Contrastación de hipótesis Hipótesis general

most ancient dwarves occupied in Germanic be-liefs. Our resources are limited, because the myths of the Germanic nations outside Scandinavia are lost, and we do not know whether Southerners told tales reminiscent of those preserved in the lays of the Elder Edda and systematized by Snorri Stur-luson.

According to Snorri, the dwarves came to life like maggots in the flesh of the primordial giant, but they received human understanding and the appearance of men from the gods despite the fact that they lived in the earth and in rocks. Some de-tails in the wording of the Elder Edda are obscure, and even Snorri may not have understood them. It is unclear when the dwarves chose their habitat in rocks or why they developed into anthropomor-phic creatures by order of the gods; however, once this happened, they came into their own. Vov^lospá (‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’), the opening lay of the Elder Edda, which devotes two lines to the creation of the dwarves, says that the most famous of them was Mótsognir and offers a catalog of dwarves’

names. Later we are told that the foremost dwarf

is called Dvalinn. All in all, in Old Icelandic litera-ture (poetry and prose), over 200 such names oc-cur.

Several dwarves supply the gods with their main treasures, including the mead of poetry; they occasionally render the same service to the heroes in the romantic sagas. In other tales, they appear as smiths. When Loki cut off the hair of Thor’s (tórr’s) wife Sif, the sons of Ívaldi, called dark elves (who are indistinguishable from the dwarves), made her new hair from gold. They made Odin’s (Óinn’s) spear and Frey’s (Freyr’s) ship. The dwarves Eitri and Brokkr forged a boar with bristles of gold, the ring Draupnir (the source of wealth that never gives out) and Thor’s hammer.

Four dwarves called North, South, East, and West (OI Norri, Suri, Austri, and Vestri) support the vault of heaven.

The dwarves are powerful and cunning, but they are almost never depicted as small. That cir-cumstance has been noticed but not discussed in any detail or explained. See the following contra-dictory statements: Gazophylacium (dwarf: “Teu-tonic Zwerch, Zwarg, that is, one of short stature”), FT (dwerg: according to them, subterranean dwell-ers were visualized as short creatures), J. de Vries (1956a:254: dwarves are called the embodiment of the soul), Motz (1973-74:105; 1993:93: “[T]he mod-ern observer may wonder why the important office of craftsman-priest was entrusted to a being of stunted size. The proportions of the creatures are not, however, mentioned in Germanic myth.

While dwarfs were of religious significance, their appearance was of no importance. With the loss of function and the development into a figure of folk- and fairy-tale the picturesque aspect came to the fore, and as characters of modern stories size is their most important quality”), and Polomé (1997:449; a passing remark along the same lines).

Only once do we hear that Regin, Sigurd’s (Sigurr’s) foster father, was “a dwarf in stature”

(Motz [1993:93, note 29]). In all likelihood, he ended up being a dwarf because he forged a won-derful sword. Such leaps of logic are typical of ancient (‘primitive’) thinking: since dwarves are smiths, smiths must be dwarves. In similar fash-ion, Regin’s brother Fafnir lay on his gold and turned into a dragon: dragons guard treasure, so that a guardian of a hoard becomes a dragon.

Even Vovlundr, the Scandinavian counterpart of Wayland, not “a dwarf in stature,” is called álfa vísi

‘prince (lord) of the elves,’ and by implication, of the dwarves, probably because he is a smith.

No conclusions regarding the dwarves’

na-Dwarf Dwarf

ture can be drawn from their names, which have often been classified and analyzed. Many names are opaque, and few contain references to the dwarves’ small size. Judging by ModI nóri ‘some-thing very small; small part of some‘some-thing; small lump; little boy; seal’s cub; narrow creek,’ the dwarf Nóri was tiny. Also nabbi means ‘pimple, lump; blemish’ in Modern Icelandic, which sug-gests that the eddic dwarf Nabbi was like Nóri, even though the common names nóri and nabbi were first recorded in the 17^th century. Finally, Ber-lingr is an animated *berBer-lingr ‘short stick’ (attested as part of the compound berlingsáss, but berling oc-curs in Swedish and Norwegian dialects). Despite the preoccupation of the Eddas with the dwarves’

names, the antiquity of most of them is in doubt, for the skalds mention only Dainn, Dvalinn, Falr, and Durnir (De Boor [1924:548]). Since the dwarves had descriptive names like Brown, and Shining, the same name could belong to a dwarf and another character or object, for example, to a fish, a hart, a ring, a rooster, a boar, a sword, Odin, and even a giant.

