Mistletoe in Norse Myth
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ค. 2024
- A look at the way mistletoe comes up in our (real) sources for Viking-Age and medieval Norse myth.
Jackson Crawford, Ph.D.: Sharing real expertise in Norse language and myth with people hungry to learn, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus. Visit jacksonwcrawford.com/ (includes bio and linked list of all videos).
Jackson Crawford’s Patreon page: / norsebysw
Visit Grimfrost at www.grimfrost.com?aff=183
Latest FAQs: vimeo.com/375149287 (updated Nov. 2019).
Jackson Crawford’s translation of Hávamál, with complete Old Norse text: www.hackettpublishing.com/the... or www.amazon.com/Wanderers-Hava...
Jackson Crawford’s translation of The Poetic Edda: www.hackettpublishing.com/the... or www.amazon.com/Poetic-Edda-St...
Audiobook: www.audible.com/pd/The-Poetic...
Jackson Crawford’s translation of The Saga of the Volsungs: www.hackettpublishing.com/the... or www.amazon.com/Saga-Volsungs-...
Audiobook: www.audible.com/pd/The-Saga-o...
Music © I See Hawks in L.A., courtesy of the artist. Visit www.iseehawks.com/
Logos by Elizabeth Porter (snowbringer at gmail).
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 72 วันนี้!! คู่เอก "ก้องศึก vs โจอาคิม"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/hT1EOSsRPac/mqdefault.jpg)
Just an immediate thought without any research...
Thistle is a hardy, prickly plant and mistletoe was a means to killing someone perceived as untouchable and a box as a casket. In a pragmatic, stare death in the face, gallows humor kind of way, could it be...
Lived Tough/Killed/Buried
Whoever did the audio for this video give major props! I live in UT and I know how loud that wind actually is. Major props!!
prolly one of those very fuzzy mics they reduce the sound of wind from what i have seen.
That spot he stood in front was really beautiful
In modern Swedish the plant is simply called ”Mistel”.
volume seems improved, thanks for the awesome free content
Washington Irving wrote of visiting an English country house where old Christmas customs were kept. He actually did this but also studied the folklore behind those customs. His stories influenced Dickens and helped chase the ghost of Puritan disapproval away in Britain and America.
In his story, an old fellow decorated the Church with holly, ivy and mistletoe. The vicar made him remove the mistletoe. But said not a word about kissing games in the great house
Merry England had several sources for the old customs. But just decorating with fresh greenery is pleasant when snow covers everything. Of course, an Old English Christmas always featured lovely fresh snow. (It was 80 degrees in Houston this year.)
Glad to hear your contribution
Hahaha!
I love the screams at the “Christianity influence anxiety.” Very funny. Not Christian myself, but not worried about Christian cultural influences, either. It’s just history.
Ya lol I was worried that was all in my head 😂
It gave me a panic attack 😂
I was listening to this trying to fall asleep at like 3 am haha. Had to go back and watch this video now in the morning to see if it wasn’t just a dream.
God Jul. Thank you for all your fabulous videos.
Dr. Crawford, sir,
Thank you for your work. Has been imparative to my euhemerist studies. Have one last semester to complete my MA focusing on Western war and religion, half taught myself Old English, which is how I found you. Been a subscriber a few years now. Starting my teaching career after 9 years of working every gross service job to get through school.
Merry Christmas from Texas.
Great job keep up the good work 👍
Thank you! Merry Christmas and Happy Yule everyone.
Thistle, Mistle, [Coffin] - _almost_ feels like a Sphinx' Riddle, perhaps some metaphor for Middle Age, Old Age, and Death? Such speculation is of course dangerous, but almost has a "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" feeling to it.
Third. Loved your lecture series on Great Courses/ Wondrium!! Very informative, made me glad to be a long-time subscriber of GC.
I did too. Incredibly well done. One of the best lecture series I’ve watched.
That bird screaming at 14 minutes nearly made me jump out of my chair, haha. Thank you for another great video Mr. Crawford.
