Talk:Nīþ

message: Why merge? Kim van der Linde at venus 01:52, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Seid Merge  

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

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: Per this discussion, I've just added moral turpitude to the "see also" section. Aleta (Sing) 02:22, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for responding so fast this time. I agree with your new decision. :) --TlatoSMD (talk) 02:37, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title:  Moral turpitude 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Pronunciation ? 

message: Substituted at 21:54, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: 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)
thread_title:  Problems 

message: 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)
thread_title: Nag tags

message: 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)
thread_title:  Dishonour? 

message: 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  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)
thread_title: Citation/Wording Issues in "Scolding and níðstang"