In myths, dwarves are never ‘dwarved’ by their surroundings. They were never “loathsome”

(contrary to Arvidsson [2005:105]). Allvíss woos Thor’s daughter; if she inherited her father’s phy-sique, she probably looked more like a giantess than an average woman. Both dwarves and giants lust for Freya (Freyja), who is reported to have slept with four dwarves in order to obtain a pre-cious necklace. Dwarves occasionally get the bet-ter of giants (as in the myth of the mead of poetry).

Loki was not tall, and yet Brokkr, one of two mas-ter smiths employed by the gods, sewed up Loki’s mouth, without experiencing any inconvenience.

All three eddic races (the gods, the dwarves, and the giants) were anthropomorphic. Their place in the universe, rather than their size, distinguished them: the gods ensured that the world would run its course, the giants fought to destroy order, and the dwarves were the gods’ artisans, for without the tools (treasures) that the dwarves forged the gods would have been powerless and destitute.

All the honor went to the elves, who were equal to the gods and who had a cult, but the memory of the elves as divinities was forgotten early. It is not unthinkable that some of the dwarves’ names at one time belonged to the elves.

The Eddas give no account of the origin of the gods, but some conclusions can be drawn from the grammatical characteristics of the Icelandic noun gu (n). Aside from late references to the Christian god, it was used only in the plural. Go galiuga-gu^*

and OHG abgot ‘false god(s)’ are likewise neuter (see an important discussion in De Tollenaere [1969:226-27]). Originally, the Scandinavians and, one can assume, all the speakers of the Germanic languages envisioned their gods as a collective whole. Although in the Eddas each god had a name and could be identified in the singular as an Áss or a Vanr, the plural forms—Æsir and Vanir—

were in the absolute majority. Even today we sometimes use the plural when the idea of a whole is uppermost in our mind, for instance, children as in: “They have no children” (one child would suf-fice for stating that they have ‘children’), germs (for what is a germ?), and so forth. Skeat preferred to list the form bots ‘worms’ in his dictionary, yet bot, singular, exists too (OED).

Despite the fact that OI dvergr is a masculine noun whose plural is dvergar, the dwarves must have started as a mass, a collective whole. The Old High German cognate of OE dweorg and OI dvergr was (gi)twerc. Its gender is impossible to determine from the extant texts, but in Middle High German (ge)twerc was nearly always neuter.

Alongside twerc, the prefixed form (ge)twerc existed (see Nib 97/1, note); ge- occurs in nouns denoting groups of people or objects. The situation in Old and Middle High German is the most archaic, for the path from gu (n pl) to gu (m sg) and from (ge)twerc (n pl) to twerc (n m sg), that is, from an undifferentiated mass to an individual, is natural, whereas the reverse path is out of the question.

Change of grammatical gender in such words was not uncommon (Brugmann [1907:318]). Note that OE ga¤^{st and gæ}¤st ‘ghost’ must originally have be-longed to the s-stem, which means that both words may at one time have been neuter (SB, sec 288, note 1; A. Campbell [1959:sec 636, end]; OED: ghost). Go skohsl* ‘demon’ was neuter too, but no general rule obtains here, for MHG orke ‘demonic creature’ is masculine, and so is OE orcne¤as (pl) ‘evil spirits, monsters,’ known from Beowulf 112. The gender of Gmc orc- was probably influenced by its etymon, L orcus ‘god of death.’

Not only the fact that the gods and the dwarves were in the remote past members of

‘hosts’ rather than individual deities unites them.

They seem to have been visualized and wor-shipped in a similar way. In Old Icelandic, two words spelled áss existed: one meant ‘member of the Æsir family,’ the other ‘pole, beam’ (as in ber-lingsáss, mentioned above). It is tempting to treat them as the descendants of the same etymon de-spite some doubts on this score. Columns and beams of all sorts have been objects of cults all over

Dwarf Dwarf

the world (Meringer [1904-05:159-66; 1907:296-306;

1908:269-70; Olrik [1910]; Weiser [1926:12]). See the discussion of the Gothic cognates of OI áss₁ and áss₂ in Feist^3-4 at ans* ‘beam’ and anses ‘(demi)gods.’

Of special interest is the ancient Venetian word ahsu-, which probably meant ‘herma,’ that is, a statue of Hermes mounted on a square stone post, and which can thus be related to both áss₁ and áss₂ (Sommer [1924:132]), Krahe [1929:325]). Áss₁ and áss₂ are now believed to be different words (Polomé [1953; 1957]), but it is remarkable, if it is a coincidence, that in medieval Iceland, dvergar meant ‘dwarves’ and ‘short pillars that support the beams and rafters in a house.’ See more on dvergar

‘pillars’ in Gunnell (2001:20-22; 2003:193).