I just had a heart attack 💀
There's this joke that pops up in the back of my mind every once in a while. It features some Norseman traveling in the American Midwest for the first time ever. One of them spots some vultures doing what vultures do, and immediately jumps to a disconcerting conclusion. He says to his traveling companions, "Those have got to be the ugliest ravens I've ever seen. I don't know about you, but I'm not looking forward to meeting the local gods".
Now, I'd always heard the story (starting many decades ago, back when I was a teen) that we kiss under the mistletoe because it was a sacred plant to the *Celts* and *Druids* -- a different culture (or set of cultures) from the Norse. I may have come across the idea in my high school Latin classes, reading Caesar's accounts of Britain.... And that when bands of warriors found themselves under a tree on which mistletoe was growing, they would lay down their arms and have a momentary respite from fighting. Of course, these are stories about stories about stories, and who knows which (if any) of the stories in the chain are historically accurate (and people want to ascribe almost as much mystical power to the druids as they do to the vikings).
In any case, thank you for your videos this year. And I hope 2022 brings you peace, and joy, and fruitful endeavors.
It’s a sacred plant to Druids, both ancient and modern. Dr. Crawford is only a Norse language expert, which limits his knowledge.
@@j.b.4340 Yes. I wasn't commenting on the scope of his knowledge (or at least, that wasn't my intent). but rather about how the "Mistletoe Sacred to the Vikings, Because Balder" idea got into the Wikipedia (and other repositories of popular knowledge). Which is what Dr. Crawford was responding to.
First, God Jul!
Then, anyone who has seen the plant we today call mistletoe, knows you can't make arrows, or even throwing sticks, from it. There is however a parasitic variety of the rowan tree, which can take root in larger trees, in Swedish it's called "flogrönn" - something like "flying rowan" would be my not very elegant translation of that word. This plant, usually produces straight pieces of wood, suitable for making arrows for a low powered bow.
And thirdly, "kista" is the word for box, we use for coffin.
First, Merry Christmas everyone
Thanks and have a good Christmas.
Hmm... I've always known the whole Mistletoe thing as we know it a Victorian romantic twist on Druidry- because the Victorians did that gubbins...
As an aside I am guessing this was recorded around the 15th - it was a windy monster that day! Happy holidays and a peaceful joyous new year to anyone reading
Your surroundings combined with an excellent lecture from you, always make my day more interesting. Merry Christmas
Awesome video, thank you for consistently uploading informational and intriguing content.
In German there is feminine “die Mistel”, but there is also the masculine “der Mistelzweig”, which would also translate to mistletoe with the added twig/sprig/bough/spray…
I can actually kind of hear you in this video. Definite improvement. 👏
Mistilteinn is a recurring special sword in the Castlevania games. They have a tonne of other mystical or magical weapons and armour in from all over the world. Who knew video games could be so educational (and still fun)~
Most people who play them knew lol.
Everyone who plays games know how valuable and educational games are, but parents and people who don't play video games will never agree with that 🤣
@@Scareth exactly! And I’d bet a fair few of us got into ancient history when playing things like Rome : Total War or the like. I’ve even met some kids (I worked in a video game shop) that knew EVERY single fact about the guns in the Call of Duty games. I mean, that’s a kind of specialist knowledge but still knowledge 😂
A very good exposition as always - and the screams were hilarious! Happy holidays to all!
Today (12/24/2021) I received your Christmas/ yule card. It brightened up my whole holiday. You have no idea… Takk!
Happy Yuletide to all!
Happy yuletide and thanks for this seasonal video!
I would wager a guess that the "teinn" is cognate with the swedish "tinne" (which is almost exclusively used in a single context, "med tinnar och torn", describing a very fancy house by comparing its achitecture to that of a castle, i.e "with spires and towers"). "Tinne" is in it's turn cognate with the english word "tine" like in "the tines of a fork".
The most important aspects that all these cognate words have in common are things like long, straight, sharp, pointed.
It's the name of a sword aswell. Of course it could be named some sort of "bad ass name" in reference to the myth of balders death. Swords are preferably long, straight (well according to the old norse anyway) sharp and pointed.
