The Myth of Baldr’s Death and the Vedic Wounded Sun

The paper argues for the identification of the “Myth of Baldr’s Death,” one of the most famous mythological narratives of pre-Christian Scandinavia, as a Norse counterpart to the Vedic “Myth of the Wounded Sun,” a mythological narrative already attested in the Rigveda, India’s oldest collection of sacred scriptures (last half of the 2nd millennium BCE). The claim is substantiated by novel formal analyses and semantic interpretations of the name and patronymic of Baldr’s wife Nanna Neps-dóttir (“Maiden Sky’s-daughter”) and of the name of Baldr’s killer Hǫðr (‘Darkness’), proposals that find support in several onomastic, lexical, and phraseological parallels in other Indo-European traditions.