The specialized meaning of dvergar is usually said to go back to the myth about four dwarves supporting the sky (ODGNS), but the development in the opposite direction is more probable: dvergar may have been understood as ‘stalwarts,’ as sup-ports subservient to æsir ‘beams,’ and, once the world came into being, it was natural for Æsir to entrust four dwarves—North, South, East, and West—with propping up the new structure. The Old Icelandic for ‘world’ was heimr ‘home,’ so that

“the big home” must have been modeled on hu-man dwellings. The myth of four dwarves did not arise when the Scandinavians were cave dwellers.

Likewise in Hittite, “[t]he typical 4 halhaltumari are not merely the mundane corners of a house or hearth, they also denote the ‘four corners of the universe,’ that is, cardinal points in terms of movements of the sun and the winds” (Puhvel [1988:257]). Æsir and the dvergar as beams form a perfect correlation. An ornament called dvergar, one on each shoulder, mentioned in the Elder Edda, must have been a short support or a pin (Nerman [1954]).

We should approach the etymology of dwarf with the following considerations in mind: the eddic dwarves were the gods’ most important servants, even culture heroes; they shared mytho-logical space with the gods, elves, and giants, from all of whom they were in some cases indis-tinguishable; they did not emerge in people’s fantasy as small creatures living in mountains and rocks; their names furnish no information about their origin; and the eddic dwarves may have had counterparts elsewhere in the Germanic speaking world.

2. The forms relevant for the etymology of dwarf are as follows: OE dweorg, OI dvergr (ModI dvergur, Far dvørgur, N dverg, Sw dvärg, Dan dværg), OFr dwerch and dwirg, OS (gi)dwerg, MLG and

MDu dwerch, OHG and MHG (gi)twerc, (ge)twerc (G Zwerg). OED gives a detailed list of cognates in the Germanic languages and English dialects, but EDD barely mentions dwarf (only as part of plant names and such). Labialization in Faroese (e > ø) is late, and so is the irregular change of tw- to zw- in Ger-man. The protoform immediately preceding the recorded forms must have been *dwerg-. The re-lation of OFr dwerch to dwirg will be discussed be-low.

The diphthong in OE dweorg is due to Old En-glish breaking (e > eo before rg). The Middle Eng-lish form was dwerg(h). It is immaterial whether it goes back to eo smoothed (monophthongized) or to e that was not broken in the Anglian dialects.

When ME er became ar, dwerg acquired the pro-nunciation dwarg, with wa later going over to wo.

Detailed books on the history of English give an account of those changes; see, for example, Luick (1964:478, 697, 861). Hirt (1921:31) mistakenly re-ferred the differences between a in dwarf and e in Zwerg to the differences in the influence of i in Germanic. In Zwerg, e is old (that is, not the result of umlaut), whereas in dwarf, a is not original.

The letter g in OE dweorg designated a fricative.

That sound regularly became f in Middle English, with gh reflecting the oldest pronunciation of -g. It is due to chance that dwarf is not spelled dwargh or dwergh now. Koeppel (1904:34) notes that -a- in dweorgas was hardly “a guttural vowel” when fricative g yielded w, but by the time of the change g to w (whatever Koeppel’s formulation means) dweorg had been monosyllabic for centuries. Ac-cording to anonymous (1901a), Skeat cited reg dwerk and adduced it as proof that fricative g occa-sionally became k. The form dwerk is not listed in the sources consulted, and Skeat does not seem to have mentioned it in any of his published works.

If dwerk exists, it is probably a variant of Scand dverg.

Most etymologists consider the word dwarf to be of unknown origin. J. de Vries (NEW, dwerg) suggested that it was a relic from a substrate lan-guage (was he thinking of a term of pre-Germanic religion?). His idea, although not repeated in AEW, found its way into Mackensen (Zwerg) as a remote possibility. Other modern dictionaries do not mention the substrate but have little to say about the history of dwarf. The hypotheses on the origin of this word are of two types. Some died without issue: no one supported them or the sup-port was minimal. Others enjoyed considerable popularity for a long time. In this section, only the less fortunate conjectures will be mentioned.

Dwarf Dwarf

Promising or fanciful, the etymologies of dwarf do not differ too much: all of them attempt to show that the original meaning of the word was

‘short,’ ‘deformed,’ or ‘deviant,’ none of which can be right.

Probably the oldest etymology of dvergr goes back to Gumundur Andrésson, who referred this word to Gk qqe’j ‘god’ and ††rgon ‘work.’

