Epic word: a comparative analysis of the nominations of the <i>world</i> in the Elder and Younger Eddas

The authorʼs goal is to compare the nominations of the world in the “Elder” and “Younger Edda”, including three types of objects: lexeme (hel, Hel ‘hel; owner of another worldʼ), combination of words (Ginnunga gap ‘gaping abyssʼ), composite (Ás-garðr ‘aces' fenced spaceʼ, etc.). A comparison of the designations of the world in the analyzed texts is quite justified, since only the “Elder” and “Younger Edda” represent a corpus of texts reflecting information about Scandinavian mythology as a system, therefore, in the absence of data from other Old Germanic areas, they become the only source for the reconstruction of German mythology, meaning which is difficult to overestimate. In addition, references to the “Elder Edda” constantly appear in the “Younger Edda”, therefore, the idea of comparison seemed relevant to its author himself, and experts have no right to ignore this circumstance. The research method is implemented in a scheme for describing an epic word, which arose on the basis of lexicological studies of a number of key concepts in the ancient Indian “Rigveda” and a thesaurus description of a folk word, which have undergone fundamental processing. Summing up the results of the comparative analysis of the designations of the world in the “Elder” and “Younger Eddas”, we can state a more archaic stage recorded in the Old Icelandic prose monument, manifested in the presence of nominations of the original loci of cosmogenesis (Mú-spellz-heimr ‘points (in space) destruction of the worldʼ, Nifl-heimr ‘fog worldʼ) and the place of their interaction (the World Abyss), the description of which as an object of the cosmic universe is given in sufficient detail; in the presentation of the opposition between one’s own and someone else’s space, fundamental to the mythopoetic model of the world (Mið-garðr ‘middle enclosed space’ – Út-garðr ‘outer enclosed space’); a more detailed and specific description of the corresponding lexemes and a wider range of their mythological connotations, as well as the factor of theocentrism, in which the reference point is the location of the dwelling of the gods (Ás-garðr ‘the enclosed space of the Asesʼ), for example, in relation to hel ‘another world, the afterlife’.