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I'm editing out the link of the Burzum's guy taxt. It's a racist text about how the aryan race from scandinavia will conquer the world. Right. 200.222.3.3 ( talk) 16:20, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
- It is a shame you have removed the link. If you took the time to read what Varg Vikernes has to say it would be clear it has nothing to do with "how the aryan race from scandinavia will conquer the world". IMHO you have gone too far with your statement. The section I think you have refered to is:
"The evolutionary record of humanity reaches beyond the shadows of the Polar race, the fog-shapes of the Hyperborean race, the androgynous Lemurian race of giants, the giants of the Atlantic race and the creative man of the Aryan race (see my second book, Germansk mytologi og verdensanskuelse for more details on this).
In our evolutionary-chain, there are seven races; the five mentioned above and two others. Only the seventh is complete and in order to understand and develop the technology, we need to bring the universe to a higher evolutionary level.
The sixth race will be called the solar race and will consist of pure Aryans with a highly developed intelligence and body. All true folk-companions shall join together in Scandinavia; or will be bound to Scandinavia through political and military alliances from their own native countries.
The new Europe will, in other words, be led and run from Scandinavia - the High-fortress of the Aryan tribe. Schools and other educational centers shall be built in a heathen Scandinavia, and kinsmen from all over the world - but foremost from Europe and the USA - will migrate there to learn the thought of Irminsûl."
- The man has simply stated his own thoughts. Only a meek fool would say this is racist. 59.167.122.19 ( talk) 02:33, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
Hello Dysmorodrepanis ( talk · contribs). I noticed you've recently reworked this article, which it, of course, needed. However, I think more development here needs to be done in a neutral matter. What do you say we work together and put together the best article on the subject on the internet?
First,I recommend that we reformat the article. Generally, I find it to be very helpful to first go through all of the known attestations of the subject matter (in this case the Irminsul and Irmin) and state them up front - I think this is the best way to dispel any nonsense that may be surrounding subjects in these quarters. Then we ought to follow the attestations up them up with whatever theories may surround that particular detail and then, after the sources are listed, whatever theories and speculation may exist around the subject matter. :bloodofox: ( talk) 05:48, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
- Hehe, my main purpose was to wake some Project guys because I only have passing interest in the subject. I salute your changes to my changes, except in one case. I have collected a bit of material (the old version was basically what I learned from... eh everybody. I grew up in that neck of the woods); see below.
- The one problem illustrates a main issue with the topic. The intro sounds NPOV versus my rant, but actually it's... well, not POV but clearly false. (If I had found the situation to be thus, I'd have probably used very much the same wording in fact)
- Because the Irminsul is certainly not the subject of any significant effort of "an amount of scholarly discourse and speculation." Arnold, Halle and less than a handful of others are apparently the only regular workers in the field. Is there a SOP to show the reader that research is essentially a 4-people business cranking out an astounding 2 or so papers per decade that give somewhat more info than a single half-sentence? Check Google Scholar for irminsul in sundry combos (+externsteine, eresburg, try erminsul etc) and you get 500 or so hits at all, of which something like 95% is drivel or one line to the effect that the Irminsul was somewhere close to the Eresburg (apparently "host's castle", cf Heeresburg). Source basically Royal Annals. One crux in encyclopedias is the lack of ways to express that mankind is essentially ignorant about the true nature of an issue, and nobody really does someting against it.
- The overview of the corpus concerning (the) Irminsul(s) is devastating. 90% of "common wisdom" go back to Teudt, and this man surely seems worthy of shooting down. The German article is revealing here, and a total hoot... he got kicked out of Ahnenerbe for being a misanthrope and too much of a crackpot, which is quite a feat ;-P and says a lot about his scientific mettle. About how Teudt et al basically crafted the modern-age Irminsul more or less out of thin air in 1929-1936, see also doi: 10.1017/S1380203805001601, and doi: 10.1017/S1380203805001595 for a comment on the quality of Nazi archaeology and "archaeology". Note Teudt is generally not acknowledged as an archaeologist by any modern archaeologist; he is universally acknowledged as one of the worst disgraces to the science ever (there is one weakly apologetic book by IIRC a relative or a friend of a relative, and even that finds it easier to exonerate his Nazi leanings than his bad work ethos). In a nutshell, he created the modern image of the Externsteine and the Irminsul. And when that was realized, research was killed dead. It's a bunch of folks in 3 podunk country museums or so who research anything even remotely pertaining to the Irminsul. Teudt gave the topic of "Engerian" Saxon archaeology such a bad name that it was imagined to destroyed careers if touched. See also the summary by Arnold here and de:Externsteine and Halle's 2002 work (I think some reviews of it are around on the Web, but it's one of those podunk country museum publications.
- Halle is universally praised as an authority in the de:Diskussion:Wilhelm Teudt, where a copyist error in her 2002 book is dissected (interesting read. These people really seem to be genuinely interested in the article and know their biz, which is not too frequent in the de:). Arnold makes some de->en mistakes sometimes. Like the Irminsul as "main Saxon saint" (de: Heiliger) ="sanctuary" (de: Heiligtum)?
- (Irminsul was certainly imagined as a folk or cultural hero in Late Early Modern times - see de:Irminsul for discussion, source and "life reconstruction" ;-) )
- Matthes & Speckner (1997) - I thought that this was good, it is one of those "authoritative" sources, i.e. a thorough monograph-paper on the topic of the de:Kreuzabnahmerelief an den Externsteinen. But I found some quotes and reviews which make it look not too reliable; to interpret the Sanhedrin Nikodemus who was basically a nice guy of no special importance as a Christian "subjugator of the people" by garbling a translation is not a mistake I as a biologist with half-knowledge of Latin and some basic Greek would make. But Arnold makes similar mistakes too - only they do not form a keystone in a theory of hers.
- Unfortunately, the only modern claim that argues for the Externsteine relief as temporally close to the Irminsul's destruction is this.
- The de:Irminsul article has some more info (one more good original source at least IIRC) but also a bunch of long-winded and ill-sourced rather fatuous discussions where Irminsuls might masquerade in Christian art. I say weak because the worship of pillar-like objects, trunks or columns is entirely homoplasious across cultures and ages.
- This is a Nazi-era article by a guy who is generally not regarded as one who sold his science for politics and a tie pin but as a somewhat cranky but very competent historian of post-Christianization art. His bottom line is "the Bernardsäule is not based on the Irminsul" which given it ran kinda contrary to mainstream science at that time was apparently a case he felt comfortably safe of to state it so boldly. And the German article makes also no mention of that theory, except in passing and seemingly as if nobody has been taken it seriously for like 70 years or so.
Thanks! There certainly is a lot of speculation and half-truths surrounding the subject. Creating a solidly referenced and straight-forward article here will help sort some things out and, along the way, maybe we can learn a thing or two. The beauty of Wikipedia!
About the introduction, while the subject hasn't attracted a huge amount of scholarly interest, anyone writing about the Germanic peoples will probably mention the Irminsul. As you know, figures like Jacob Grimm and Eugene Goblet d'Alviella (where most of this information comes from) are certainly very notable figures, so I think that is probably enough alone for us to say something like what we have in the introduction at the moment - it doesn't say there's a huge amount of scholarly work around the subject, just that it is a topic of some scholarly interest.
