Haliurunas

Haliurunas, haljarunae, Haliurunnas, haliurunnae, etc., were Gothic "witches" (also called '' priestesses'', ''seeresses'', ''shamans'' or ''wise women'') who appear once in ''Getica'', a 6th century work on Gothic history. The account tells that the early Goth king Filimer found witches among his people when they had settled north of the Black Sea, and that he banished them to exile. They were impregnated by unclean spirits and engendered the Huns, and the account is a precursor of later Christian traditions where wise women were alleged to have sexual intercourse and even orgies with demons and the Devil.

The term has cognates, or close cognates, in both Old English and Old High German, which shows that it had an old history in Gothic culture and paganism and originates in Proto-Germanic. The account may be based on a historic event c. 200 AD, when the Goths had won a critical and decisive victory and a new royal clan asserted its power, and the priestesses were banished for opposing the new royal ancestor cult. In connection to this, they may also have been banished by their king in order to take over their riches. Another reason may have been blaming them as scapegoats for having caused a defeat against enemies by predicting the wrong outcome.

Etymology

The name has been emended as the Goth-Latin forms , or (and variations of the two forms) from several variants in the ms, i.e. , , and .
The first element - is a variant of - 'Hell' (i.e. 'Hel, the abode of the dead'), but it has also been suggested that the first element does not refer to the realm of the dead, but instead directly to Hel, the goddess of the dead. Scardigli (1973) has analysed the second element as , from * 'to run', and so the word would mean ' hell runners', i.e. female shamans. Lehmann (1986) considers this analysis preferable to Müllenhoff's who analyzed it as and compared it to OHG 'witch'.

However, others are of the same opinion as Müllenhoff, and analyse the second element as , and so it is considered to be cognate with Old English, ('seeress' or 'witch') and OHG ('necromancy') and ('necromancer'). Orel follows this interpretation and reconstructs it as the Proto-Germanic form * in which the first element is * 'hel, the abode of the dead', and the second is * ('mystery, secret').

During Proto-Germanic times, the word * still referred to chanting and not to letters (''rune''), and in the sense 'incantation' it was probably borrowed from Proto-Germanic into Finnish where means 'poem'.

Klaeber and Niles et al. write the Latin-Gothic word as and comment that the word appears in ''Beowulf'' in where it means 'such demons', and it shows that the word would have been in the nominative singular. Neidorf adds that the use of the word in ''Beowulf'' supports the early 8th century dating of the poem, because besides the unambiguous attestation in the 6th century ''Getica'' (), it is only attested in the 8th century Aldhelmian glosses, where it appears five times. The word is glossed consistently as ('seeress') and ('witch'), and twice ('witch') is listed as a synonym. The appearance of the word in these early sources shows that in the 8th century and were competing terms, but was out-competed very early in the Anglo-Saxon language and so the word dominates with 28 attestations.

Lukman (1949) argued that Cassiodorus was inspired by a Roman account about a Germanic seeress whose name appeared in the form , but the word is generally considered to be an authentic Gothic word.

Account

Sixth century Goth scholar Jordanes reported in his ''Getica'' that the early Goths had called their seeresses (Goth-Latin). They were in the words of Wolfram " women who engaged in magic with the world of the dead", and they were banished from their tribe by Filimer who was the last pre-Amal dynasty king of the migrating Goths.

The found refuge in the wilderness where they were impregnated by unclean spirits from the Steppe, and engendered the Huns, which Pohl