Talk:Nīþ

etymological relations

Even though naming all etymological relations I could find at the moment, I've tried to mostly stick to Anglo-Saxon forms, except for yrghi as even Anglo-Saxon earg seems to be closer to ergi even though yrghi is supposed to be the Anglo-Saxon form of ergi. If I'll find the time, I'll try to give English translations within the footnotes themselves for all the sources's names. For now, I'm particularly interested in someone more fluent in English and especially a basic English language grasp particularly at the matter in question to look over all my quotes in the article since I've translated them all myself. Furthermore, don't be surprised about the bottom section (Potential historical context of nith ), there'll be material to appear in there soon, just as the sections Nith in relation to biological sex, Nith, physical ailments, and illness, and especially Nith and witches will further grow. -TlatoSMD 03:09, 15 Mai 2006 (CEST)

I'm concerned about the statement: "It is also retained in the modern German word Niete, meaning "loser", "losing ticket", "also-ran"." Kluge 2011 (656) suggests that this word was borrowed from modern Dutch, actually meaning nichts (nothing) and has no etymological relation to nīþ. The extant modern Dutch cognate of nīþ is nijd. Kavindad1 (talk) 15:32, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

I have removed the mention of Niete, as Kluge's reference above disestablishes the link. While the word semantically similar, NHG "t" does not trace back to Germanic "þ" by established sound laws. Instead, Germanic "þ" produced NHG "d," as is the case with the secure cognate "Neid" (envy, grudge). Kavindad1 (talk) 14:38, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

There is also little evidence to qualify the statement "cf. modern English beneath and modern German nieder" upon mentioning nīðing. Even the definition of "one lower than those around him" does not conform to the Oxford English Dictionary's "a coward, a villain; a person who breaks the law or a code of honour; an outlaw" (OED Online). English "beneath" and German "nieder" come from a different root word than Middle English nithe and German Neid. I have found no reliable evidence that German "Neid" and "nieder" share any direct relation. Can anyone find anything? Kavindad1 (talk) 15:00, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Concerning your last question: I guess so, cp "nieder machen", "erniedrigen", which transparently relate to "niedrig" (low), synonym "runter machen" (never "? herunter machen" as far as I can tell), also "rund machen" (cp "to round up", further "jemanden rollen"). If you mean anything quotable then no, I have no idea, but the mere allusion is well convincing to me.

"Netherlands" is formally compatible with "nieder", viz "Niederlande", that could be hardly explained from a negative sense. The interesting bit of the etymology would be the polysemy and development of a possibly ancient paradigm. I.e. it does make some sense to think the Netherlands were forefit. For the article the line has to be drawn somewhere, and naive notions of relatedness are questionable, if there's no merrit in trying to reduce many different meanings to one single root.

This also counts for your removal of "Niete". It being from Dutch says little about the further history. Not being formally compatible also says very little, taking into account that slurs are regularly subject of bowdlerization, *you nit* (no offense, pun intended). @[User:Kavindad1|Kavindad1]. 109.41.2.44 (talk) 18:16, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

It may not be prudent to delete all mention of the folk etymology relating the word to the meaning "lower, beneath", as was recently done. What do we know about how old this misinterpretation is and whether it may have influenced the use of the term already in the old times? In any case it has influenced later views on it. 2A00:801:3C5:C437:E0EE:BCDC:8334:A75A (talk) 13:01, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Seid Merge

Resolved

Why merge? Kim van der Linde ^{at venus} 01:52, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

On the definition of "chastity"

Resolved

By using the English term "chastity", I've tried to translate that traditional Indo-European notion or attitude referred to as Leibfeindlichkeit by Dr. Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg in German and that Dr. Hubert Kennedy translated as "hostility of the body" in his English translation of her work The paedophile impulse. --TlatoSMD 04:33, 11 August 2006 (CEST)

Talked to an erudite, germanophone American scholar about Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg's specific use of Leibfeindlichkeit now, and it seems like asceticism is a better choice for translation. --TlatoSMD 19:57, 10 March 2007 (CEST)

Persons

Resolved

I am not clear whether people are called niding or some people considered themselves niding? --Error 17:22, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

