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Aurvandill (Old Norse) is a figure in Germanic mythology. In Norse mythology, the god Thor tosses Aurvandill's toe – which had frozen while the thunder god was carrying him in a basket across the Élivágar rivers – into the sky to form a star called ' ('Aurvandill's toe'). In wider medieval Germanic-speaking cultures, he was known as ' in Old English, ' in Old High German, ' in Lombardic, and possibly as auzandil () in Gothic. An Old Danish latinized version, Horwendillus (Ørvendil), is also the name given to the father of Amlethus (Amleth) in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum.
Comparative studies have led scholars to reconstruct a Common Germanic mythic figure, ' ('light-beam' or 'ray of light'), associated with brightness and dawn-light imagery. On the basis of the Old English and Gothic evidence, and to a lesser degree the Old Norse text (which mentions a star without additional details), this figure has been interpreted as relating to the rising light of the morning, sometimes identified with the Morning Star (Venus). The German and Old Danish material, however, is more difficult to integrate into this interpretative model.
Name and origin
Etymology
The Old Norse name ' stems from a Proto-Germanic form reconstructed as ', ', or '. It is cognate with Old English ', Old High German ' (≈ '), and Lombardic '. The Gothic word ', which can be read in the Gothica Bononiensia according to the interpretation of several experts, is probably another cognate.
Main interpretation
The exact meaning of the Proto-Germanic name has been the subject of sustained scholarly discussion. Most scholars favour a connection with dawn-light imagery, making Aurvandill a figure associated with brightness, the morning star, or a celestial phenomenon.
A commonly cited interpretation, first proposed by Rudolf Much in 1934, analyses ' as a compound meaning 'light-beam' or 'ray of light'.|group=note while the second element ' is traced to ' ('rod, cane').