The "Thorstone" at Taston, Oxfordshire, UK, by ColinofOxfordshire, is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taston No changes were made to the image. The image owner does not endorse this blog.
There are a number of megaliths in Great Britain named after the Germanic Gods or at least have legends attributed to them which involve our deities. One example of the former is the Thor Stone situated in Taston in Oxfordshire, England. It is situated next to the garden wall of Thorstone Cottage in the middle of the small hamlet. Taston is believed to be derived from Thorstan (meaning Thorstone) but I cannot find the place name referred to in either A Dictionary of English Place-Names (A.D. Mills, 1991) or Place-Names in the Landscape (Margaret Gelling, 1984), no doubt because of the small size of the hamlet. I understand however that it is referred to in Gelling's The Place-Names of Oxfordshire-volume 2 (1954).
It is significant however that the village should take its name from this megalith and no doubt this was originally a ritual site for the worship of Thor. The suffix of the original name Thor-stan is of Old English rather than Norse origin and I am speculating that this may have been an Anglian cultic site where Thunor was worshiped. Over the course of time and with the influence of Old Norse on the English language 'Thunor' may very well have transformed in some places in to 'Thor'.
Elsie Corbett in her A History of Spelsbury (1962) relates that the stone is said to be a thunderbolt thrown down from the heavens. This idea is closely related to the concept of the much smaller Thunderstones in Germanic folklore. The story of the origin of the stone is similar to that of the origin of the Devil's Arrows in Boroughbridge and I refer readers to my article The Devil's Arrows in Folklore
No comments:
Post a Comment