It was a clearly negatively connoted label. No person in their right mind would have identified themselves as a nithing because the very concept itself contained a moral obligation of doing away with them in most violent and hostile ways. --Tlatosmd 06:19, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Moral turpitude

User:Aleta has removed my link to the main entry moral turpitude from the section Nith, seid, and criminality. Did you find it "not appropriate" because the pertaining article describes moral turpitude as being strictly an American legal term? I had added the term after finding it in Night of the Long Knives on Goebbels's and Hitler's justifications regarding Röhm's homosexuality, and how American is that? Furthermore, don't you see a striking, almost 1:1 resemblance between the misdemeanors and crimes listed under moral turpitude and those associated with nithings here?

Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, my main source for this article, expounds for hundreds of pages on the history of homophobia in the Western world since Kurganization. The nithing is the main concept she operates with because this Norse version of the mythological origins of homophobia is the least rationalized, thus most "purest" or original form available to cultural anthropology in Western history of Indo-European cultures, at least at these earliest stages of Norse culture still researchable. According to Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, these mythological roots of homophobia, as best-recognizable, most basic and typical in proto-historic Norse culture, are themselves the Western core concept of ethnocentric reactions of horror and hatred towards not only all deviant sexuality in general, but also of the idea of moral depravity in general, compare for instance Malakia (effeminacy) (formerly Classical definition of effeminacy) or the closely related Indo-European concept of imbecillitas, English imbecility (note Tacitus's term imbelles in this article on nithings!) on that.

Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg makes her way across Kurganization, Norse culture, monotheisms, Greece and Rome, Byzantine Emperor Justinian I's invention of the Sodom myth (that the Genesis account would have anything to do with carnal sins), Benedictus Levita's forged Charlemagnian capitularies in the Pseudo-Isidore prolonging the existence of the Sodom myth (see Sodomy on the latter two issues), the carnal sin laws from the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina and more recent developments. She thereby finds largely identical cultural notions even though reading most sources in their original languages and most thoroughly and exhaustingly avoiding purely ethnocentric or chronocentric interpretations in the spirit of our own times, and she witnesses increasingly pseudo-scientific rationalizations prolonging the old numinous, ethnocentric prejudices as history progresses. Finally, Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg uses the inherent, typically homophobic patterns in the justifications by Hitler and Goebbels for the Night of the Long Knives as evidence, among many other examples from modern history, on how little this numinous ethnocentric notion of sexual deviance, especially homosexuality, as the primary indicator and association of moral depravity, general unreliability, insidiousness, criminal tendency, weirdness, creepiness, and entire untrustworthiness has actually changed over the centuries from the mythological nithing fiend.

So, with this background and the fact the entry for Night of the Long Knives uses the term, wouldn't you agree that moral turpitude is quite a fitting main entry for that section, especially regarding the basically identical list of crimes and misdemeanors here as well as in the article for moral turpitude? --TlatoSMD (talk) 01:48, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps instead of simply removing the link, I should have put it in a "see also" section. Without the connection being more explicit in the articles, no, I don't think it should be listed as a "main article" link though. Aleta (Sing) 02:20, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Per this discussion, I've just added moral turpitude to the "see also" section. Aleta (Sing) 02:22, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for responding so fast this time. I agree with your new decision. :) --TlatoSMD (talk) 02:37, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

You're welcome. BTW, with regards to the rating (for which I'm formulating my comments), you seem to have the impression that a B rating is negative. On the contrary, it's the highest rating an article can get without having been nominated and going through either the more formal good article or featured article process (which does imply, of course, that improvements could still be made). Aleta (Sing) 02:47, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I've removed a few more of your "main article" links. Basically, you should use that template when you have a section of your article summarizing a topic that is the subject of its own article - such as the section on ergi here. In the sections for, e.g. shamanism, you are discussing how this Nið and it relate, but not summarizing shamanism in general. So it is absolutely relevant to link, but shouldn't be a "main article" link. Does this make sense? Aleta (Sing) 03:22, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Clarity

