Kára

In Norse mythology, Kára is a valkyrie, attested in the prose epilogue of the Poetic Edda poem Helgakviða Hundingsbana II.

The epilogue details that "there was a belief in the pagan religion, which we now reckon an old wives' tale, that people could be reincarnated," and that the deceased valkyrie Sigrún and her dead love Helgi Hundingsbane were considered to have been reborn as another Helgi and valkyrie couple; Helgi as Helgi Haddingjaskati and Sigrún as the daughter of Halfdan—the valkyrie Kára. According to the epilogue, further information about the two can be found in the work Káruljóð, which has not survived.[1]

The name Kára either means "the wild, stormy one" (based on Old Norse afkárr, meaning "wild") or "curl" or "the curly one" (from Old Norse kárr). Otto Höfler theorizes a connection between the "curl" etymology and the Odinic cult name Odinkar that appears in runic inscriptions, which means "the one with the (long?) Odin's curls."[2]

Notes
  1. Larrington (1999:141).
  2. Simek (2007:182) citing Höfler (1952).
gollark: What I did when I wanted secure GPS was to run an early AGPS-type thing over SPUDNET, which guarantees no spoofing via out of game websocket stuff.
gollark: Other way round I believe?
gollark: No, yours actually includes useful things like the UI library and not just "hahaha look I have made a desktop and application launch menu".
gollark: https://gist.github.com/SquidDev/6fa444798bbe01f4068bf82a76ac273f
gollark: It's not even copying Windows, which might be *slightly* useful (it has *some* good bits) as much as just the obvious user visible bits.

References
  • Höfler, Otto (1952). Germanisches Sakralkönigtum. Tübingen, Münster, Köln.
  • Larrington, Carolyne (Trans.) (1999). The Poetic Edda. Oxford World's Classics. ISBN 0-19-283946-2
  • Simek, Rudolf (2007) translated by Angela Hall. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. D.S. Brewer ISBN 0-85991-513-1
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.