norse epic "Völuspá" and quoted the source. As soon as I saw the source, I noticed the names of Myth's ages:

----- quote -----
'An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the Age of Men comes
crashing down'

Vsp. 45 4-5
skeggöld, skálmöld - skildir 'ro klofnir - vindöld, vargöld, ádhr veröld steypisk.

'An axe-age, a sword-age - shields are cloven - a wind-age, a wolf-age, before the world (veröld) collapses'.

This is extraordinarily good, because 'veröld' (a loan-word into Norse from Old English 'weorold' 'world') actually means 'world', but its etymological sense is 'man-age', the world seen in human time, not in space. The structure of the word is exactly and visibly parallel with 'skeggöld', 'skálmöld', 'vindöld', 'vargöld'; ON 'verr', OE 'wer', poetical word for 'man', cognate with Lat. 'vir'. The cloven shields reflect the cloven sky (using the same word) also described in Völuspá 52.

Whoever composed that line to put into Aragorn's mouth knew all this exactly, and Aragorn is talking not only about the end of the Age of Men but the End of the World. Inspired. Tolkien would have been happy with this.

Incidentally, 'vargöld' contains the element that Tolkien anglicised / modernised as 'warg'.

----- end quote -----

So there you have it: the names of the ages in Myth come from Völuspá.

Richard.

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