Hi, the lede needs clarity clean-up. If you had only ten seconds, Níð is what? It sounds like its a mythological concept but I'm not sure. The various other spelling should probably be clumped into parenthesis (so readers more easily understand it's the same word in other languages). I think the second and third sentences should focus on it's implications followed by other forms of the word. That's just my quick feedback, don't be disheartened when folks only read the lede we're a low attention-span society after all. Benjiboi 04:22, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

In ten seconds? Then I'd say "evil", especially evil associated with lecherousness and sexual deviance. For the time span and culture this article particularly deals with, the most evil form of inherently evil sexual deviance were male same-sex activities and desire for them, but according to main source Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg this most prominent place among sexual deviances, as ethnocentrically defined as evil due to what particularly in Norse culture was called nith, has been replaced by certain other paraphilia increasingly since the Age of Enlightenment and especially so post-WWII.

As much as I remember this article once contained the word evil a few times but it was replaced by an editor with "malicious" or "malevolence" (of course malice, as in malevolent intent, was part of being a nithing as well) because they felt that modern science and philosophy would have debunked the very concept of "evil". One might argue of course that this article deals with a pre-scientific culture where people still believed in evil, and one might also argue that this societal and cultural notion has survived the rise of modern science quite well, especially in the case of sexual deviance. Keywords for Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg here are the remaining numinosity of certain irrational prejudices that are inherently mythological in origin, with pseudo-scientifically rationalized transcendental/supernatural connotations. Example: "Evil" and malevolence in homosexuals was re-defined by ideological pseudo-science as mental illness (the keyword being moral insanity) and selfishness. --TlatoSMD (talk) 12:59, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Lol. I'm way too short-attention span for in-depth articles at the moment but I've fluffed the lede a bit for clarity. I suggest working in "evil associated with lecherousness and sexual deviance" if you have a source that covers it - if you have a quote even better as folks seem to respect quotes a bit more. Benjiboi 16:33, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Very dubious, rewrite needed

Currently, this article presents a number of theories as fact and then runs with it, and the end result is an extremely dubious and misleading article. It needs to be rewritten. Most important of all, attestations need to be mapped out, and then the theories needed to be brought into a separate section. :bloodofox: (talk) 17:43, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Detailed discussion is obviously taking place only here. --79.193.61.35 (talk) 17:31, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Discussion of an article "obviously" takes place on that article's talkpage. It is a complete mystery what purpose a separate "comments" page is supposed to serve.

This article is in extremely bad shape. If frankly looks like your typical "Indian antiquity" article prior to cleanup. I don't think I have seen anything like it among Germanic topics. A complete rewrite is necessary, but of course the present article contains a lot of valid material that should be preserved. Maybe it would be best to move the present article to a {{workpage}} and start over. --dab (𒁳) 08:56, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

ok, it transpires that the main problem here is the Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg gender/LGBT study stuff, blown out of proportion to the point of obscuring the article topic. Essentially, we are looking at a {{coatrack}} {{essay-entry}}. Surprisingly, the ergi article, which is the redirect target for Homosexuality in Norse paganism, appears to have remained undisturbed. --dab (𒁳) 09:11, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's quite a unique article. I see you're taking a stab at bringing it into line. Good luck! Haukur (talk) 09:09, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I can't do this today, but I will try to sort the wheat from the chaff over the next few days... --dab (𒁳) 09:11, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

fwiiw, de:Neidingswerk seems to be in good shape and may be useful as a guide. --dab (𒁳) 09:15, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Dab, you and I have been agreeing so well in defending the article Kurgan hypothesis from Rokus01 and his pseudo-scientific claim that Indo-Europeans would've originated from Holland. Most of what I know also about Indo-European studies is through the same source by Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg as used here, so she can't be that bad a source. Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg dug out a century of Indogermanistik research publications prior to Gimbutas to point out that Gimbutas actually never originated the Kurgan hypothesis in the first place, she only thought of using the handle Kurgan, applied it to a propagation model and timeline already existent in Scandinavian and Central-European Indogermanistik research, and popularized the overall idea in the Anglosphere.