The "Thistle Mistle Kistill" rhyme makes me think they share more descriptors. Both instances are post conversion, so a Kistill would also be associated with death, being buried. It could be a more morbid rhyme, if mistle means something else than we think. So the rhyme is something like "sharp-spear-dead", or in contemporary english "Had, Stabbed and Slabbed".
I like the theory that there's a missing story on how the mistletoe was cursed into its current shape, since it is the exact opposite of all that. I have another theory though. What if we just have the wrong plant? What if mistle just used to refer to something usefull for making sharp things? Or usefull for making boxes? Or pointed and stabby? The only stanza we have that describes it, as you pointed out, describes it as tall and straight.
For the last 6 minutes of this video that Skáld song was playing loudly in my head. 🤘
Dr. Crawford, are you going to do a video about the upcoming film "The Northman," a filmed version of the Amleth story on which Shakespeare's "Hamlet" is based?
Thank you for sharing your opinions. 🙂
Aww I saw grimfrost pop up, I love them!
Lol those screams
You cut across the Woo and hippy-dippy stuff like chainsaw. As ever.
Wahoo! Weapon-ized mistletoe to bring peace, by Jacob Grimm! Great vid; Ty. Merry Christmas, from south Texas!
That was really interesting! Thank you.
“Tén” is the Danish Word for “spindle”, as in the yarn-making tool that Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on (in certain versions of the tale).
So, there is another instance of something pointy and sharp.
Still not very wintery Colorado is right
Merry Jul! I was doing some research today and I stumbled across this book -> "The Carthaginian North: Semitic Influence on Early Germanic" and this book -> "Contributions towards an Arabico-Gothic Culture". I read selections from both and found some of the content interesting. One is a modern book and one is an older source, but they had similar ideas in that they think that Germanic languages were influenced by Semitic and Arabic early on in both their content and their writing systems. I'm curious about your thoughts on the possible connections and how it may affect your understanding of the evolution of runes / alphabet systems.
God Jul. Merry Christmas!
I really appreciate you tackling a lot of the modern speculation about Germanic paganism head-on in these videos. There's so much misinformation out there, and it has been circulating for so long, much of it has taken on a veneer of authenticity which can really make it difficult to research these subjects.
Happy yule everybody, and may your gods go with you.
That Þistil Mistil Kistil thing also sounds like it could have come from some lost poem. Very cryptic!
great video.
The screams are awesome LOL.
As for thistle, misltaine, and box. As for symbolism would that not be the noble, the passion, and the grave?
Come on down to Durango, Jackson; it's been dumping here
Thanks a lot for the video 🙌 You told really important things about symbols and its connotations in pre-Christianity. In Ukraine we have the same situation, so many people want to know what does vyshyvanka means (our traditional embroidered cloth), but sometimes there is something just because 'воно красиве' ('it's beautiful'), without any symbolism lol :D
A version of this formula appears also in _Bósa saga ok Herrauðs,_ where it is given as a riddle to King Hring of Götaland by Bósi’s foster-mother Busla after she has cursed him. It appears in the form *r.o.þ.k.m.u iiiiii ssssss : tttttt : iiiiii : llllll* which reads ‘ristill, eistill, þistill, kistill, mistill, vistill.’ _Þistill,_ _kistill_ and _mistill_ are ‘thistle,’ ‘box’ and ‘mistletoe,’ as already covered, _ristill_ means ‘ploughshare’ or maybe ‘gentlewoman,’ _eistill_ means ‘a lump in stone or iron’ and _vistill_ could mean something like ‘cottage, hut.’ She has just placed a curse upon him unless he acquiesces to her demands, but she gives him an out, if he can interpret the runes (it is not clear how she is supposed to present them) correctly, then the curse will have no power. The King cannot do this, so the plot moves forward with him submitting to the witch’s will.
