Talk:Mara (folklore)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Norse history and culture, a WikiProject related to all activities of the Norse people, both in Scandinavia and abroad, prior to the formation of the Kalmar Union in 1397. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

According to The Online Etymology Dictionary:

nightmare, c.1290, "an evil female spirit afflicting sleepers with a feeling of suffocation," compounded from night + mare "goblin that causes nightmares, incubus," from O.E. mare "incubus," from mera, mære, from P.Gmc. *maron "goblin," from PIE *mora- "incubus," from base *mer- "to rub away, harm, seize" (cf. first element in O.Ir. Morrigain "demoness of the corpses," lit. "queen of the nightmare," also Bulg., Serb., Pol. mora "incubus;" Fr. cauchemar, with first element is from O.Fr. caucher "to trample"). Meaning shifted mid-16c. from the incubus to the suffocating sensation it causes. Sense of "any bad dream" first recorded 1829; that of "very distressing experience" is from 1831.

It is interesting to note that "mara" obviously has cognates in French (cauchemar), the Slavic languages (mora) and possibly Irish (Mórrígan). There is also a Polish night hag, Nocnitsa, which shows correspondence to the mara, just as the Greek Ephialtes. Now, sleep paralysis and witches are universal, so I'm not going to pull ye olde "When the proto-Indo-Europeans sat around the campfire, five thousand years ago ..." but it would be nice if someone with access to better sources in the original languages could look up the etymology for these respective beings. Salleman 17:44, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

I looked up cauchemar in Dictionnaire de l'Académie française:

Mot picard, composé de cauche, impératif de l'ancien verbe cauchier, « presser, fouler », et de mar, emprunté du moyen néerlandais mare, « fantôme nocturne ». [1]

So it entered French from a Middle Dutch mare ... if anyone's interested :P --Salleman 15:11, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Sanskrit?

I cut the following sentence from the pop culture section: "Mara is the Sanskrit word for evil". I don't know if someone wants to source it and incorporate it into the main text, but it sure doesn't belong where it was. Aleta 23:03, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merger proposal

The provisionaly Slavic folkloric concept of Mora is akin to Mara, and stems from the same Indo-European root. I suggest the two be merged. TomorrowTime (talk) 19:28, 23 April 2008 (UTC)