The World Mill (also "heavenly mill", "cosmic mill" and variants) is a mytheme suggested as recurring in

Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...

and other mythologies. It involves the analogy of the

cosmos The cosmos (, ) is another name for the Universe. Using the word ''cosmos'' implies viewing the universe as a complex and orderly system or entity. The cosmos, and understandings of the reasons for its existence and significance, are studied in ...

firmament In biblical cosmology, the firmament is the vast solid dome created by God during his creation of the world to divide the primal sea into upper and lower portions so that the dry land could appear. The concept was adopted into the subsequent ...

and a rotating millstone. The mytheme was extensively explored in

Viktor Rydberg Abraham Viktor Rydberg (; 18 December 182821 September 1895) was a Swedish writer and a member of the Swedish Academy, 1877–1895. "Primarily a classical idealist", Viktor Rydberg has been described as "Sweden's last Romantic" and by 1859 was ...

's 1886 '' Investigations into Germanic Mythology'', who provides both ancient Scandinavian and Indian examples. Donald Mackenzie described the World Mill’s relationship to the sacred spiral and the revolution of the starry heavens, providing analogs in Chinese, Egyptian, Babylonian, and AmerInd folklore, before concluding "that the idea of the World Mill originated as a result of the observation of the seasonal revolutions of the constellation of the 'Great Bear'." Clive Tolley (1995) examined the significance of the mytheme in Indo-European and

Finnish mythology Finnish mythology is a commonly applied description of the folklore of Finnish paganism, of which a modern revival is practiced by a small percentage of the Finnish people. It has many features shared with Estonian and other Finnic mythologies, ...

. Tolley found that "the image of a cosmic mill, ambivalently churning out well-being or disaster, may be recognized in certain fragmentary myths", adding additional Indo-European and Finnish analogs of the mill to the material previously considered by Rydberg and others. Tolley comes to the conclusion that Richard M. Dorson surveyed the views of 19th-century writers on the World Mill in his 1968 historical review, ''Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists'', and the mytheme is discussed in the ''Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda'',bd. 3, p. 839. in regard to the Eddic poem, ''

Grottasöngr ''Grottasöngr'' (or ''Gróttasöngr''; Old Norse: 'The Mill's Songs', or 'Song of Grótti') is an Old Norse poem, sometimes counted among the poems of the ''Poetic Edda'' as it appears in manuscripts that are later than the '' Codex Regius''. T ...

''.

Notes

References

*Dorson, Richard M., ed. (1968). ''Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists'', Vol. I.

University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press is the largest and one of the oldest university presses in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including ''The Chicago Manual of Style'', ...

. *Tolley, Clive (1995). ''The Mill in Norse and Finnish Mythology''. Saga-Book 24:63-82. {{refend Astronomical myths Comparative mythology Mythological objects

See also

Notes

References