Skip to main content
European Commission logo
italiano italiano
CORDIS - Risultati della ricerca dell’UE
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary

The Sun-chariot’s Journey Towards the Nordic Sky: on the (Pre-)History of Ideas on Sky, Sun, and Sunlight in Northern Europe

Descrizione del progetto

Svelare la poetica, i miti e le cosmologie della preistoria

La poetica comparativa indoeuropea è una branca emergente dell’archeolinguistica. Il tentativo di ricostruire la poetica indoeuropea preistorica ha avuto successo grazie a una precedente collaborazione interdisciplinare negli studi comparativi per decifrare la lingua protoindoeuropea, il predecessore comune di tutte le antiche lingue indoeuropee. Adesso, è possibile anche tracciare e studiare elementi delle cosmologie preistoriche come il cielo, la luce solare o concetti di divinità presenti nelle culture preistoriche dell’Europa centrale e settentrionale, svelando sorprendenti segreti sul nostro passato preistorico. Il progetto SunSHINE, finanziato dall’UE, intende ampliare ulteriormente la ricerca nel campo della poetica comparativa indoeuropea e sviluppare e rafforzare la collaborazione tra esperti di linguistica storica, archeologi e altri studiosi nell’ambito delle ricerche approfondite sul nostro patrimonio protoindoeuropeo.

Obiettivo

The objectives of my project are:
(1) to further develop the field of Comparative Indo-European Poetics (CIEP) and to strengthen the interdisciplinary collaboration between Historical Linguistics and Archaeology;
(2) to apply the approach of CIEP to Old Norse (ON) and Germanic (Gmc.) texts by analysing poetic phraseology and mythological conceptions concerning the sky, the sun, and sunlight which find correspondences in other Indo-European (IE) traditions and may reflect Proto-Indo-European (PIE) heritage;
(3) to connect the results of this analysis with prehistoric archaeological artefacts by means of an interdisciplinary approach to these issues.
Spoken more than 5000 years ago, PIE is the reconstructed ancestor of all IE languages, among which are Hittite, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, as well as ON and other ancient Gmc. languages (such as Old English and Old Saxon). By studying these languages in a comparative perspective, historical linguists have reconstructed not only an impressive amount of the words of PIE, but also of its traditional formulas and poetic phrases. These are the subject of study of CIEP, whose approach has only sporadically been applied to ON and Gmc. texts.
CIEP gives us precious insights into the mythological beliefs of the speakers of PIE: inter alia, we can reconstruct numerous PIE poetic images and cosmological conceptions concerning the day-lit sky, the sun, the sunlight, and the deities which were associated with them. Some of these conceptions are, on the one hand, attested in ON and Gmc. texts and, on the other hand, have parallels in Bronze Age archaeological artefacts belonging to Northern and Central European prehistoric cultures, whose formation has recently been traced back by scholars of Archaeology, Genomics, and Archaeolinguistics (an interdisciplinary field combining Historical Linguistics and Archaeology) to contacts between pre-existing populations of Neolithic farmers and migrating groups of PIE-speaking pastoralists.

Coordinatore

KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET
Contribution nette de l'UE
€ 207 312,00
Indirizzo
NORREGADE 10
1165 Kobenhavn
Danimarca

Mostra sulla mappa

Regione
Danmark Hovedstaden Byen København
Tipo di attività
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Collegamenti
Costo totale
€ 207 312,00