Aurvandill

"Ēarendel" redirects here. For the Tolkien character, see Eärendil. For other uses, see Earendel (disambiguation).
"For by his rain of blows he destroyed Koll's shield"

Aurvandill (Old Norse) is a figure in Germanic mythology. In Norse mythology, the god Thor tosses Aurvandill's toe – which had frozen while the thunder god was carrying him in a basket across the Élivágar rivers – into the sky to form a star called Aurvandils-tá ('Aurvandill's toe'). In wider medieval Germanic-speaking cultures, he was known as Ēarendel in Old English, Aurendil in Old High German, Auriwandalo in Lombardic, and possibly as auzandil in Gothic. An Old Danish Latinized version, Horwendillus (Ørvendil), is also the name given to the father of Amlethus (Amleth) in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum.[1][2][3] Comparative studies of the various myths where the figure is involved have led scholars to reconstruct a Common Germanic mythical figure named *Auza-wandilaz, which seems to have personified the 'rising light' of the morning, possibly the Morning Star (Venus). However, the German and – to a lesser extent – the Old Danish evidence remain difficult to interpret in this model.[4][5][2][6]

  1. ^ de Vries 1962, p. 20.
  2. ^ a b Simek 1984, pp. 31–32.
  3. ^ Falluomini 2017, pp. 288–291.
  4. ^ de Vries 1957, pp. 137–138.
  5. ^ Dumézil 1970, p. 1171.
  6. ^ Lindow 2001, p. 65.