Newsgroups: soc.history.moderated
From: [a--ns--n] at [lysator.liu.se] (Lars Aronsson)
Subject: Re: Early Scandinavian trade ("gard")
Date: Thu, 12 May 1994 18:15:00 GMT

[e--p] at [umich.edu] (Eduard Ponarin) writes:

>Regarding Aasgard, "home of gods", does it really mean "the home
>CITY of gods" or, rather, "the home FARM or GARDEN of gods"?
>What kind of things did the gods do there?  Waging warfare from
>a castle or ploughing the land or whatever?

In the days of the vikings, there were no villages in Scandinavia
large enough to qualify as towns.  There would have been little
difference between a large "farm" and a village.  The present Swedish
word for town "stad" is a loan from German "Stadt".  However,
Norwegian "sted" and English "stead" (as in homestead) means "farm" or
"small place".  The present Norwegian and Danish word for town "by" is
also the Swedish word for village.  The English word town corresponds
in ethymology to Swedish word "tun" which means "the flat ground in
front of your house", obviously a much smaller place than an entire
farm.  Still, at least one Swedish town (Eskilstuna) contains this
word in its name.  Towns were a new invention at the time, and there
seems to have been a lot of confusion on terminology.

A bishop, king, or other important person would not live in one house,
but rather have a (few) dozen houses grouped together, possibly with a
fence or wall or moat around it.  Sometimes situated on a small
island.  This is a "gard".  This is what the Viking gods had in
Asgard.  It has nothing to do with farming, so "farm" does not quite
describe it.  Of course, the gods had large and splendid houses.

The gods, and all brave dead warriors who joined them, spent all day
fighting each others with swords, without getting hurt.  They then sat
down to dinner, drinking lots of beer and eating the pork of a magic
pig, which was reborn the next day.  Nice religion, huh?

In old Norse mythology, the human world was also thought of as a gard,
surrounded not by a moat, but by the ocean sea.  This is Midgard, the
middle earth, where humans live.  Between Asgard and Midgard is a
bridge, bifrost, the rainbow.  Giants live in Utgard (out-gard),
outside of Midgard.  There are books about this.  See the mythology
shelf of your local library.

A gard is not a village, because a village consist of houses owned by
several people.  All houses in a gard belongs to one person or a
family.  A village is a collection of (small) gards.

The earliest all-Swedish kings had king-gards in strategic places
throughout the country, as a means to collect taxes.  They toured
around, living a few months at each place, rather than residing in one
capital.  Later these gards were fortified as castles, and counts were
appointed to govern the counties, and the king resided in Stockholm.
Villages close to the county castles started to grow and form towns.

In modern Swedish, a garden is a tree-gard (tradgard), a cow-house is
a barn-gard (ladugard), a church yard is a church-gard (kyrkogard), a
bishop's home is a bishop-gard (biskopsgard), a vicar's home is a
priest-gard (prastgard), a mansion is a lord-gard (herrgard), a farm
is a farmer-gard (bondgard), and a lunar halo is a moon-gard
(mangard).  The word is very popular.

Considering the general confusion about Stadt, stead, by, town, tun,
etc., the idea of calling a town a gard is not far off, especially
when your language does not have a word for town and your country has
no towns.  I cannot tell whether Novgorod and the rest were named by
vikings or local people, I guess we just cannot know that for sure.
--
Lars Aronsson, Lysator, Linkoping University, Linkoping, Sweden