The reason the ergi article stayed the way it was is that in 2006, esoteric neo-Pagans didn't want "their" entirely arbitrary, New Age "seid" label as practiced today for recreational purposes to be associated with poisoning and lewdness as for a matter of fact seid is in original and modern sources; their neo-Pagan definition of níð is one of a "curse directed against malevolent people" instead of a spiritual evil or malevolence itself that Germanic people accused those of they considered as wrongdoers. Obviously, they got it mixed up with the scolding ritual that was expected to be used on a suspected nithing.

The German de:Neidingswerk article is based entirely on out-dated sources prior to WWI, with some later uncritical derivates of those, whereas all of which are dedicated mostly to broad overviews over Germanic culture as a whole; two people effectively downgraded the German article to a state prior to WWI, while ignoring all original Germanic sources not in line with their limited understanding of the topic, just as they also did on the talkpage. Their understanding of níð is one of "perjury" or, more generally, "law-breaking", obviously. It was indeed considered a nithing creature's natural behavior according to folklore to break a whole lot of the most sacred and most valued laws, however nith was not the eventual act of breaking any law, in fact it was their overall motivation for doing such that they were labeled with, a kind of malevolent hatred closely related to envy or jealousy due to being essentially inferior to mankind.

I just don't understand how you can blame this on some coatrack forgery by Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg if you look at the ratio of direct references to her compared to that of all those other modern references in the intact version: Out of 85 references (whereas almost every single sentence is tagged with at least one reference or more!), only 9 are to Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg (not counting the one reference relating to the proper English translation of German Leibfeindlichkeit)! Why ignore more than 70 other sources by calling them some "coatrack", "original research", or some "personal essay"?

As I've said before elsewhere, what you call her "out-of-proportion gender issue" is totally in line with Klein 1930 and Grönbech 1954 as other sources with whole chapters dedicated entirely to the nithing myth, where this particular topic is referred to as "obvious" lewdness motifs about it. More modern references for strong associations of lewdness are Weisweiler 1923 and Much 1959 (enlarged edition 1967).

Also, I'd like you to know that the move of the article has broken the above link to its LGBT review. Its original name was Níð. --79.193.113.61 (talk) 23:51, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Note that this seems to be indefinitely banned user Tlatosmd (talk · contribs). :bloodofox: (talk) 10:20, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

Restoring referenced content

Most of the material in the article was valid and referenced. Some of it was faulty or misleading. I have removed some unattested items, improved some, and restored the referenced material

Now, Bloodofox, . " loaded with so many POV-violations" is not a coherent argument. Stop arguing by edit summary and present a coherent argument on talk why you think the remaining material is flawed. Also feel free to use inline tags. This isn't my text, and I agree it needs to be cleaned up, but it simply will not do for you to just go around and blank material just because you do not like it. You seem to think that whenever you find a bit of information that doesn't suit you, you can get rid of it just by invoking general policy and raising the bar to such arbitrary heights of perfection that essentially you can selectively blank anything you like. This is not acceptable. Either help writing this article or stay away.

I obviously agree the article isn't good at this stage and needs improvement. You will not achieve this by blanking perfectly valid content just because its presentation needs some copyediting.

The original article "full of so man POV-violations" was that of May 2009. The current revision is already a significantly cleaned up version. I don't see why you should keep blanking a work in progress, which has made significant progress, just because its starting point more than a year ago was really bad. --dab (𒁳) 09:00, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Normally the argument that you've presented here might have some merit, but you have conveniently neglected to mention that what you keep restoring stems from a seriously POV-plagued article by a banned user, and all of the material supposedly culled from said sources needs to be thoroughly checked to see where the sources end and said user's dubious opinions begin. This article needs more than "copyediting"; it needs a straight razor—we're looking at about 60 references with varying potentials for misattribution.

Now, until someone wants rewrite all of this from the ground up—and, given your well-established history of inserting your personal opinion into articles and common disregard for referencing (the latter making the prior inconvenient, of course), I'm certainly not nominating you—all of this needs to be culled due to the obvious problems inherent in the original text. :bloodofox: (talk) 15:28, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

nonsense, this is just another one of your OWN ego trips. I am in the process of improving this, see the diff above. You are welcome to help. Otherwise stop disrupting this.

