Untitled - Centrostudirpinia.it

HIS DANCE. A SKELETON. 849
Very commonly he is called der grimme furious, B/oth. 2750.
Nib. 1360, 4. 1553, 3. Mar. 218. Flore 1931. Troj. 2317-25.
1 10885. Ls. 3, 124 der ;
ferchgrimme, Morolt 4059, a felicit
ous compound, as Death has designs upon the life or soul (ferch) ;
der grimmige, Roth. 517. Reinh. 360. 1248. Berthold 303;
f
der bittere
(iriKpos Odvaros:) and amara Mors/ 2 Rudl. 1,
110. Unibos 117, 4. Diut. 3, 89. Mar. 206. Alex. (Lampr.)
820. 1097. 3999. 4782. Gr. Ruod. Cb 15. Wh. 253, 28. Wigal.
1113; der bitterUche, Troj. 3521. 22637; der
9
sure, sour,
Parz. 643, 24; der scharfe : ein scharpher bote, Freid. 21, 6;
der irre Amgb. 29 a in Wizlau neighbhd. therefore prob. for
erre, ireful;
f
der gemeine/ common (qui omnes manet), En.
2081. All, so far, epithets taken from his unavoidableness,
cruelty, bitterness ; not a hint about his personal presence. No
where is he the black, the pale, after the Latin mors atra,
pallida. Otto II was called paliida mors Saracenorum/ Cod.
lauresh. 1, 132 ; and in Renner 23978. 80 I find der gelwe
tot/ yellow d. ; in both cases the aspect of the dead, not of
Death, is meant. So when Walth. 124, 38 says of the world,
that it is innan swarzer varwe, muster sam der tot/ inwardly
black of hue, dark as death, he means the abode of the dead,
hell, not the figure of Death. In one song he is addressed as
lieber Tot! dear D. (Hagen s Mus. 2, 187), and H. Sachs i. 5,
528 d
speaks of him as der heilig Tod/ holy D. ;
D., again in voc. case only, Apollonius
Ackermann aus Bohmen (see Suppl.).
<
her Tot ! Sir
295 and often in the
It is more important to our inquiry, that in the Reinardus 3,
2162 a bone fiddle is said to be ossea ut dominus Blicero, by
which nothing but Death can have been meant, whether the word
signify the pale (bleich), or the grinning (bleckend), or be, as I
rather think, the proper name BUdger, Blicker with a mere sug
gestion of those meanings. A bony horse s head is here handed
in mockery to the wolf as a skilful player (joculandi gnarus) by
way of fiddle, (
bony as a skeleton. And now that unexplained
caput caballinum at p. 661 n. may be interpreted as in fact a sym-
1 Der grimme tot, the name of a knife (Wolfd. 1313), is remarkable, as Hel s
knife was called sultr (p. 313) from svelta esurire, which in the Goth, sviltan takes
the meaning of mori.
2 Isidore even says, mors dicta quod sit amara.