Since _-ill_ is a diminutive suffix (related to Old Norse _-li_ and Gothic _-ila,_ which Dr. Crawford has noted in the past as a diminutive suffix, Gothic examples _Attila_ ‘little father’ and _Wulfila_ ‘wolfkin’) there is a decently large pool of recorded words which one could draw from to create such a formula, and nearly an endless number of inventible forms as well. Such could be the case with other, later inscriptions with similar formulas which have forms like _tistill_ (at least twice), _gistill_ and _bistill_ (on the same inscription). ( _Tistill_ maybe from _tísta_ ‘to chirp’ of a bird, ‘to squeak’ of a mouse, etc., _gistill_ perhaps from _gestr_ ‘guest’ or _gista_ ‘to stay the night, be a guest’ and _bistill_ perhaps from _bistr_ ‘grim, cruel.’)
Given its use in _Bósa saga ok Herrauðs,_ perhaps this formula should be interpreted as a kind of runic shibboleth. Those in the know would be able to read it, and those not in the know would have to be intelligent enough to interpret it correctly. It could be that being able to read it would protect the reader from runic magic like it is said it would protect King Hring from Busla’s curse in the saga.
To clarify: there are no curses to be found in the inscriptions containing this formula, unless the formula itself is taken as an implicit curse, which I would not take it as. So the protective nature of being able to read the shibboleth would hinge entirely on _Bósa saga ok Herrauðs,_ which is a later, more 'Christian influenced' work. The writer may simply have been using the runic formula to seem more 'authentic' in his Pagan curse, knowing his readers would be unfamiliar with the riddle.
Could 'teinn' be cognate to 'tine' (of a fork)?
Just an unsubstantiated theory of mine, but could a 'spear of mistletoe' be made instead from the wood of its host tree? It grows on linden (lightweight yet durable, straight grained) and poplar (close-grained, flexible and grows straight as a die).
Plants being cursed for something they did reminds me of baobab being uprooted and inverted for being proud of its beautiful canopy, with that story being very widespread wherever baobab grows, and giving possible clues to human migration patterns. Conversely, I recall an Irish (probably more widely northwestern celtic) story of heather being blessed for its actions. It volunteered itself to occupy all the poorest soils, and for its humility (I think by a saint, not God directly) it was deigned that it should have the most beautiful and abundant flowers, covering the moors and highlands in swathes of white, pink and purple.
Sorry, I have no sources for those two stories, they're just from memory so due diligence should be done before taking them to heart.
Thanks for your videos. I have a friend who studies the old tales and we get into spirited debates over this stuff. She knows better than I do, I'm a molecular biologist, she's the scholar in myth. Wehn we discussed the death of Baldur and the Mistletoe story, she flipped a switch on and I got to hear her "conspiracy" theories. She made a point about Loki being the culprit in that Loki could not take the form of a bird and had had to borrow Freya's cape to make an escape in another story. It made the tale of Pok a little suspect. It was fun over a bottle of wine.
TL;DR Is it possible that the word misteltan means "the thing that takes/took away from the tree"?
So I came across the Old English word "missan" the other day, and saw that it's where our modern word "miss" comes from. The Old Norse version of the word is "missa" and the Elfdalian form is "mista". And they all go back to the proposed Proto-Germanic form *missijana .
The history of the word indicates a meaning of losing or having something taken away from you.
Then I remembered reading about how the -el suffix was added to some Old English words to create a noun from a verb.
I looked up those words and saw the formation of "shovel" is shov+el (essentially the past tense for the word "shave" [in Old English "scof"] with the -el added to indicate that it's an object or source of the action). So "shovel" means something like the instrument that shaved (or perhaps shaves if I'm misunderstanding the form of the word).
Anyway, I was talking about the myth of Balder with someone the other day and it made me interested about the etymology of the word "misteltan", so I looked it up again and my brain realized that the first part of the word could basically be "mist" (the past tense form of many of the Germanic words meaning "to miss/lose") + "el".
In which case, it would mean something like "the thing that took from or caused it to lose/miss".
Tan used to be used to indicate large trees. It seems like a very old word. In Celtic tradition it has to do with oak trees. In Germanic tradition it seems to indicate fir trees.