Are you, or are you not going to point out which points you are objecting to? Otherwise your removal of referenced, unproblematic content is simple vandalism. --dab (𒁳) 16:42, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Do I need to spell this out again? Here, I'll put it in italics for you; every one of nearly 60 references on this article needs to be checked for misattribution. Now, if you want to attempt to rewrite this article using solid references (hard for you, I know), then I'll be here too, and, well, I'll even help you (!). In the mean time, reinstating what is known to be severely problematic material does no one any favors, is, in fact, disruptive, and is further indicative of your henceforth generally dubious and questionable approach to editing articles. :bloodofox: (talk) 16:53, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Nonsense. The article originating with a banned user has nothing to do with this, as the user wasn't banned when he wrote it, and his ban had nothign to do with this article. If you were finally banned over your constant edit-warring and WP:BATTLEGROUND, would you argue that all articles you contributed in the past would need to be deleted? It doesn't work this way. Your valid contributions will stay, even if you are banned. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the article as it stands. It needs work, it is duly tagged, and I am working on it. If you cannot help at least don't stand in the way. --dab (𒁳) 14:04, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

And here we have another example of Dbachmann's infamous sidestepping. I point out concrete problems (generally involving WP:OR, WP:NPOV and WP:PROVEIT—frequently of Dbachmann's own doing), and then Dbachmann attempts to distract with vague claims of behavioral policy. Like I've said repeatedly, considering how badly infected this article was with blatant POV issues as written by said, yes, banned user, each one of these references would need to be filtered through. There are nearly 60 of them. And, as I've said, considering how you're largely guilty of exactly these problems (in fact, I think you would well do Wikipedia a favor by hanging it up—but I'm sure your daily systematic violations will catch up to you eventually), you're not exactly the first person I would vote for.

So, out it goes, as the references can't be trusted. If you want to continue making a stink about it, go ahead, but the problem could simply be solved with a well-referenced rewrite. :bloodofox: (talk) 22:49, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

got to love your use of "concrete" and "generally". Saying "riddled with" or "generally involving" does not meet my definition of "concrete". If you did point out concrete problem, they could actually be addressed. So far you have just said "I want to check all references". Be my guest and do that. Let me know if you find anything concrete.

As long as you cannot point out any concrete problem with the article other than "don't like it, don't trust it" please stop trolling. You could also go easy on the oblique personal attacks, but I wouldn't mind them so much if you would make up for them by doing something useful too. --dab (𒁳) 13:20, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Careful with your semantic venturing here—it seems to me that you might want to take a second look at the usage of "generally" above; it's a synonym for "usually", and I was referring to you. The article does, indeed, have concrete problems, both in terms of its foundation and the inherent issue with pulling references wholesale from the problematic previous revision, whether or not you've given it a round of editing. Then there's the current text, with lines like "Also, there exists (or existed) evidence on the Golden horns of Gallehus that male initiates of seid were ritually castrated" stated as fact. Come on, even your additions are usually better than that.

Anyway, anyone who cares about the quality of this article has ample reason to call for a rewrite here. Besides the problems with the text itself, the usage of those 60 references pulled straight from the POV-plagued previous article results in a very big risk of misattribution. You're obviously not too concerned about this referencing business. However, I am, and anyone else who wants a reliable article here should be also.

It should all be cut; nearly all of the sentences in the article need to be rewritten with neutrality in mind (frequently presenting theory as fact), and each one of those references would need to be sorted through. That said, it's pointless to go back and forth with you here. So, until the article gets the needed rewrite, I'm willing to leave it at a rewrite tag for now. :bloodofox: (talk) 22:32, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Pronunciation ?

Is there a good way to get a clarification on the pronunciation of the word? Are there links to descriptions or audio files that would help? --Alex.rosenheim (talk) 13:59, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Nīþ/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Comment(s)

