PIE gods and the word "dwarf"

On Jul 7, 2:43 am, Trond Engen <trond...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My previous post was about *dvor (~courtyard) and *dver (door) lines.

I know. I drift.

Your materials are dealing with the etymology of English "dwarf" which
is another subject. If "dwarf" is the actual question then it is not
posed to the right person alas. I am not a great specialist in Anglo-
Saxon comparative linguistics. My field of interest are PIE
reconstructions so 6,000-4,000 B.C.

And I am nobody.

IMO that's way too rough to say about yourself. :-) :-|

....

And what's more, the same deities were worshipped under different names
in different localities, occasionally developing different
characteristics and splitting into separate gods, maybe merging with
some other god in the process.

Right.
Roughly XVIII B.C. king of Kussar Annitas brought all Hittite forces
to Hattusas, the capital of Hatti people. They took and fully
destroyed Hattusas and eliminated Hatti who were the original local
population of this part of Asia Minor. That puts the beginning of the
Indo-European Hettite Empire (the autochthonic Hatti population was
speaking an ergatic language typologically similar to some Caucasus
languages). In the "Inscription of Annitas" - the oldest authentic
text written in an IE-family language btw - Annitas says:
I took it at the night time by assault
And I planted bad grass on its place
If any of kings after my kingdom
Tries to restore Hattusas:
Shall he be punished by THUNDER.GOD
Hattusas still was soon restored and became the capital of the Hettite
Empire because its location was too good for a capital. What is
interesting to us: the only knowledge we have about the extinct Hatti
language is coming from Hittite clay tablets with sacral texts for the
goddess of the moon. This goddess was worshiped by Hatti but the
invaders took full care of her: not only by keeping the necessary
ceremonies but even by keeping the original language of these
ceremonies. "-Who knows? Maybe if we spell her glory in our language -
she will not understand us and she will get upset?" Just think about
it: the whole nation is killed or taken into slavery and adsorbed in a
few generations; bad grass is planted on places of their cities. At
the same time eight centuries in the row after that, until the very
end of the Hittite Empire, Hittite clerics had special days to worship
a goddess of that eliminated nation. Eight centuries these clerics
carefully made new copies of transcribed texts of a language no one
knew anymore, of a language with a structure totally alien to any of
accusative IE languages. Eight centuries they memorized these
transcriptions - without any idea what a particular syllable would
mean - to spell them at the necessary day of the year in their
temples.
For us, surrounded by modern monotheistic religions, knowing the times
of religious wars this maybe seems like insane - but this was the
"mindset" of the oldest time.
First of all, gods were pretty much by themselves: it was some
"superior power tribe" on the sky and they didn't care too much what
tribe is currently ruling down on the earth. In any shall case the
full respect has to be shown to each known god - or else...
Secondly, old people were "religious" in the sense once used by
St.Paul for Athene's people: because besides hundreds of known gods
they also admitted the existence of unknown to them - yet - gods
("because who can really see and count all of them there, behind the
clouds?"). So their pantheon was always readily open for new names.
"If some other tribe worships a god we don't know about then it is not
a competitor to our gods. It just means that they knew another name
from behind the clouds, a name we somehow missed so far. How it is
clear why the harvest was so bad - the missed god got upset; lucky we
can repair the situation now" :-)
And finally their religion was something what one could see as a form
of satanism from the modern point of view :-) Namely they oftenly paid
a bigger respect and they spent bigger efforts (giving, ceremonies) to
malicious and destructive gods - rather than to "good" gods.
"- Good gods do not touch me if I don't touch them, so just be
respectful and be happy. It is another case with malicious gods, they
are active and they can make bad to anyone - just because. So I have
to put extra efforts so their destructive power would fail onto anyone
else but not on me (my family, my people, my kingdom etc.)"

All this takes us away from the "dwarf" question - but it is on
subject of PIE / IE deities. For the word "dwarf" etymology I am just
not qualified. As a pure speculation from my side I dare to say:

IMHO dwarfs are the personified fear of ancient miners: the fear of
being underground, of dark enclosed space, the fear of being buried
here, do not find your way back to the sunlight. So very close to much
more modern tommyknockers, scaring coal miners in England. Ancient
pantheons are mainly consisting of such personified - or even
impersonated sometimes- fears: fear of death, fear of sickness, fear
of forest, of thunder, of unknown place etc.

"dwarfs love treasures" would be then a standard naive explanation for
different givings which ancient miners could leave in mines. "Whis god
prefers that - so that must be in the giving" is an age old way "to
form the giving basket" for a particular deity. If we don't find these
givings in old mines then it could be explained in the same way why
one rarely finds any treasures in ancient tombs: because they were
stolen long time ago.

.

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