I believe this difference comes from the fact that the word tan is like the word green, in that it indicates a stage of growth (as the words "grow" and "growth" are connected to the same Indo-European root that the color green comes from). We still use the modern word tan today to indicate something that has turned brown, and there's also the modern word dun (from the Old English word dunn) that means brown.
With the importance of trees in ancient times, it makes sense that the colors of trees would be extended out metaphorically to include more abstract meanings.
And seeing as misteltoe is a parasitic plant, this Germanic compound word construction makes sense.
Anyway, all of that to ask: is it possible that the word misteltan means "the thing that took/takes away from the tree" ?
I hope everyone here had a merry Christmas, or a happy yule! Or any holiday lol
I just made a connection with mistle(toe) and the English bird mistle thrush. Does it eat mistle(toe)?
Also there are prehistoric burials called kist burials where bones or ashes are buried in a "box" made from stone slabs.
Yes the mistle thrush eat mistle berries, its one of the main dispersers of mistle seeds. Its berries are poisonous to most animals but not to the mistle thrush and a few other birds. The flesh of mistle berries is very viscous and glue-like and when the seeds come out the other end of a thrush it sticks to the bark of tree branches where it can germinate (mistletoes are parasitic and grow on top of trees with their roots infiltrating the host trees vascular system to steal water and nutrients).
I will be right back, just scraping my heart off the ceiling 😂
Please don't jumpscare us like that with the sound effects 😂
Is it possible that "box" mentioned on the rune stone refers to a casket? That was my first thought. Great video as always!
Its odd you thought that, he says Casket" right before he says "Box" 9:53
Must be one of those things where you hear but didnt hear, then subliminally reconnect, or something :)
@@isty4491 Well shucks, I should have taken another listen! You must be right.
There are prehistoric burials in Britain where kists are constructed out of slabs of stone to make a buried box.
I used to imagine that mistletoe grew on hedges for some reason. It wasn't until I went to pick mistletoe, harvest if from certain parts of Oak trees, that I learned that the white berries were poisonous . Can't understand why kissing under a poisonous plant is a good thing. But maybe the three words ending in casket or box has something to do with that.
cool!
From my guess, I would think mistletoe being 'high above the planes' means they were high up in the trees?
The screams when you said "Christian" killed me! 🤣🤣🤣
Mistilltein Norse 'ei' = Saxon 'a' = English ''o'
heim / ham / home
steinn / stan / stone
einn / an / one
Also fun fact, use google translate on old norse of the eddas and when using Icelandic some of the words are translatable.
i find the part about symbols verry interesting. The symbolism of old norse is quite different to christian symbol systems, BUT i think the old norse (and europeans overall) had a verry symbolyc, you could say poetic, way of telling their tales. I dont think that for example when the greek say that Ares was impersonting Achilles on the battlefield they mean exactly that but he was acting in the `spirit` of ares or like ares and would thereby impersonating him. Regarding the kennings and stuff i think they liked reffering to other contexts, but since we are missing the context we often dont get the joke.
How do we know that the three runic characters in those inscriptions mean þistill, mistill and kistill?
Thank you for this'. just started looking into this, it grew on & fed off Oak' Horrid it is, just like the holly & the ivy, all harming trees.
I tried looking for the chapter in poetic edda on baldr and Mistletoe. Turns out the story is reconstructed.
But isn't kennings a kind of symbols - which also could be used in other situations than poetic? Hugin and Munin are, as far as I know, symbols for the past and the future.
No
Is saying yule tidings wrong if so what is the correct saying
I almost did a spit take at “thistil Mistil Kistil” cuz that’s the title of a webcomic based heavily on Norse myth
As far as that theory that mistletoe was once it's own tree... There's a similar tradition in Christianity that the dogwood tree, a tree that doesn't grow straight enough or tall enough to use as a telephone pole let alone an ancient roman implement of torture, was the wood of the cross. So basically there's this legend about another plant that was mystically, magically changed after a noteworthy death.