Finn Magnusen (FML) found himself in agreement with Andrésson. Their etymology became widely known, because Jacob Grimm supported it (with-out references). He offered it in all four editions of his Deutsche Mythologie (1835:252; 1875:370). Since qeourgàa meant ‘divine work, miracle, magic, sor-cery’ (cf qeourg’j ‘one who does the work of God, priest’) and has retained its meaning in modern use, as in E theurgy ‘the working of some divine or supernatural agency in human affairs,’ Andrésson and others were justified in searching for links between the earliest sense of dvergr and the pro-duction of magical objects, but dvergr cannot be a relic of a disguised late Greek compound. Those who referred to Grimm (they did not know his predecessors) added question marks. Mueller mentions him, but Ten Doornkaat Koolman (dwarg, dwerg), Kluge (EWDS: Zwerg), and Franck (EWNT:

dwerg) make a point of distancing themselves from Grimm. Weigand combined Grimm’s etymology with the Zwerch hypothesis (see below).

According to Skinner and Wachter, Martinius (apparently, not in Martinius [1701]) compared dwarf and L dı@@vergium, a word derived from Late L dı@vergere ‘turn aside,’ because dwarves are devi-ant creatures. Skinner refers to Martinius with-out comment and adds Belgian (that is, Flemish) dweeis ‘obliqus.’ The closest one comes to dweeis is MDu dwaes ‘foolish.’ Wachter called Martinius’s conjecture ingenious but doubted its validity. Cle-land (1766:47), who set out to demonstrate the Celtic origin of most words, looked on dwarf as the sum of the ‘Celtic’ privative prefix de- and OE arf ‘inheritance.’ The expected result should have been ‘disinherited’ or ‘dispossessed,’ but Cleland says ‘not grown.’ Only Lemon took his etymology seriously. Dwarf turns up in W. Barnes (1862:233) under one of his roots, namely dw*ng ‘dwindle.’

Grouping together several mainly regional words beginning with dw- and having something to do with diminution and smallness was a good idea, but the root dw*ng does not exist. Zollinger (1952:89), ninety years later, in a book whose title is amusingly reminiscent of Barnes’s, compared PIE

*dhu••ergh, from IEW (279), and Egyptian dnrg, dang, darg, da’g, all of which he glossed as ‘dwarf.’

Between 1862 and 1952, two more researchers dealt with this word. According to Loewenthal (1928:459), dvergr should be understood as

*dhu••^er-u••^oku••os, the second component being re-lated to L vox ‘voice.’ He glosses that compound as ‘one saying fateful things,’ though the dwarves are nowhere depicted as prophets. Juret (1942) gave a thesaurus of his own roots. Under \\2t

‘small, tiny,’ we find, among others, E dwarf and thin (p. 342).

3. ‘Divergent,’ ‘dwindler,’ ‘sooth-sayer,’ and

‘producer of magical things for the gods’ do not seem to be the original meanings of dwarf. Nor is the material outside Germanic of much help in ap-proaching the Germanic word. ‘Dwarf’ does not appear in Buck, but some comparative material can be found in SN (708). Gk nßnnoj and na~^nnoj, from which Latin has na¤nus (whence Ital nano, F nain, and Sp enano) and Hebrew has snn (nns), is probably a baby word. Gk pugmai~oj is from pugmø ‘fist,’ a formation like G Däumling, E Tom Thumb, and OPr parstuck (Lith pir~^s‡tas ‘finger,’ and so on). Russ kar-lik, with a diminutive suffix, and its cognates in Polish and Czech are slightly reshaped borrowings from German (OHG karal, MHG karl, G Kerl ‘young man’: Vasmer, karla; further references in ESRI [XI:72], karlik). See more on Kerl at GIRL. Lith kau~kas goes back to the root meaning ‘elevation’

(the kau~kas is visualized as a gland, pimple, knob;

among the related words is Go hauhs* ‘high,’

LEW). L pumilio is obscure. If it is from PIE *p(a)u-

‘small’ (pu-mi-l-ion), -m- remains unexplained (WH); if it is from pumi-l-ion ‘little hairy one’ (as in D. Adams [1985:244, note 8]), the feature chosen for the nomination (‘hairy’) makes little sense. F nabot is equally opaque. From (O)I Nabbi (see it above)?

A disguised compound from nain + (pied)bot ‘club-foot’? Both hypotheses look strained. Nothing is known about the history of gnome, first occurring in Paracelsus (KS, Gnom). Gmc *dwerg- is neither a baby word nor ‘manikin,’ and unless it is a sub-strate word, it must have a recoverable root.

Over the years, four etymologies of dwarf (dvergr, Zwerg) have been recognized as holding out some promise.

1) Dwarf is presumably a cognate of G