One thing I really stress in the articles I put work into is primary sources. I like to really dig up the primary sources of a subject and present them before I present the theories surrounding the subject - I find that this is the best way to present things like this. Too often, the primary sources are danced around and subsequently this gives rise to elaboration and half-truths seen through someone else's monocle. So, I think we ought to dig up every primary source regarding the Irminsul and put it in the "Attestations" section in a chronological manner. So, right now, I am trying to dig up all these mentions and then afterwards will flesh all the other sections out.
About Teudt, we have to remain neutral about him - a note mentioning that he provided no evidence to back his claim is probably enough for most people to get the idea. We also need to make sure his work doesn't make its way into anywhere else but the "Extersteine" section (like the rest of the theories) so people know very clearly what is attested and what is conjecture.
This seems to be a problem with the German Wikipedia article on the subject - they've got theories about Völuspá, Yggdrasil, Thor's Oak, and the Sacred tree at Uppsala mixed in with the primary sources, whereas it should really be sectioned off into the "theories" section because, while there is obviously some sort of connection, the connection is not directly attested. :bloodofox: ( talk) 00:33, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
I have some of what was above expanded, it is now below.
Dysmorodrepanis (
talk) 07:30, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
- The Royal Annals translation (I updated the German versions I found to match the original text as closely as I could) runs:
"And subsequently [after the council in Worms, Charlemagne] went for the first time into the Saxon lands, captured the castle of Eresburg, and went on as far as to the Irminsul and destroyed that idol and seized and brought back the gold and silver that he found there. And there was a great drought, so that there was a lack of water at the aforementioned locality, where the Irminsul stood; and when [Charlemagne] wanted to stay two or three days to destroy that idol he had no water, then suddenly due to the generousity of God at mid-day when the whole army was resting [the next bit I'm not 100% sure about] there sprang fourth in a streambed a lot of water that nobody had ever seen there before [i.e. the spring had not been active previously], and the whole army was sufficiently supplied. Then [Charlemagne] went over [to?] the Weser and made a ceasefire/truce [? placitum] with the Saxons and received 12 hostages and returned to Frankish lands."
- I do not have the original Latin text of the Einhardsannalen, a later version of the Annals (though probably not by Einhard. It may be it was him, but it is generally considered another fancy idea without factual evidence it seems). I try construct it from the German version, but the differences seem very severe to me, perhaps the German text is not accurate:
"And after the council in Worms, Charlemagne decided to wage war upon the Saxons; and he went forthwith and devastated everything with fire and sword, captured the castle of Eresburg, and destroyed the idol that the Saxons call Irminsul. And as he took three days [to destroy the idol] it occurred that due to the constant sunny weather all brooks and springs at the locality dried up and no water was to be had. So that the army would no longer suffer from thirst it happened, due to divine interference as is believed, that one day when everybody was resting at mid-day as usual there sprang from the mountain near which the army camped such a quantity of water into a forest creek's bed that the whole army had sufficient. After the idol was destroyed, the king travelled to the Weser and had 12 hostages delivered to him by the Saxons. Then he returned to the Frankish lands."
- The difference between these two accounts is 30 years at best.
- The veracity of the water issue is disputed. Either Charlemagne was generally rather unawares of the supply situation in the Saxon Wars, or his scribes had a penchant for using the "water springs forth" miracle as an allegory; apparently it is not the only time that such an event is reported. Or given that it only seems to be reported once in the original source, perhaps it indeed happened at the destruction of the Irminsul, and was copied later on to different events. It is fairly certain that they stayed at the Irminsul site for 2-3 days, but why is less clear.
- This is a graduate student's last or last-but-one term paper, it's not very interesting except it has a very interesting map giving an idea of the setup, especially if you add this which is later but has more details. The 772 campain probably came from rather due south, as Charlemagne had had wintered in Herstal but held council of war in Worms. The Sauerland and Rothaargebirge is still very much rolling hills with dense woods, and was back then essentially uninhabited except for the occasional farmstead here and there.
- Had Charlemagne gone downriver and bushwhacked his way to the Eresburg from W, it would have been a MAJOR campaign, requiring dedicated preparations. The reports would read like the second (775) campaign where they in fact travelled more or less the de:Kaiserroute after setting out from Cologne immediately after leaving winter quarters at Düren, taking a route basically E straight through the southwestern part of the Saxon lands. They razed the de:Sigiburg before coming to the ruins of the Eresburg.
- The Kaiserweg bypases the Eresburg by some 20-25 km to the NW; they apparently took a detour to rebuild the defence works and leave a garrison in 775, but whereas the 772 campaign was launched against the "Engerns", the 775 campaign was launched against the "Engerns" and "Westphalians".
- Altogether the reports on 772 give the impression to have taken not much longer then two or three weeks after crossing the border (1-2 to Eresburg, 1-2 at Eresburg, say 2-3 to the Irminsul, 2-3 at the Irminsul, generously giving a full 1-2 weeks for the way to the Weser and back to the border). The Eresburg was reaedificavit ("rebuilt") by Charlemagne in 775 and fought over in 776; it must have been in ruins 772-775.
- de:Sachsenkriege (Karl der Große) seems to be in error. The Royal Annals mention the destruction of the Hoohseoburg in 743, whereas the de: article claims it for 772. The hottest locations for the Hoohseoburg are Watenstedt near Salzgitter and Seeburg, Saxony-Anhalt) and the Royal Annals make it quite clear that Charlemagne did not go there (far east of the Weser) in 772.
- The 772 does not seem to have been a very violent or well-prepared campaign at all, and the significance of the destruction of the Irminsul ist certainly not suggested to have been large by the early Annals' account. The whole affair seems to have been tit-for-tat border raids at that time. Eresburg was coepit apparently without a siege, perhaps not even with a major battle - Widukind chose not to make a stand at all in 772; he simply tried to raze Fricdislar ( Fritzlar) in revenge the next year. Things only got to the point of full-blown war in 774/775, if the original Annals are to be believed.
- In any case, from Worms to Eresburg the shortest and safest route was across the Taunus on the lange Hessen/ Weinstraße/ de:Rennstraße (see also de:Hünerstraße) and then between Taunus and Vogelsberg along the Westfalenweg via Angelburg. TheWestfalenweg (or whatever the roadway was called then - these names are all referring to the particular roads that were established post-Charlemagne) actually is very interesting, as it must have passed through the de:Ederbergland, then skirting the Sauerland's eastern boundary or running along its southeastern slope, possibly via Fritzlar, and passed through Franconian territory all the way until it crossed the border in the vicinity of Bad Arolsen - almost certainly within spitting distance of the Eresburg but perhaps passing east of it to get to Paderborn, with the Eresburg being either in the angle between the main W-E and N-S roads of the region (if they met in Paderborn) or near where they met (if they met SW of Paderborn already).
- (But this is a matter of secondary interest for the Eresburg article; the topography leaves little other way, but the Westfalenweg is not a subject of present-day scientific interest at all. It is likely to be discussed in some monograph on ancient roads, perhaps Landau (1958), or Dreyer-Eimbecke (1989), or on the Hessian hinterlands, e.g. Lennarz (1973))
- This is nice. It gives the Thietmar von Merseburg source, which states that a "church of St Peter" was in 938 where the Irminsul used to be at "Ehresburg". This might be the source to which the Eresburg location fix seems to go back to. "Ehresburg" literally means "honor castle" which looks like a plausible Frankish renaming - but the Externsteine look like a plausible sacred site... See also below.