Yeah, it does scream Christian Influence Anxiety...
Obviously, this proves nothing, and there's no reason to imagine a connection between a story we don't have with an obscure one that's still told. However, it does make one wonder if there was an element of cultural cross-pollination that took place. Of course, there is no way to know in which direction that cross-pollination would have gone if such a thing ever happened.
Is there any way we can ask ask Merrill if he knew of the aforementioned dogwood story at the time he made his suggestion about a lost legend for mistletoe?
Perhaps it could still be a useful academic exercise to track down the origins of that story about the dogwood tree to see what cultures were interacting in that time and place. If nothing else, we could use that information to rate the theory about mistletoe as somewhere between completely implausible to barely plausible.
I read somewhere of an English tradition that the true cross was made of mistletoe, which was a tree before being punished for its role in the crucifixion.
Sounds like the stories blended together after all.
Either way, eventually a story like this will make a child who's old enough to understand the concept of fault cry. Then the story gets modified so that the tree, whichever one the story is about, was changed so that it would never have to experience being used by people like that ever again (which is the version I grew up hearing about).
It's very similar to the question of whether Medusa was punished by an unrighteous goddess or granted a defensive weapon for her own safety.
Now I really want to see that interview, if Merrill is still around.
Could you make a video on Helene A. Gueber’s book “Tales of Norse Mythology”? Because that was my first book I read to introduce myself with Norse myth and I’m finding a lot of claims in that book appear unsubstantiated.
Regarding symbols of old Norse society, we have the hammer as a symbol of Tor/Thor at least... However, I don't know if that was christian influence.
Is that "teinn" thing related to the word "tine", like a fork's tines or a rake's tines? Intuitively the branches of a forked tool do look a bit like little shoots...
Also, you're telling me there's a "little-known" saga that's got zombie-wrestlin' action?
wild guess on thistel, mistel, kistel, a rhyme expressing, born, lived and grew and now dead
I think norse people only had one consensus about mistletoe it is to young swear a oath but an arrow made of wood is old enough to swear so for thematic reasons mistletoe was chosen
it’s a sprout that makes sense
Maybe a rib bone from a calf would’ve worked but that’s less folkie and less charming
Jeg ønsker deg en God Jul fra Trøndelag i Norge :)
The reference in the Wikipedia page about "peace and friendship" is a really weak one. Some random web page, "The Mistletoe Pages", that just claims this without further references.
I have a question for Anyone who sees this TH-cam comment. How dose odin find out about ragnarok (The end of everthing)
God Jul!
God jul!
I wonder if the "thistle, mistle, kissle" thing might be some model of life? Idk how it could be, but the idea would be thistle reps childhood or birth, mistle adulthood or life, and kissle, obvsl, death.
Thistle isn't exactly a briar patch, but some small, noticeable creature might see it as a safe place to nest. The question is whether it was significant enough for the average Norseman of the age to know about... Like where to find some eggs in a pinch?
@@sirnukesalot24 HHHHHMMMmmmm... That's tantalizing
we call a mstletoe a mistelzweig. mistel is the whole plant. im german, by the way
Genuine question: what do you mean "the whole plant" ? I don't think we distinguish in English.
@@flannerypedley840The thing grows on trees in little bushes, those are caled mistel, but on christmas you only hang up branches which are called mistelzweig, i think i got something wrong because mistletoe can be both in english. Sorry
if I had a sword and I wanted others think it was badass I would name it after something that killed a God
14:00 aw come on man you pissed off my dog. Did you have to make the screams like 16 times louder than the rest of the video?
I expect that Druids (either ancient or modern) are more responsible for recent mistletoe mythology.
God Jul
Mistel is, in fact, feminine. Your memory served you right.
I'm confused as to why people would think Santa's based on Odin.
