Hörgr

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A hörgr (Old Norse, plural hörgar) or hearg (Old English) was a type of altar or cult site,
possibly consisting of a heap of stones, used in Norse religion, as opposed to a roofed hall
used as a hof (temple).

The Old Norse term is attested in both the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, in the sagas of
Icelanders, skaldic poetry, its Old English cognate in Beowulf. The word is also reflected in
various place names (in English placenames as harrow), often in connection with Germanic
deities.

Contents
 1 Etymology
 2 Old Norse tradition
o 2.1 Literary
o 2.2 Epigraphic
o 2.3 Toponymy
 3 Old English tradition
 4 Notes
 5 References

Etymology
Old Norse hǫrgr means "altar, sanctuary"; Old English hearg "holy grove; temple, idol".[1]
and Old High German harug continue a Proto-Germanic *harugaz, possibly cognate with
Insular Celtic carrac "cliff".[2]

Old Norse tradition

Literary

The term hörgr is used three times in poems collected in the Poetic Edda. In a stanza early in
the poem Völuspá, the völva says that early in the mythological timeline, the gods met
together at the location of Iðavöllr and constructed a hörgr and a hof (Henry Adams Bellows
and Ursula Dronke here gloss hörgr as "temples"):

Henry Adams Bellows

Old Norse:
Hittoz æsir á Iðavelli,
þeir er hǫrg ok hof
hátimbroðo.[3]
translation:
At Ithavoll met the
mighty gods;
Shrines and temples
they timbered high;[4]
Ursula Dronke translation:
Æsir met on Eddying
Plain
they who built towering
altars and temples.[3]
In the poem Vafþrúðnismál Gagnráðr (the god Odin in disguise) engages in a game of wits
with the jötunn Vafþrúðnir. Gagnráðr asks Vafþrúðnir whence the Van god Njörðr came, for
though he rules over many hofs and hörgar, Njörðr was not raised among the Æsir (Benjamin
Thorpe here glosses hörgr with "offer-steads" and Bellows glosses with "shrines"):

Henry Adams Bellows translation:

Benjamin Thorpe translation:

Tenth answer me now, if thou

Tell me tenthly, since thou all the
knowest all
origin
The fate that is fixed for the gods:
of the gods knowest, Vafthrudnir!
Whence came up Njorth to the kin of
whence Niörd came among the Æsir's
the gods,—
sons?
(Rich in temples and shrines he
O'er fanes and offer-steads he rules by
rules,—)
hundreds,
Though of gods he was never
yet he was not among the Æsir born.[5]
begot?[6]

In the poem Hyndluljóð, the goddess Freyja speaks favorably of Óttar for having worshiped
her so faithfully by using a hörgr. Freyja details that the hörgr is constructed of a heap of
stones, and that Óttar very commonly reddened these stones with sacrificial blood (Thorpe
glosses hörgr with "offer-stead", Bellows with "shrine", and Orchard with "altar"):

Andy Orchard
translation:
Benjamin Thorpe He made me a high
translation:
Henry Adams Bellows altar
An offer-stead to me
translation: of heaped-up
he raised,
For me a shrine of stones stones:
with stones
he made, the gathered rocks
constructed;
And now to glass the have grown all
now is the stone
rock has grown; bloody,
as glass become.
Oft with the blood of and he reddened
With the blood of
beasts was it red; them again
oxen
In the goddesses ever did with the fresh blood
he newly sprinkled it.
Ottar trust.[8] of cows;
Ottar ever trusted the
Ottar has always
Asyniur.[7]
had faith in the
ásynjur.[9]

Epigraphic

The place name Salhøgum that is mentioned on a 9th-century Danish runestone known as the
Snoldelev Stone has a literal translation which combines Old Norse sal meaning "hall" with
hörgar "mounds," to form "on the hall mounds," suggesting a place with a room where
official meetings took place.[10] The inscription states that the man Gunnvaldr is the þulaR of
Salhøgum, which as been identified as referring to the modern town Salløv, which was in the
vicinity of the original site of the runestone.[11]

Toponymy
Many place names in Iceland and Scandinavia contain the word hörgr or hörgur, such as
Hörgá and Hörgsdalur in Iceland and Harg in Sweden. When Willibrord Christianized the
Netherlands (~700 AD) the church of Vlaardingen had a dependency in Harago/Hargan,
currently named Harga. This indicates that near those places there was some kind of religious
building in medieval times.[12]

Old English tradition

In the interpretation of Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Paganism (1992), hearg refers to "a special type
of religious site, one that occupied a prominent position on high land and was a communal
place of worship for a specific group of people, a tribe or folk group, perhaps at particular
times of the year", while a weoh, by contrast, was merely a small shrine by the wayside.

Beowulf has the compound hærgtrafum in the so-called "Christian excursus" (lines 175–
178a), translated as "tabernacles of idols" by Hall (1950).[13]

Following the regular evolution of English phonology, Old English hearg has become
harrow in modern English placenames (unrelated to the homophone harrow "agricultural
implement"). The London Borough of Harrow derives its name from a temple on Harrow
Hill, where St. Mary's Church stands today. The name of Harrow on the Hill (Harewe atte
Hulle) was adopted into Latin as Herga super montem; the Latinized form of the Old English
name is preserved in the name of Herga Road in Harrow.[14][15]

Notes
1.

 Simek (2007:156).
  Gerhard Köbler, Germanisches Wörterbuch, 5th ed. (2014). Pokorny (1959) s.v. "3. kar-
'hard'".
  Dronke (1997:8).
  Bellows (1936:5).
  Thorpe (1866:16).
  Bellows (1923:79).
  Thorpe (1866:108).
  Bellows (1936:221).
  Orchard (1997:89).
  Sundqvist (2009:660-661)
  Peterson (2002).
  Kvaran (2006).
  Yasuharu Eto, "Hearg and weoh in Beowulf, ll. 175-8a" The Bulletin of the Japanese
Association for Studies in the History of the English Language, 2007, 15-7.
  Briggs, Keith "Harrow", Journal of the English Place-name Society, volume 42 (2010),
43-64

15.  Room, Adrian: “Dictionary of Place-Names in the British Isles”, Bloomsbury,

1988. ISBN 0-7475-0170-X
References
 Bellows, Henry Adams (Trans.) (1936). The Poetic Edda. Princeton University Press.
New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation.
 Bellows, Henry Adams (Trans.) (1923). The Poetic Edda. American-Scandinavian
Foundation.
 Dronke, Ursula (Trans.) (1997). The Poetic Edda: Volume II: Mythological Poems.
Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-811181-9
 Kvaran, Guðrún (May 29, 2006). "Hvað þýðir orðið hörgur?." Vísindavefurinn.
 Orchard, Andy (1997). Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend. Cassell. ISBN 0-304-
34520-2
 Peterson, Lena (2002). Nordisk runnamslexikon. Swedish Institute for Linguistics and
Heritage (Institutet för språk och folkminnen).
 Simek, Rudolf (2007) translated by Angela Hall. Dictionary of Northern Mythology.
D.S. Brewer. ISBN 0-85991-513-1
 Sundqvist, Olof (2009). "The Hanging, the Nine Nights, and the "Precious
Knowledge"". In Heizmann, Wilhelm; Beck, Heinrich. Analecta Septentrionalia.
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-021869-5.
 Thorpe, Benjamin (Trans.) (1866). Edda Sæmundar Hinns Frôða: The Edda of
Sæmund the Learned. Part I. London: Trübner & Co.

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Norse mythology
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