- Here is a most significant find, it contains apparently much of the original sources. The paper discusses the Dwarf Beech which we can safely say (contra the authors) has nothing to do with the Irminsul because its trunk is simply not the one you'd want ;-) (see Dwarf Beech article -> Commons). The authors mention a source that claims Irminsuls as "trees of life" have been found on all sorts of objects e.g. in Etruria and Ireland - and we can be quite certain that this is bunk also insofar as that the more parsimonious assumption is that the Irminsul was a Saxon relic sui generis rather than something ripped off from Goidelics or Etruscans.
- Note the sources for the claim that une figure de l'Irminsul gravée is found at the Externsteine.
- On a confondu Erenburg avec Eresburg, Eresberg et avec un Erenbourg proche de Pfiffligheim sur Pfrimm. So caveat emptor. Whoever put the Irminsul at Pfiffligheim an der Pfrimm - a suburb of Worms today and Charlemagne's backyard of sorts back then - can obviously be disregarded as a source. Except if they have something really really worthwhile to say.
- More on the sources below. If you like, simply nick them from the paper, check for spelling errors or add warning, and ref them in. Ideally w/fulltext - perhaps add "check" tag to each unchecked one.
- Grimm gives nice material, but his etymological analysis apparently blows at elast in part. I have found no modern source who would seem to subscribe to his etymology of Osning, and the best I can come up with is something along the lines of "Aesir forest". In any case, this late 19th century source already finds it weak. Asanbrugg ( Osnabrück) can also be explained as "bridge over the Hase" which would make the Osning simply the Hase mountains; it seems certain that the town and the range are etymologically tied together but nothing more can be said with certainty.
- You get all sorts of weird stuff. The External Link is one example, maintains matter-of-factly that the Externsteine were a sacred site and baring all sorts of half-knowledge, but it has a decently sourced discussion of the Irmin/Ziu issue.
- You'll note the citations I gave for the Kaiserchronik. There are others on the Web referring to the Massmann edition which is the oldest and though pretty decent not the one considered best as a source. But the verse numbers of the third and either the second or the first bit are wrong! Nobody ever bothered to check them out. That was the version that I corrected to the present one (Funnily, Massmann's orthography is, as far as I checked, copied without errors).
- This, has a similar mixture of shaky stuff, utter bullshit, and some genuinely good pieces. The author has read and understood the Royal Annals or read someone who did. But fanum et locum eorum famosum Irminsul is not from the original Royal Annals. aurum et argentum , quod ibi repperit, abstulit is, except it's vel and not et. rivi ac fontes and iuxta montem , qui castris erat contiguus are also absent from the original text. I think they derive from the Einhardsannalen. But the analysis of the evidence, however unreliable the source of the evidence may be, is quite fascinating. I would actually tend to agree with the Iburg location, as the original annals mention that the Irminsul was not at the Eresburg. The water issue is interesting - to dry up the Diemel (which runs by the Eresburg) you need a superhot summer, IIRC it was nearly dried up in 2003. I cayaked down part of it some other year and in normal years, it's a nice strong river all year round.
- But on the other hand, Iburg may be the castro, quod dicitur Iuberg from the 753 Royal Annals.
- The Yburg etymology of the Web article is likely to be farcical. Yggdrasil does not mean "Yew tree", and the Saxon word for the Common Yew was with near certainty i[g]wa (cf. German Eibe) and not iggr or yggr which means "the terrible one". Though the words may well trace back to a common root (yew certainly is toxic enough to qualify as a "terrible tree"), they had separated for good there and then.
- The miraculous spring is often identified with the Bullerborn/Bollerborn near Altenbeken (e.g. de:Eresburg). This article indicates "the matter-of-fact Ledebur" as the origin of that claim. This would seem to be Leopold von Ledebur and I have no idea what he based this identification on, but the proposed Irminsul location closest to the Bullerborn is the Externsteine which is 11 km north as the raven flies but across the southern Osning as the Frankish spearman walks. Highly unlikely as the original Royal Annals seem to place the spring in the immediate vicinity of the loco, ubi Ermensul stabat. So the whole Bullerborn case is tenuous to the extreme. Unabashed, the de: article goes "From other sources[not cited], we know[yeah right] that he made camp at the Bullerborn...". Such "reasoning" is typical for the whole mess.
- In concluson, my impression is:
- The Irminsul was a decorated tree trunk, probably without an idol on top. As a biologist by trade, I find the notion that it was a trunk of a Dwarf Beech or a Common Yew preposterous. People who propose this have never cared to check out those taxa in the wild. If I had to choose a candidate simply from a botanical point of view, it would be Common Ash first, with European Silver Fir or Norway Spruce as an astoundingly distant second and Pedunculate Oak or Sessile Oak as a very remote third (despite what common wisdom has, oaks were never a particularly "Germanic" tree until the Modern Era). The point is that there are not that many tree species in the region whose trunks could be turned into an irmin sul. They need to be large and straight, and the Common Ash simply holds the record in Central Europe for heigth and straightness of trunk. And lo and behold, the Völuspá actually has:
Ask veit ek standa / heitir Yggdrasill...
- And though the worship of long erect objects is too commonplace to assume that any two of them are genetically related, the idea that Yggdrasil and the Irminsul share a common origin is entirely reasonable. Though it would be necessary to determine the possible Celtic influence (which would favor oaks).
- It is really possible that there was more than one, though they were not common. For one thing, had every major settlement had one, neither the accumulation of booty at the Irminsul destroyed in 772, nor the desire of Charlemagne to take 2-3 days for destroying the site make sense. If it was so overarchingly important to the Saxons, neither their somewhat lacklustre reaction ("oh you just razed our most sacred site to the ground, well, let's call it a truce and here's some hostages to take back with you." in the source closest in time to the actual event) nor that Charlemagne did not think of withdrawing his somewhat improvised expedition that apparently lacked both means and intent to conquer but pushed on for some more dozen kilometers make sense. The entire Royal Annals story about the 772 affair sounds more like Kinmont Willie’s Raid than like the Great Patriotic War. Certainly, the Christian scribes are conspicuously silent about the propagandistic consequences of razing the Irminsul, if it indeed had been the fulcrum of Saxon religion.
- Altogether, a reasonable explanation was that either every main Saxon tribe or region had their Irminsul (giving one or two handfuls altogether perhaps), in which case the one destroyed in 772 was the one of the "Engerns". Or that it was a one-of-a-kind thing like Thor's Oak, significant but not all-important. A sacred site of major importance, a popular place of pilgrimage, but not the "spriritual heart of Saxendom" that it is sometimes depicted as.
- The Iburg is the location that least conflicts with the collected accounts - preliminarily.
- I am starting to seriously doubt whether the Eresburg is a good candidate. There are too many conflicts with the contemporary sources.