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Article appears to be well-sourced. If English-language references exist, they should be added. Aleta (Sing) 03:25, 21 January 2008 (UTC) The article seems to have proper sources, and cites these well with inline citations. However, the article contains a lot of irrelevant information, and it is nearly impossible to fathom the general concept without considerable effort. Too many headlines, it is not neutral, not concise enough, to mention a few negative sides. –Holt T•C 18:03, 10 November 2008 (UTC) Yes, it is also heavily slanted towards sexuality. A man was also níðing simply by failing to turn up for a duel.--Berig (talk) 05:55, 11 November 2008 (UTC) It's nothing that can't be explained. The mentioned holmgang situation is what's hinted at in the sections New Helgi song and Scolding. Germanic warriors (usually male) challenged each other into a duel by insulting each other as earg ("cowardly, unmanly, lewd") nithings (see also scop and flyting), and if the accused didn't turn up for the duel or didn't appropriately retort by violence right away he was considered a coward, i. e. the preceding challenging accusations of him as a cowardly, unmanly, and lewd nithing had proven to be true, and for failing to respond as was considered appropriate for a decent man, he was outlawed. And as a matter of fact, cowardice and unmanliness are strongly associated with lewdness and sexual deviance, especially homosexuality, in all patriarchal Indo-European cultures since the beginning of the Iron Age until the present day. Just look at the many sources given in the footnotes for proto-historic Germanic society closely tying the nithing myth to lewdness, for instance. It's just that the proto-historic, mythological Germanic nithing creature as it shows to us in remaining records is the one version of this myth still least rationalized we know from any Indo-European religions and mythologies, standing in close correspondence with the common Indo-European archetype of the shape-shifting trickster deity. Just why do you think Loki, Norse pantheon's prototypically Shamanic, shape-shifting, prankster trickster deity, is the one Germanic god most associated with lewd (= earg) seid? Why do you think he's neither a proper Áss, nor a proper Vanir, being accepted, as many tricksters are, into the pantheon by the proper deities only by means of either deceit or tolerance, in Loki's case particularly an ancient, almost forgotten blood brotherhood with Odin? The trickster deity of Loki in itself, as it appears to us in remaining sources, is already quite rationalized, thus much about him and his associated attributes appears rather obscure and cryptic to any modern scholar ignorant of the nithing archetype and its influence upon proto-historic Germanic society. If you ignore the nithing myth, you just don't know what made Loki the deity we encounter in the surviving original sources. Many things we see about the trickster archetype in other Indo-European cultures, and even the underlying cultural paradigms behind the close associations of seid, ergi, and suht, or of ignavi et imbelles et corpore infames, in proto-historic Germanic society itself, just don't make sense without the nithing as a recovered early, not already too rationalized cultural link to the original mythological idea. In other words, with the nithing we're talking here about a basic Indo-European socio-cultural and mythological archetype in its purest, most ancient form that we may ever know. --79.193.61.35 (talk) 17:10, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Substituted at 21:54, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Problems

The content is good, but the style is typical of comparative literature, trying to immerse the reader and explore a topic. This is atypical for wikipedia. We are rather looking for a meta survey.

• The topic appears to be delicate. It's difficult to be up-front without being too much on the nose. But if one doubts at times whether the article is sensationalizing something that was sensationalizing to begin with, i.e. when it presents a written story, that might or might not be embelished, as if it were fact. The cited law codes must not be misunderstood as codified ritual, but sanctioned traditioned, if there is a difference.

• The first section starts with an imperative, and contains an allegation of formal process without clarifying who adhered to it. In effect this is a just-so story: Insults, violence, duels, laws describing due process after the fact. It's missing the rational. It falls under WP:NPOV due to the imperative of institutionalized violence (which is an ironic thing to say, really). Simply the choice of words "one had to" is imperfect.

• Terms like argr etc are introduced over a long winded section, to equate them with nith only at the very end of the section. That's report style and bad reading for a summary.

• This goes on until the very end, where castration is mentioned, which but remains incomprehensible because the responsible "seid" is not explained once in the text, as if it was commonly understood. It certainly isn't and a link doesn't help with that.

• Calling it a myth en passant could be technically correct, as broad as the term is in mythology, but that does not matter because it's likely not going to be understood by many. It's like math articles that pull specific notation out of nowhere.

• The Lede is still not helpfull, @[User:dab], the formatting too dense. A good article has an extra section for etymology, which should be kept brief unless the etymology is uncertain, possibly crossreferenced with wiktionary. Which might be unsatisfactory, if possible relations as for Niete and beneath (see above), can't be sourced.

