Symbel

A drinking scene on an image stone from Gotland, in the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm
For the British band, see Symbel (band).
"Sumble" redirects here. For the legendary king, see Sumble (Finnish king).

Symbel (OE) and sumbl (ON) are Germanic terms for "feast, banquet".

Accounts of the symbel are preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf (lines 489–675 and 1491–1500), Dream of the Rood (line 141) and Judith (line 15), Old Saxon Heliand (line 3339), and the Old Norse Lokasenna (stanza 8) as well as other Eddic and Saga texts, such as in the Heimskringla account of the funeral ale held by King Sweyn, or in the Fagrskinna.

Paul C. Bauschatz in 1976 suggested that the term reflects a pagan ritual which had a "great religious significance in the culture of the early Germanic people".[1]

  1. ^ First proposed at the Third International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics, at the University of Texas at Austin, April 5–9, 1976 (published in 1978), elaborated in Bauschatz, "The Germanic ritual feast" and The Well and the Tree; Pollington, Mead-hall.