- Perhaps the de:Desenberg is a better or even the best candidate. It's a nice singular round hill in a flat landscape 25 km ENE of the Eresburg, the hilltop (where de:Burg Desenberg is today) was supposedly fortified as early as 766. I have not checked it out, but it is interesting to note that in an 1168 siege of the castle, the water supply was apparently a problem factor (the besiegers thought that disrupting it would give them an early victory). Of course, the area was by and large wooded all over in Saxon times. The hill's name may or may not mean "mountain of the Idisi" (of Merseburg Incantations fame) which may or may not suggest for or against locating the Irminsul site. Altogether it looks highly promising (it happens to be the only candidate location that you'll pass when you attempt to go from the Eresburg to the Weser by the shortest distance) but among the better candidates it is also the least-studied it seems.
- There are a few other candidates, but I have not checked them out.
- The Iburg church was dedicated to St Peter, the Eresburg church was dedicated to St Peter and St Paul. There seems to have been a lot of brouhaha about both of these in the late 8th/early 9th century CE and the clerics seem to have considered them more important than others.
- The French text's sources:
- 1: straightforward Royal Annals as per above.
- 2: Einhardsannalen. It seems that the text may indeed be as divergent as it is above.
- 3: Rudolf von Fulda. Uses plural forms. Says "tree trunk" explicity. But is part of a general discussion of sacred trees and sacred springs.
- 4: Annalium de gestis Caroli Magni. General impression of a heavily decorated (gold/silver anyone?) tree trunk.
- 5: Annales St-Amandi. Uninformative.
- 6: Chronicon Laurissense breve = Annales Laurissenses minores. Perhaps the original source for the suggestion that the Irminsul was THE Saxon national relic: fanum et lucum eorum famosum Irminsul
- 7: Annales Moselani/Annales Nazariani. Concise version of Royal Annals
- 8: Annales Petaviani. Irminsul is given as a toponym not as name of an object.
- Briefly, what Irminsul was understood to mean (the de: article is very good for material on this, although it has also a lot of stuff which is entirely unconvincing as I noted above):
- Late Migration Period: as per Royal Annals
- Early Middle Ages: a generic pedestal for objects of veneration (as per Kaiserchronik)
- Late Middle Ages to Early Modern Era: a generic pedestal for a statue of "Mercury/Mars" (= Woden)
- Early-mid Modern Era: a Saxon/Lower Saxon cultural hero (named "Irminsul" or "Irminsula" initially, becoming "Irmin" or "Irmingod" [sic] in the 19th century)
- mid-19th century - c.1930s: a pedestal for a statue of the "Saxon national deity" "Irmin"
- since 1929: a structure or structures like on the Externsteine relief that stood at Externsteine or Eresburg and perhaps somewhere else and represented a tree of life, and
- towards the late 20th century alternatively: a (probably) wooden column located somewhere between the Eresburg and the Weser but not at the Externsteine, which represented a world pillar. Dysmorodrepanis ( talk) 05:36, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
- The Teudt issue is tricky. It may be that by being too ostensibly NPOV we're already being very POV. My observations are
- a) I have not found any living scientist who considers Teudt a scientist in a citeable publication.
- b) I had some university course on Nazi biology (not hardcore stuff, more like Emil Abderhalden and Ernst Lehmann) and though these guys might ostensibly fall in the same category as Teudt, the reaction of the scientific community differs. I cannot remember ever reading terms like "‘lunatic fringe’ of archaeology", "implausible and unscientific theories", "pseudo-archaeologists", "often confused with responsible, objective and critical German research" (a 1936 opinion; the guy risked his neck for speaking out as he basically accused Himmler of promoting irresponsible, subjective and uncritical research), "fanatic dreamer" (another quote by contemporaries), "‘astro-archaeologist’", "völkisch fantasy", "displacement of a technical scholarly problem into the political arena" etc.
- This name-calling is all by serious and professional academics. I'm not an archaeologist, but IIRC the rule-of-thumb is that calling a colleague's find and their interpretations "supposed" (as in "the supposed Varus battlefield at Kalkrieser Berg" or "the supposed town around Hisarlik") is the point where you start to violate the social mores. That archaeologists who did not care much about politics actually risked their lives to denounce someone is I think rather unique among Third Reich science and pseudo-science; I have never seen scientists unite in such acrimony. Simply put, this is not normal.
- A pretty simple decider exists actually: if Jan Udo Holey or Guido von List do not warrant considerations as scientists "sometimes" accused of malpractice, then Teudt does not warrant either. Peer-reviwed citations to that effect can be provided from about 1930 onwards, whereas such citations to the contrary do not exist after the early 1940s.
- But there is another way, which is very much more work (for me) but has a perverse kind of attractiveness (to me):
- The de: article on Teudt is rather comprehensive and the guys who wrote it seem to be well versed in the issues of archaeology and scientific research.
- So Teudt could be dropped out of the article altogether except as a note that the Externsteine theory was thought out by him and that no evidence whatsoever was ever provided.
- The ppl on de: could be asked to transfer their article to en:. A relative of mine visits the Lippisches Staatsarchiv every now and then, as he likes to write the odd piece on regional history (he's a trained historian but never went professional). The de: editors might be interested in some stuff about any topic of Lippe's regional history that happens to strike their fancy but is hard to get if you don't live in the Detmold region and don't have a doctoral degree, and I could try and get it acquired for them.
- POV problems would be avoided altogether beause the issue is deferred to the biography article where it cvan be discussed in all details and facets
- en: would get a stub expanded to a largish article
- And some dedicated editors on de: would get some new exciting (more or less) source material thrown in their laps, which I am sure they'll put to good use. Dysmorodrepanis ( talk) 07:15, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
I don't have a lot of time to respond to this at the moment but I haven't forgotten about it. We ought to move the sources you've mentioned into the article though with sourced translations. I'll do it later if nobody beats me to it! :bloodofox: ( talk) 13:26, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
How is it pronounced? Is there a kind of "established English pronunciation"? Could somebody provide IPA-info? 217.236.180.7 ( talk) 15:57, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
"Ir-" is pronounced like "Ear", "-min-" is pronounced like "-mean-", "-sul" is pronounced like tool, but with an S in front of course. 92.196.58.240 ( talk) 21:52, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
"A Germanic god Irmin".
Sorry this is plain wrong, based on Widukind of Corvey's fantasy. Irmin comes from *(e)irmanaz, which is translated great, big, or mighty. Sul is Säule translated as pillar. Irminsul is just the mighty pillar. Irmin is a normal German name, that is known as Herman, or in Latin Arminius. There is also feminine form of this name Irmina, see Irmina of Oeren 92.196.58.240 ( talk) 21:48, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
i was keen to get a short description of what was believed to be the function, the nature of this magical object and somehow i could not find an answer for this in the article. it does tell things in a nice encyclopedical style about the history of research and thinking about the topic from later ages, but really seems not to touch the core of what is an (or the) irminsul for the german pagan tribes who built or worshipped them. the above "rework" discussion is a lot more informative than the article itself (though its discussion form is obvoiously would not make it fit for the article page), but even that discussion did not get me the answer. (what i was lookinf for is something like e.g. in the atticle about Odin you find somewhere that he was a god of something and was believed to have some powers/fields of influence, etc. this kind of simple short description of irminsul is what i miss here.) 89.134.199.32 ( talk) 21:32, 15 February 2020 (UTC).