• Even the Title with its widsidth, ð, feels out of place. We transliterate titles if at all possible, no?

Effectively, the article gives the impression that the concept is not well understood, or not tangible at all. If it's a bit out-there, that's perhaps not the authors' fault, but reflecting the concept. Either way, I can't help with that. 109.41.2.44 (talk) 20:22, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Nag tags

I don't think there is much that can be done to make the topic look simple and straightforward. I remove the tags as they hardly help improve the article anyway.--Berig (talk) 16:27, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

The term relates to what was a very serious crime for men in Germanic culture, i.e. not behaving like a "real man", and that included "dishonourable behaviour", like homosexuality and female activities like magic, and especially not being a man who cared about his honour. This means in practice that the term did not refer to a single concept, but to an array of "offensive behaviours". How do we make that kind of concept work in a single article? Not by adding tags, anyway.--Berig (talk) 16:42, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

Dishonour?

The article states: "was a term for a social stigma implying the loss of honour and the status of a villain". The root "Nīþ" literally means "honourable man", "valorous", "battle fury". Why is this listed in the negative here?Rosengarten Zu Worms (talk) 11:44, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

Citation/Wording Issues in "Scolding and níðstang"

I have removed a citation and added a request for another as the translations and citations at the start of the "Scolding and níðstang" section of the article appear to be of subpar quality, if not outright misleading, namely:

• I was unable to locate the initial citation indicating that "Níðings had to be scolded". The citation indicates that it should be found in the 1957 revised edition of the second volume of Jan de Vries's "Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte" on page 51, but this edition does not feature a section entitled "Die Religion der Nordgermanen". The 1957 revised edition does not appear to feature such a section (or at least, the 1970 reprinting of this edition does not), but the first edition published in 1937 does appear to title the second volume "Die Religion der Nordgermanen".
• In an attempt to locate the presumably referenced content on ragr, argr and their use in invective speech in the 1970 reprint of the revised edition, I did identify a discussion in § 147 (p. 200) of the 1970 reprint of volume 1, but this discussion appears to indicate only that the words ragr and argr were often used in invective speech against men ("Überraschend häufig wird diese Beschuldigung laut, besonders in ehrenrührigen Scheltreden.") but does not indicate that a scolding was legally obligatory, that scolding was some special term exclusively used for the practice of slandering a níðingr, or that scolding would "break the concealing seiðr spell and would thus force the fiend to give away its true nature", all of which are strongly implied or stated outright by the current wording.
• The quotation from Gering ("nach isländischen rechte hatte der so gescholtene das recht, den beleidiger auf der stelle zu töten, ohne verpflichtet zu sein, wergeld zu zahlen") seems to be poorly translated and does not seem to imply a legal obligation to kill someone when slandered as argr (as the translation claims), but rather, that any such killing was the right of an Icelandic man so wronged (as the man would not be obligated to pay the weregild that would otherwise be warranted for slaying another person), though it was no doubt socially expected of a man who did not wish to be branded as níðingr. I will admit, however, that the subsequent quotation in Old Norse given by Gering may indicate that such a legal obligation existed (perhaps implied by the later discussion of níðingr as outlaw in the article). (I don't want to hazard a guess as to its meaning as an layperson in the field with as poor a grasp of German as I have...)
• The quotation from the "New Helgi song" is not cited. In the above discussion by de Vries, a reference is made to "Sinfjǫtlis Beschimpfung" in Helgakviða Hundingsbana I, stanzas 38 and 40. This seems to largely correspond with the English translation in the article, but I am unable to locate the translation used, and the only translations and transcriptions I have been able to locate do not use the word earg. While the flyting in question is almost certainly an example of the severity of being considered ergi in Germanic culture, the translation itself is potentially misleading without the proper citation.

Given these issues, I suspect the whole section could probably do with a review by someone with extensive expertise in Ancient Germanic studies so as to properly vet potentially misleading wording here and elsewhere in the article, but I'm reluctant to invoke {{expert}} here until there's some consensus on what, exactly, should be reviewed and whether that's the best way to approach the issues with this article as written at this juncture.

--Pipian (talk) 22:22, 14 April 2023 (UTC)