Not the Neil Gaiman-Roger Avary movie! I wrote a review here; that is so far from the original poem it hurts. Grendel gets lots of interesting words attached to him, but niðing isn't one of them. Gaiman and Avary mixed in all kinds of things from a wide variety of contexts that have little to do with the poem or Old English. (My colleagues and I now get students who think that having seen the movie replaces reading the poem. Ow, ow, ow.)
As I noted, the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary is now online, if you ever want to use it; I use it quite a lot. Sadly, the newer and far superior Dictionary of Old English being done up at the University of Toronto is only up to the letter "G" and is restricted to subscribers, as is the Corpus of Old English. (The Middle English Compendium, including the Middle English Dictionary and other useful resources, is now free: when the project made back from subscribers the money it had cost, they opened it to the public. "Nithing" also appears there, though I didn't think to look it up there until a few minutes ago.)
We seem indeed to have much more record of the word in Old Norse, as others have pointed out; I'm no expert in that language, but a quick trip to my handy dictionary shows lots more usages than the word ever saw in Old English.
What Teresa Hayden thought she was saying, I don't know. I found the usage bizarre, to say the least. I've read very few of the posts she and her husband made, because they seemed to me to be all heat and no light. You're certainly right that it's an insult, any way you look at the word. I hope my little excursion into English etymology doesn't obscure that point.
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Date: 2009-01-31 07:55 pm (UTC)As I noted, the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary is now online, if you ever want to use it; I use it quite a lot. Sadly, the newer and far superior Dictionary of Old English being done up at the University of Toronto is only up to the letter "G" and is restricted to subscribers, as is the Corpus of Old English. (The Middle English Compendium, including the Middle English Dictionary and other useful resources, is now free: when the project made back from subscribers the money it had cost, they opened it to the public. "Nithing" also appears there, though I didn't think to look it up there until a few minutes ago.)
We seem indeed to have much more record of the word in Old Norse, as others have pointed out; I'm no expert in that language, but a quick trip to my handy dictionary shows lots more usages than the word ever saw in Old English.
What Teresa Hayden thought she was saying, I don't know. I found the usage bizarre, to say the least. I've read very few of the posts she and her husband made, because they seemed to me to be all heat and no light. You're certainly right that it's an insult, any way you look at the word. I hope my little excursion into English etymology doesn't obscure that point.