- This is a reflection of the historical record—there's only so much we know about the object. However, you may find your needs met by a related article: Sacred trees and groves in Germanic paganism and mythology. :bloodofox: ( talk) 22:49, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
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I'm editing out the link of the Burzum's guy taxt. It's a racist text about how the aryan race from scandinavia will conquer the world. Right. 200.222.3.3 ( talk) 16:20, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
- It is a shame you have removed the link. If you took the time to read what Varg Vikernes has to say it would be clear it has nothing to do with "how the aryan race from scandinavia will conquer the world". IMHO you have gone too far with your statement. The section I think you have refered to is:
"The evolutionary record of humanity reaches beyond the shadows of the Polar race, the fog-shapes of the Hyperborean race, the androgynous Lemurian race of giants, the giants of the Atlantic race and the creative man of the Aryan race (see my second book, Germansk mytologi og verdensanskuelse for more details on this).
In our evolutionary-chain, there are seven races; the five mentioned above and two others. Only the seventh is complete and in order to understand and develop the technology, we need to bring the universe to a higher evolutionary level.
The sixth race will be called the solar race and will consist of pure Aryans with a highly developed intelligence and body. All true folk-companions shall join together in Scandinavia; or will be bound to Scandinavia through political and military alliances from their own native countries.
The new Europe will, in other words, be led and run from Scandinavia - the High-fortress of the Aryan tribe. Schools and other educational centers shall be built in a heathen Scandinavia, and kinsmen from all over the world - but foremost from Europe and the USA - will migrate there to learn the thought of Irminsûl."
- The man has simply stated his own thoughts. Only a meek fool would say this is racist. 59.167.122.19 ( talk) 02:33, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
Hello Dysmorodrepanis ( talk · contribs). I noticed you've recently reworked this article, which it, of course, needed. However, I think more development here needs to be done in a neutral matter. What do you say we work together and put together the best article on the subject on the internet?
First,I recommend that we reformat the article. Generally, I find it to be very helpful to first go through all of the known attestations of the subject matter (in this case the Irminsul and Irmin) and state them up front - I think this is the best way to dispel any nonsense that may be surrounding subjects in these quarters. Then we ought to follow the attestations up them up with whatever theories may surround that particular detail and then, after the sources are listed, whatever theories and speculation may exist around the subject matter. :bloodofox: ( talk) 05:48, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
- Hehe, my main purpose was to wake some Project guys because I only have passing interest in the subject. I salute your changes to my changes, except in one case. I have collected a bit of material (the old version was basically what I learned from... eh everybody. I grew up in that neck of the woods); see below.
- The one problem illustrates a main issue with the topic. The intro sounds NPOV versus my rant, but actually it's... well, not POV but clearly false. (If I had found the situation to be thus, I'd have probably used very much the same wording in fact)
- Because the Irminsul is certainly not the subject of any significant effort of "an amount of scholarly discourse and speculation." Arnold, Halle and less than a handful of others are apparently the only regular workers in the field. Is there a SOP to show the reader that research is essentially a 4-people business cranking out an astounding 2 or so papers per decade that give somewhat more info than a single half-sentence? Check Google Scholar for irminsul in sundry combos (+externsteine, eresburg, try erminsul etc) and you get 500 or so hits at all, of which something like 95% is drivel or one line to the effect that the Irminsul was somewhere close to the Eresburg (apparently "host's castle", cf Heeresburg). Source basically Royal Annals. One crux in encyclopedias is the lack of ways to express that mankind is essentially ignorant about the true nature of an issue, and nobody really does someting against it.
- The overview of the corpus concerning (the) Irminsul(s) is devastating. 90% of "common wisdom" go back to Teudt, and this man surely seems worthy of shooting down. The German article is revealing here, and a total hoot... he got kicked out of Ahnenerbe for being a misanthrope and too much of a crackpot, which is quite a feat ;-P and says a lot about his scientific mettle. About how Teudt et al basically crafted the modern-age Irminsul more or less out of thin air in 1929-1936, see also doi: 10.1017/S1380203805001601, and doi: 10.1017/S1380203805001595 for a comment on the quality of Nazi archaeology and "archaeology". Note Teudt is generally not acknowledged as an archaeologist by any modern archaeologist; he is universally acknowledged as one of the worst disgraces to the science ever (there is one weakly apologetic book by IIRC a relative or a friend of a relative, and even that finds it easier to exonerate his Nazi leanings than his bad work ethos). In a nutshell, he created the modern image of the Externsteine and the Irminsul. And when that was realized, research was killed dead. It's a bunch of folks in 3 podunk country museums or so who research anything even remotely pertaining to the Irminsul. Teudt gave the topic of "Engerian" Saxon archaeology such a bad name that it was imagined to destroyed careers if touched. See also the summary by Arnold here and de:Externsteine and Halle's 2002 work (I think some reviews of it are around on the Web, but it's one of those podunk country museum publications.
- Halle is universally praised as an authority in the de:Diskussion:Wilhelm Teudt, where a copyist error in her 2002 book is dissected (interesting read. These people really seem to be genuinely interested in the article and know their biz, which is not too frequent in the de:). Arnold makes some de->en mistakes sometimes. Like the Irminsul as "main Saxon saint" (de: Heiliger) ="sanctuary" (de: Heiligtum)?
- (Irminsul was certainly imagined as a folk or cultural hero in Late Early Modern times - see de:Irminsul for discussion, source and "life reconstruction" ;-) )
- Matthes & Speckner (1997) - I thought that this was good, it is one of those "authoritative" sources, i.e. a thorough monograph-paper on the topic of the de:Kreuzabnahmerelief an den Externsteinen. But I found some quotes and reviews which make it look not too reliable; to interpret the Sanhedrin Nikodemus who was basically a nice guy of no special importance as a Christian "subjugator of the people" by garbling a translation is not a mistake I as a biologist with half-knowledge of Latin and some basic Greek would make. But Arnold makes similar mistakes too - only they do not form a keystone in a theory of hers.
- Unfortunately, the only modern claim that argues for the Externsteine relief as temporally close to the Irminsul's destruction is this.
- The de:Irminsul article has some more info (one more good original source at least IIRC) but also a bunch of long-winded and ill-sourced rather fatuous discussions where Irminsuls might masquerade in Christian art. I say weak because the worship of pillar-like objects, trunks or columns is entirely homoplasious across cultures and ages.
- This is a Nazi-era article by a guy who is generally not regarded as one who sold his science for politics and a tie pin but as a somewhat cranky but very competent historian of post-Christianization art. His bottom line is "the Bernardsäule is not based on the Irminsul" which given it ran kinda contrary to mainstream science at that time was apparently a case he felt comfortably safe of to state it so boldly. And the German article makes also no mention of that theory, except in passing and seemingly as if nobody has been taken it seriously for like 70 years or so.
Thanks! There certainly is a lot of speculation and half-truths surrounding the subject. Creating a solidly referenced and straight-forward article here will help sort some things out and, along the way, maybe we can learn a thing or two. The beauty of Wikipedia!
About the introduction, while the subject hasn't attracted a huge amount of scholarly interest, anyone writing about the Germanic peoples will probably mention the Irminsul. As you know, figures like Jacob Grimm and Eugene Goblet d'Alviella (where most of this information comes from) are certainly very notable figures, so I think that is probably enough alone for us to say something like what we have in the introduction at the moment - it doesn't say there's a huge amount of scholarly work around the subject, just that it is a topic of some scholarly interest.
