Aurvandill

Aurvandill (Old Norse) is a figure in Germanic mythology. In Norse mythology, the god Thor tosses Aurvandill's toe – which had frozen while the thunder god was carrying him in a basket across the Élivágar rivers – into the sky to form a star called Aurvandils-tá ('Aurvandill's toe'). In wider medieval Germanic-speaking cultures, he was known as Ēarendel in Old English, Aurendil in Old High German, Auriwandalo in Lombardic, and possibly as auzandil (𐌰𐌿𐌶𐌰𐌽𐌳𐌹𐌻) in Gothic. An Old Danish latinized version, Horwendillus (Ørvendil), is also the name given to the father of Amlethus (Amleth) in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum. Comparative studies have led scholars to reconstruct a Common Germanic mythic figure, *Auza-wandilaz ('light-beam' or 'ray of light'), associated with brightness and dawn-light imagery. On the basis of the Old English and Gothic evidence, and to a lesser degree the Old Norse text (which mentions a star without additional details), this figure has been interpreted as relating to the rising light of the morning, sometimes identified with the Morning Star (Venus). The German and Old Danish material, however, is more difficult to integrate into this interpretative model.