I'm very far from an expert, given my single semester of studying Old English - some of my information comes from looking up the Old Norse root word and from things modern Norse/Germanic pagans have told me. So I'm not at all surprised to find out that I got some of it wrong, or that the Anglo-Saxon/Old English meaning is different from the Old Norse meaning.
If it's not used to refer to Grendal in the Beowulf, then I can only bow my head and confess that I'm a bad English major who didn't go back and check first, and that the nithing poles that you see in the new Neil Gaiman Beowulf movie must have misled me (it's not used at all in Lovecraft. The people in the Lurking Fear are an example of the kind of behavior that would have gotten someone declared a nithing in an Old Norse context).
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Date: 2009-01-31 07:24 pm (UTC)If it's not used to refer to Grendal in the Beowulf, then I can only bow my head and confess that I'm a bad English major who didn't go back and check first, and that the nithing poles that you see in the new Neil Gaiman Beowulf movie must have misled me (it's not used at all in Lovecraft. The people in the Lurking Fear are an example of the kind of behavior that would have gotten someone declared a nithing in an Old Norse context).