The other day, I was shopping for flash drives. On the package for one, there were bullet points for suggested uses for the drive, one of which was for making backup copies of important files. Alongside the bullet points in English were bullet points in French, and the translation for the noun "backup" was "sauvegarde". That strikes me as looking quite a lot like "Sovngarde".

I don't know French at all. Poking around in an online dictionary, I found that "sauvegarde" is a cognate for "safeguard", which would certainly fit as the name for the stronghold of Shor. But, I find "backup" suggestive: Shor (Lorkhan) has a project of collecting material from each kalpa to add to the next, and I had imagined Sovngarde to be a place where he kept that material, which turns out to be the souls of Nord heroes.

Well in real world Norse mythology (non-TES), Asgard is the realm of the gods.

And according to Wikipedia, "Asgard" means "Enclosure of the ?sir".

I'm going to reckon that the suffix -gard or -garde means "enclosure".

Now I'll do some digging for other words with the prefix "sovn-" or something.


EDIT:

According to Google Translate, "sovn" is Danish for "sleep"

and "sovn gard" is Norwegian for "sleep farm"

Isnt it fun how languages all are interlinked?
The word 'father' can be recognised from 'ba' in Chinese to 'papa' in French, among others, to 'baba' in Turkish and 'pabbi' in Icelandic.
With a little imagination you can even see how you get from 'shalom', which means hello, goodbye and peace to 'aloha' which means hello, goodbye and peace, really, roll them around in your mouth they are not that dissimilar.

Sauvegarde means safeguard, obviously, so it is quite likely that Sovngarde means something similar. Safe haven.

Isnt entymology fun

Norse -gard suffix is a cognate with yard and garden. Ergo, Asgard is "Yard of the Gods", Midgard is "Middle Yard", and Sovngarde is "Sleeping Yard".

Awesome, way better than my monkey-bashings!
Thanks

Comming from a Nordic country myself (Norway) here is a thoughts:

The Norwegian word for sleep is S?vn - or English - Sovn. Garde or Garden is the royal honorguard protecting the king

Gard alone can also mean farm, or more correctly an area of owned land.

Translating this to my language would be like "The land of the sleeping" fits no?

So the question is whether or not "sovn" (sleeping) is referring to the dead souls there or something else. . .

It doesn't really fit my preconceived notions of Nordic culture when we refer to the afterlife as slumber of some kind. I thought it was rather rambunctious

I suspect a good dream by Nordic standards involves weapons, booze, different weapons, different booze, saucy wenches, baudy lads, curved swords, arrows, knees, sweetrolls, joy snow, wasabi, more booze, painted cows, Ysgramor's beard, shield bitting, daedric lava whiskey, decapitation, shouting villages into the sea, and even more booze.

In a word, rambunctious.

That sounds about right.

You forgot boozed-induced-ideas which surely must include the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_floater.
It has to be like an eternal frat-house. Only with more to booze and the clean-up is done by magic so the new guys get more boozing and action.

Now I think of Tsun paddling new initiates, and Shor wearing one of those hats with beer cans on them.

Hey its the modern age. We have electricity now.
Bzzt!
But yeah, you know, some of those mythical heaven-halls are really like a 18yr's idea of heaven, cause thats what the old men who actually had the power and sent them to war told them to believe.
Which has nothing to do with why people on any continent get in the army now. Nor that old men with power are safe while kids die.
Ahum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuX5_OWObA0 are MMO's that you get to live in. You fight, quest, and most importantly; respawn.

The name of the inn in Riverwood is the Sleeping Giant inn.Any chance Sovngarde has some of them Atmoran giants that could figure into one of the expansions.

I had a thought not too long ago, that the Valhalla myth originated from a prophet who foresaw our video-games and didn't have any sort of context for what they were, and decided it was a glorious afterlife.

A shimmering path - the Bifr?st it was,
A path that the gods themselves,
And the heroes under,
Traveling on their mounts of metal.
Red it shimmers - There shall be no travel;
Yellow it shimmers - Prepare yourself;
And finally - Green, comes allowance.
At the allowance from his cloud,
He who illuminates - Heimdallr,
They go to and fro.

I'm norwegian myself and can say that the word Sovn comes the modern norwegian word S?vn (pronounced suhvn in English) and means sleep. Garde comes from the old norse word gardr (the d being pronounced like the ''th' in ''this'') which means enclosure as has already been mentioned. This is the same word that the modern norwegian word ''g?rd'' (roughly pronounced like ''gohr'' but with a slightly rolled ''r'') stems from, meaning farm. In norse mythology this was extended a bit into meaning world, seeing as there were nine worlds in norse mythology and they were all seperate from each other, almost as if by an enclosure. These were in turn encapsuled by Yggdrasil, the world tree. So I'd say that Sovngarde is roughly translated as ''sleeping world'' or ''sleeping garden'', as in the place you go when you fall into your eternal sleep, worded slightly poetically.

So Bifrost is a giant, magical, traffic light. Good to know.

OMSG I want one.

A kenning then?

If Sovngarde is a Kenning? It might be. However, in TES things have a habit of being rather literal.

TES may be in the practice of being literal, but kennings are staples of real Norse mythology, so it wouldn't surprise me if Bethesda emulated it when making Nord culture.

Oh yes, definitely. And it may just as well be true. But what would it be a kenning of? Apart from the really obvious; heaven.

Or just death itself. A garden where you sleep.

Sure. Good point.