One thing I really stress in the articles I put work into is primary sources. I like to really dig up the primary sources of a subject and present them before I present the theories surrounding the subject - I find that this is the best way to present things like this. Too often, the primary sources are danced around and subsequently this gives rise to elaboration and half-truths seen through someone else's monocle. So, I think we ought to dig up every primary source regarding the Irminsul and put it in the "Attestations" section in a chronological manner. So, right now, I am trying to dig up all these mentions and then afterwards will flesh all the other sections out.
About Teudt, we have to remain neutral about him - a note mentioning that he provided no evidence to back his claim is probably enough for most people to get the idea. We also need to make sure his work doesn't make its way into anywhere else but the "Extersteine" section (like the rest of the theories) so people know very clearly what is attested and what is conjecture.
This seems to be a problem with the German Wikipedia article on the subject - they've got theories about Völuspá, Yggdrasil, Thor's Oak, and the Sacred tree at Uppsala mixed in with the primary sources, whereas it should really be sectioned off into the "theories" section because, while there is obviously some sort of connection, the connection is not directly attested. :bloodofox: ( talk) 00:33, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
I have some of what was above expanded, it is now below.
Dysmorodrepanis (
talk) 07:30, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
- The Royal Annals translation (I updated the German versions I found to match the original text as closely as I could) runs:
"And subsequently [after the council in Worms, Charlemagne] went for the first time into the Saxon lands, captured the castle of Eresburg, and went on as far as to the Irminsul and destroyed that idol and seized and brought back the gold and silver that he found there. And there was a great drought, so that there was a lack of water at the aforementioned locality, where the Irminsul stood; and when [Charlemagne] wanted to stay two or three days to destroy that idol he had no water, then suddenly due to the generousity of God at mid-day when the whole army was resting [the next bit I'm not 100% sure about] there sprang fourth in a streambed a lot of water that nobody had ever seen there before [i.e. the spring had not been active previously], and the whole army was sufficiently supplied. Then [Charlemagne] went over [to?] the Weser and made a ceasefire/truce [? placitum] with the Saxons and received 12 hostages and returned to Frankish lands."
- I do not have the original Latin text of the Einhardsannalen, a later version of the Annals (though probably not by Einhard. It may be it was him, but it is generally considered another fancy idea without factual evidence it seems). I try construct it from the German version, but the differences seem very severe to me, perhaps the German text is not accurate:
"And after the council in Worms, Charlemagne decided to wage war upon the Saxons; and he went forthwith and devastated everything with fire and sword, captured the castle of Eresburg, and destroyed the idol that the Saxons call Irminsul. And as he took three days [to destroy the idol] it occurred that due to the constant sunny weather all brooks and springs at the locality dried up and no water was to be had. So that the army would no longer suffer from thirst it happened, due to divine interference as is believed, that one day when everybody was resting at mid-day as usual there sprang from the mountain near which the army camped such a quantity of water into a forest creek's bed that the whole army had sufficient. After the idol was destroyed, the king travelled to the Weser and had 12 hostages delivered to him by the Saxons. Then he returned to the Frankish lands."
- The difference between these two accounts is 30 years at best.
- The veracity of the water issue is disputed. Either Charlemagne was generally rather unawares of the supply situation in the Saxon Wars, or his scribes had a penchant for using the "water springs forth" miracle as an allegory; apparently it is not the only time that such an event is reported. Or given that it only seems to be reported once in the original source, perhaps it indeed happened at the destruction of the Irminsul, and was copied later on to different events. It is fairly certain that they stayed at the Irminsul site for 2-3 days, but why is less clear.
- This is a graduate student's last or last-but-one term paper, it's not very interesting except it has a very interesting map giving an idea of the setup, especially if you add this which is later but has more details. The 772 campain probably came from rather due south, as Charlemagne had had wintered in Herstal but held council of war in Worms. The Sauerland and Rothaargebirge is still very much rolling hills with dense woods, and was back then essentially uninhabited except for the occasional farmstead here and there.
- Had Charlemagne gone downriver and bushwhacked his way to the Eresburg from W, it would have been a MAJOR campaign, requiring dedicated preparations. The reports would read like the second (775) campaign where they in fact travelled more or less the de:Kaiserroute after setting out from Cologne immediately after leaving winter quarters at Düren, taking a route basically E straight through the southwestern part of the Saxon lands. They razed the de:Sigiburg before coming to the ruins of the Eresburg.
- The Kaiserweg bypases the Eresburg by some 20-25 km to the NW; they apparently took a detour to rebuild the defence works and leave a garrison in 775, but whereas the 772 campaign was launched against the "Engerns", the 775 campaign was launched against the "Engerns" and "Westphalians".
- Altogether the reports on 772 give the impression to have taken not much longer then two or three weeks after crossing the border (1-2 to Eresburg, 1-2 at Eresburg, say 2-3 to the Irminsul, 2-3 at the Irminsul, generously giving a full 1-2 weeks for the way to the Weser and back to the border). The Eresburg was reaedificavit ("rebuilt") by Charlemagne in 775 and fought over in 776; it must have been in ruins 772-775.
- de:Sachsenkriege (Karl der Große) seems to be in error. The Royal Annals mention the destruction of the Hoohseoburg in 743, whereas the de: article claims it for 772. The hottest locations for the Hoohseoburg are Watenstedt near Salzgitter and Seeburg, Saxony-Anhalt) and the Royal Annals make it quite clear that Charlemagne did not go there (far east of the Weser) in 772.
- The 772 does not seem to have been a very violent or well-prepared campaign at all, and the significance of the destruction of the Irminsul ist certainly not suggested to have been large by the early Annals' account. The whole affair seems to have been tit-for-tat border raids at that time. Eresburg was coepit apparently without a siege, perhaps not even with a major battle - Widukind chose not to make a stand at all in 772; he simply tried to raze Fricdislar ( Fritzlar) in revenge the next year. Things only got to the point of full-blown war in 774/775, if the original Annals are to be believed.
- In any case, from Worms to Eresburg the shortest and safest route was across the Taunus on the lange Hessen/ Weinstraße/ de:Rennstraße (see also de:Hünerstraße) and then between Taunus and Vogelsberg along the Westfalenweg via Angelburg. TheWestfalenweg (or whatever the roadway was called then - these names are all referring to the particular roads that were established post-Charlemagne) actually is very interesting, as it must have passed through the de:Ederbergland, then skirting the Sauerland's eastern boundary or running along its southeastern slope, possibly via Fritzlar, and passed through Franconian territory all the way until it crossed the border in the vicinity of Bad Arolsen - almost certainly within spitting distance of the Eresburg but perhaps passing east of it to get to Paderborn, with the Eresburg being either in the angle between the main W-E and N-S roads of the region (if they met in Paderborn) or near where they met (if they met SW of Paderborn already).
- (But this is a matter of secondary interest for the Eresburg article; the topography leaves little other way, but the Westfalenweg is not a subject of present-day scientific interest at all. It is likely to be discussed in some monograph on ancient roads, perhaps Landau (1958), or Dreyer-Eimbecke (1989), or on the Hessian hinterlands, e.g. Lennarz (1973))
- This is nice. It gives the Thietmar von Merseburg source, which states that a "church of St Peter" was in 938 where the Irminsul used to be at "Ehresburg". This might be the source to which the Eresburg location fix seems to go back to. "Ehresburg" literally means "honor castle" which looks like a plausible Frankish renaming - but the Externsteine look like a plausible sacred site... See also below.