How could anyone think Thor (or Odin) would be Santa Clause?????? Rhetorical question only---Insanity is contagious apparently! It is beyond all logical belief. This all reminds me of the remark in Plato's explanations saying, "That is a very shoddy etymology." I apologize for the correct citation---it has been 40 years........
beware 13:52 my fellow anxiety driven friends
Just saying.. Carefully with Wikipedia. Anyone could write any article or edit an article already has posted there. I'm not suggesting to not reading it but don't take it as some scientific, well-founded, studied info.
Sticky bird poo on a branch is the breakdown I found. Lol maybe this is the English meaning I found.
That's just reality. The berries produce sticky "poo" in the birds that eat them. The birds often need to actually wipe themselves on tree branches to get clean (beak and cloaca). Even if it falls clear from the bird the poo is sticky enough to hopefully stick to a tree before it hits the ground. Seeds that hit the ground are usually not viable. This is how mistletoe seeds are dispersed.
That is a very nice looking shirt, i almost never notice what clothes people wear or think about them, but that one is really really cool looking!
i'd really like to have one of those, where did you get it, was it sold by a big chain? I'd be prepared to spend plenty to order it from the US if i can't find it in Sweden.
Also really nice video about mistletoe.... in Swedish we've dropped the -ten, just "mistel" but norwegian still has it..."mistelten".
Ledberg stone there is like a less than an hour drive from me. And I have a rune stone just 1.1 km (⅔ mile) from me, but my property doesn't stretch that far, it's on the "neighbour's" property (neighbours where i live are like hundreds of meters apart, even a km or two). Östergötland is really full of runestones though, but most are not that interesting, just "raised in honor of X who died in the east" or something like that. But of course some famous ones with interesting little stories or strange "secret runes" do also exist in Östergötland, like the Rök stone.
The Eastern norse vs western norse distiction is pretty interesting, my biggest high school project was one where i analyzed the Östgöta-lagen (one of the early written laws in sweden, based on traditional norse law, only Västgötalagen an older written law in sweden), partly on the language (i was just 16 and not a linguist, but i was very curious about linguistics so i had some things to say about it), and the content and how very different it is from what one might expect from a "primitive" early law in a just recently christianized and recently established kingdom nationstate.
Like the rituals for electing the king, the crimes listed and the penalties prescribed, which i guess some people just guess is brutal death penalty for everything but instead it's very unexpected to modern readers, some crimes we'd see as extreme, even some murders were punished lightly, settled by paying fines and some that we would consider less serious got you sentenced to death or outlawry.
I didn't do that great in highschool overall, but i got heaps of praise for this project from several teachers who otherwise never had much good to say about me. Normally i sucked at all subjects except latin, french and english.
Ah yes: Wackopedia.
At the risk of being an annoying armchair linguist, this discussion of mistletoe calls to mind the hypothesis that Loki is a borrowing of the Celtic Lugh/Lugus, noting the importance of mistletoe in Gaul, as reported by the Romans. Since the Romans appear to have identified Lugh/Lugus with Mercury, this could explain the association between Loki and Woden. The association of these three would make sense in the context of Mercury's role as psychopomp. In support of the idea of cross-pollination between Celtic-speaking and Germanic-speaking communities, isn't there a marginal gloss in a manuscript about the story of how Heimdall gave rise to the three social classes, which contains the word "ri" and is interpreted as meaning "king" in a Celtic language? And isn't the "heim-" element of Heimdall's name cognate, not only with "home" (a vulgar meaning of which is relevant to the Heimdall myth) and the Old English word "haemed" (married) but also with the name of Shiva, the patron of the royal khshatriya caste in India? The marginal gloss "ri" (assuming it has some relevance to the Hemdall story) could be either a reference to a similar, but lost, story told in a Celtic language or to a cultural practice (along the lines of droit de seigneur) in which a "ri" or king ritualistically enacted the deeds of Heimdall in this story, at least among those in a certain social relationship to the king. If the Heimdall story was recognized as having some sort of reflex in a Celtic culture, then other aspects of Germanic myth and culture, potentially including Loki and potentially including mythical or ritual associations of mistletoe, might also have had reflexes in Celtic culture and might even have been borrowed from a Celtic culture. The Lokasenna might be illuminated by this hypothesis?