- Here is a most significant find, it contains apparently much of the original sources. The paper discusses the Dwarf Beech which we can safely say (contra the authors) has nothing to do with the Irminsul because its trunk is simply not the one you'd want ;-) (see Dwarf Beech article -> Commons). The authors mention a source that claims Irminsuls as "trees of life" have been found on all sorts of objects e.g. in Etruria and Ireland - and we can be quite certain that this is bunk also insofar as that the more parsimonious assumption is that the Irminsul was a Saxon relic sui generis rather than something ripped off from Goidelics or Etruscans.
- Note the sources for the claim that une figure de l'Irminsul gravée is found at the Externsteine.
- On a confondu Erenburg avec Eresburg, Eresberg et avec un Erenbourg proche de Pfiffligheim sur Pfrimm. So caveat emptor. Whoever put the Irminsul at Pfiffligheim an der Pfrimm - a suburb of Worms today and Charlemagne's backyard of sorts back then - can obviously be disregarded as a source. Except if they have something really really worthwhile to say.
- More on the sources below. If you like, simply nick them from the paper, check for spelling errors or add warning, and ref them in. Ideally w/fulltext - perhaps add "check" tag to each unchecked one.
- Grimm gives nice material, but his etymological analysis apparently blows at elast in part. I have found no modern source who would seem to subscribe to his etymology of Osning, and the best I can come up with is something along the lines of "Aesir forest". In any case, this late 19th century source already finds it weak. Asanbrugg ( Osnabrück) can also be explained as "bridge over the Hase" which would make the Osning simply the Hase mountains; it seems certain that the town and the range are etymologically tied together but nothing more can be said with certainty.
- You get all sorts of weird stuff. The External Link is one example, maintains matter-of-factly that the Externsteine were a sacred site and baring all sorts of half-knowledge, but it has a decently sourced discussion of the Irmin/Ziu issue.
- You'll note the citations I gave for the Kaiserchronik. There are others on the Web referring to the Massmann edition which is the oldest and though pretty decent not the one considered best as a source. But the verse numbers of the third and either the second or the first bit are wrong! Nobody ever bothered to check them out. That was the version that I corrected to the present one (Funnily, Massmann's orthography is, as far as I checked, copied without errors).
- This, has a similar mixture of shaky stuff, utter bullshit, and some genuinely good pieces. The author has read and understood the Royal Annals or read someone who did. But fanum et locum eorum famosum Irminsul is not from the original Royal Annals. aurum et argentum , quod ibi repperit, abstulit is, except it's vel and not et. rivi ac fontes and iuxta montem , qui castris erat contiguus are also absent from the original text. I think they derive from the Einhardsannalen. But the analysis of the evidence, however unreliable the source of the evidence may be, is quite fascinating. I would actually tend to agree with the Iburg location, as the original annals mention that the Irminsul was not at the Eresburg. The water issue is interesting - to dry up the Diemel (which runs by the Eresburg) you need a superhot summer, IIRC it was nearly dried up in 2003. I cayaked down part of it some other year and in normal years, it's a nice strong river all year round.
- But on the other hand, Iburg may be the castro, quod dicitur Iuberg from the 753 Royal Annals.
- The Yburg etymology of the Web article is likely to be farcical. Yggdrasil does not mean "Yew tree", and the Saxon word for the Common Yew was with near certainty i[g]wa (cf. German Eibe) and not iggr or yggr which means "the terrible one". Though the words may well trace back to a common root (yew certainly is toxic enough to qualify as a "terrible tree"), they had separated for good there and then.
- The miraculous spring is often identified with the Bullerborn/Bollerborn near Altenbeken (e.g. de:Eresburg). This article indicates "the matter-of-fact Ledebur" as the origin of that claim. This would seem to be Leopold von Ledebur and I have no idea what he based this identification on, but the proposed Irminsul location closest to the Bullerborn is the Externsteine which is 11 km north as the raven flies but across the southern Osning as the Frankish spearman walks. Highly unlikely as the original Royal Annals seem to place the spring in the immediate vicinity of the loco, ubi Ermensul stabat. So the whole Bullerborn case is tenuous to the extreme. Unabashed, the de: article goes "From other sources[not cited], we know[yeah right] that he made camp at the Bullerborn...". Such "reasoning" is typical for the whole mess.
- In concluson, my impression is:
- The Irminsul was a decorated tree trunk, probably without an idol on top. As a biologist by trade, I find the notion that it was a trunk of a Dwarf Beech or a Common Yew preposterous. People who propose this have never cared to check out those taxa in the wild. If I had to choose a candidate simply from a botanical point of view, it would be Common Ash first, with European Silver Fir or Norway Spruce as an astoundingly distant second and Pedunculate Oak or Sessile Oak as a very remote third (despite what common wisdom has, oaks were never a particularly "Germanic" tree until the Modern Era). The point is that there are not that many tree species in the region whose trunks could be turned into an irmin sul. They need to be large and straight, and the Common Ash simply holds the record in Central Europe for heigth and straightness of trunk. And lo and behold, the Völuspá actually has:
Ask veit ek standa / heitir Yggdrasill...
- And though the worship of long erect objects is too commonplace to assume that any two of them are genetically related, the idea that Yggdrasil and the Irminsul share a common origin is entirely reasonable. Though it would be necessary to determine the possible Celtic influence (which would favor oaks).
- It is really possible that there was more than one, though they were not common. For one thing, had every major settlement had one, neither the accumulation of booty at the Irminsul destroyed in 772, nor the desire of Charlemagne to take 2-3 days for destroying the site make sense. If it was so overarchingly important to the Saxons, neither their somewhat lacklustre reaction ("oh you just razed our most sacred site to the ground, well, let's call it a truce and here's some hostages to take back with you." in the source closest in time to the actual event) nor that Charlemagne did not think of withdrawing his somewhat improvised expedition that apparently lacked both means and intent to conquer but pushed on for some more dozen kilometers make sense. The entire Royal Annals story about the 772 affair sounds more like Kinmont Willie’s Raid than like the Great Patriotic War. Certainly, the Christian scribes are conspicuously silent about the propagandistic consequences of razing the Irminsul, if it indeed had been the fulcrum of Saxon religion.
- Altogether, a reasonable explanation was that either every main Saxon tribe or region had their Irminsul (giving one or two handfuls altogether perhaps), in which case the one destroyed in 772 was the one of the "Engerns". Or that it was a one-of-a-kind thing like Thor's Oak, significant but not all-important. A sacred site of major importance, a popular place of pilgrimage, but not the "spriritual heart of Saxendom" that it is sometimes depicted as.
- The Iburg is the location that least conflicts with the collected accounts - preliminarily.
- I am starting to seriously doubt whether the Eresburg is a good candidate. There are too many conflicts with the contemporary sources.
- Perhaps the de:Desenberg is a better or even the best candidate. It's a nice singular round hill in a flat landscape 25 km ENE of the Eresburg, the hilltop (where de:Burg Desenberg is today) was supposedly fortified as early as 766. I have not checked it out, but it is interesting to note that in an 1168 siege of the castle, the water supply was apparently a problem factor (the besiegers thought that disrupting it would give them an early victory). Of course, the area was by and large wooded all over in Saxon times. The hill's name may or may not mean "mountain of the Idisi" (of Merseburg Incantations fame) which may or may not suggest for or against locating the Irminsul site. Altogether it looks highly promising (it happens to be the only candidate location that you'll pass when you attempt to go from the Eresburg to the Weser by the shortest distance) but among the better candidates it is also the least-studied it seems.
- There are a few other candidates, but I have not checked them out.
- The Iburg church was dedicated to St Peter, the Eresburg church was dedicated to St Peter and St Paul. There seems to have been a lot of brouhaha about both of these in the late 8th/early 9th century CE and the clerics seem to have considered them more important than others.
- The French text's sources:
- 1: straightforward Royal Annals as per above.
- 2: Einhardsannalen. It seems that the text may indeed be as divergent as it is above.
- 3: Rudolf von Fulda. Uses plural forms. Says "tree trunk" explicity. But is part of a general discussion of sacred trees and sacred springs.
- 4: Annalium de gestis Caroli Magni. General impression of a heavily decorated (gold/silver anyone?) tree trunk.
- 5: Annales St-Amandi. Uninformative.
- 6: Chronicon Laurissense breve = Annales Laurissenses minores. Perhaps the original source for the suggestion that the Irminsul was THE Saxon national relic: fanum et lucum eorum famosum Irminsul
- 7: Annales Moselani/Annales Nazariani. Concise version of Royal Annals
- 8: Annales Petaviani. Irminsul is given as a toponym not as name of an object.
- Briefly, what Irminsul was understood to mean (the de: article is very good for material on this, although it has also a lot of stuff which is entirely unconvincing as I noted above):
- Late Migration Period: as per Royal Annals
- Early Middle Ages: a generic pedestal for objects of veneration (as per Kaiserchronik)
- Late Middle Ages to Early Modern Era: a generic pedestal for a statue of "Mercury/Mars" (= Woden)
- Early-mid Modern Era: a Saxon/Lower Saxon cultural hero (named "Irminsul" or "Irminsula" initially, becoming "Irmin" or "Irmingod" [sic] in the 19th century)
- mid-19th century - c.1930s: a pedestal for a statue of the "Saxon national deity" "Irmin"
- since 1929: a structure or structures like on the Externsteine relief that stood at Externsteine or Eresburg and perhaps somewhere else and represented a tree of life, and
- towards the late 20th century alternatively: a (probably) wooden column located somewhere between the Eresburg and the Weser but not at the Externsteine, which represented a world pillar. Dysmorodrepanis ( talk) 05:36, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
- The Teudt issue is tricky. It may be that by being too ostensibly NPOV we're already being very POV. My observations are
- a) I have not found any living scientist who considers Teudt a scientist in a citeable publication.
- b) I had some university course on Nazi biology (not hardcore stuff, more like Emil Abderhalden and Ernst Lehmann) and though these guys might ostensibly fall in the same category as Teudt, the reaction of the scientific community differs. I cannot remember ever reading terms like "‘lunatic fringe’ of archaeology", "implausible and unscientific theories", "pseudo-archaeologists", "often confused with responsible, objective and critical German research" (a 1936 opinion; the guy risked his neck for speaking out as he basically accused Himmler of promoting irresponsible, subjective and uncritical research), "fanatic dreamer" (another quote by contemporaries), "‘astro-archaeologist’", "völkisch fantasy", "displacement of a technical scholarly problem into the political arena" etc.
- This name-calling is all by serious and professional academics. I'm not an archaeologist, but IIRC the rule-of-thumb is that calling a colleague's find and their interpretations "supposed" (as in "the supposed Varus battlefield at Kalkrieser Berg" or "the supposed town around Hisarlik") is the point where you start to violate the social mores. That archaeologists who did not care much about politics actually risked their lives to denounce someone is I think rather unique among Third Reich science and pseudo-science; I have never seen scientists unite in such acrimony. Simply put, this is not normal.
- A pretty simple decider exists actually: if Jan Udo Holey or Guido von List do not warrant considerations as scientists "sometimes" accused of malpractice, then Teudt does not warrant either. Peer-reviwed citations to that effect can be provided from about 1930 onwards, whereas such citations to the contrary do not exist after the early 1940s.
- But there is another way, which is very much more work (for me) but has a perverse kind of attractiveness (to me):
- The de: article on Teudt is rather comprehensive and the guys who wrote it seem to be well versed in the issues of archaeology and scientific research.
- So Teudt could be dropped out of the article altogether except as a note that the Externsteine theory was thought out by him and that no evidence whatsoever was ever provided.
- The ppl on de: could be asked to transfer their article to en:. A relative of mine visits the Lippisches Staatsarchiv every now and then, as he likes to write the odd piece on regional history (he's a trained historian but never went professional). The de: editors might be interested in some stuff about any topic of Lippe's regional history that happens to strike their fancy but is hard to get if you don't live in the Detmold region and don't have a doctoral degree, and I could try and get it acquired for them.
- POV problems would be avoided altogether beause the issue is deferred to the biography article where it cvan be discussed in all details and facets
- en: would get a stub expanded to a largish article
- And some dedicated editors on de: would get some new exciting (more or less) source material thrown in their laps, which I am sure they'll put to good use. Dysmorodrepanis ( talk) 07:15, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
I don't have a lot of time to respond to this at the moment but I haven't forgotten about it. We ought to move the sources you've mentioned into the article though with sourced translations. I'll do it later if nobody beats me to it! :bloodofox: ( talk) 13:26, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
How is it pronounced? Is there a kind of "established English pronunciation"? Could somebody provide IPA-info? 217.236.180.7 ( talk) 15:57, 27 May 2010 (UTC)
"Ir-" is pronounced like "Ear", "-min-" is pronounced like "-mean-", "-sul" is pronounced like tool, but with an S in front of course. 92.196.58.240 ( talk) 21:52, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
"A Germanic god Irmin".
Sorry this is plain wrong, based on Widukind of Corvey's fantasy. Irmin comes from *(e)irmanaz, which is translated great, big, or mighty. Sul is Säule translated as pillar. Irminsul is just the mighty pillar. Irmin is a normal German name, that is known as Herman, or in Latin Arminius. There is also feminine form of this name Irmina, see Irmina of Oeren 92.196.58.240 ( talk) 21:48, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
i was keen to get a short description of what was believed to be the function, the nature of this magical object and somehow i could not find an answer for this in the article. it does tell things in a nice encyclopedical style about the history of research and thinking about the topic from later ages, but really seems not to touch the core of what is an (or the) irminsul for the german pagan tribes who built or worshipped them. the above "rework" discussion is a lot more informative than the article itself (though its discussion form is obvoiously would not make it fit for the article page), but even that discussion did not get me the answer. (what i was lookinf for is something like e.g. in the atticle about Odin you find somewhere that he was a god of something and was believed to have some powers/fields of influence, etc. this kind of simple short description of irminsul is what i miss here.) 89.134.199.32 ( talk) 21:32, 15 February 2020 (UTC).
- This is a reflection of the historical record—there's only so much we know about the object. However, you may find your needs met by a related article: Sacred trees and groves in Germanic paganism and mythology. :bloodofox: ( talk) 22:49, 15 February 2020 (UTC)