Мани: Лунный бог германо-скандинавской мифологии

Moon personified in Germanic mythology

Máni (Old Norse: ; "Moon") is the Moon personified in Germanic mythology. Máni, personified, is attested in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson. Both sources state that he is the brother of the personified sun, Sól, and the son of Mundilfari, while the Prose Edda adds that he is followed by the children Hjúki and Bil through the heavens. As a proper noun, Máni appears throughout Old Norse literature. Scholars have proposed theories about Máni's potential connection to the Northern European notion of the Man in the Moon, and a potentially otherwise unattested story regarding Máni through skaldic kennings.

In the Prose Edda book Gylfaginning, Máni is referenced in three chapters. In chapter 8, the enthroned figure of High quotes stanza 5 of Völuspá, and the figure of Third, also enthroned, adds that this occurred prior to the creation of the Earth. In chapter 11, High says that Máni and his sister Sól are the children of a man by the name of Mundilfari. The children were so fair that Mundilfari named them "moon" and "sun". Perceiving this as arrogance, the gods were so angered that they placed the brother and sister in the heavens. There, Máni "guides the path of the moon and controls its waxing and waning." Additionally, Máni is followed through the heavens by the brother and sister children Hjúki and Bil "as can be seen from the earth", whom he took from the Earth while they fetched water from a well. In the Prose Edda book Skáldskaparmál, Sól is referred to in chapter 26 as "sister of Máni", and in chapter 55 names are given for the Moon: "lune", "waxer", "waner", "year counter", "clipped", "shiner", "gloam", "hastener", "squinter" and "gleamer".

Kennings in the skaldic corpus for female jötnar have been identified (such as "desired woman of Máni" used by the 10th century skald Guthormr sindri) as pointing to a potential marriage or sexual union between Máni and a female jötunn. John Lindow states that if a story about Máni having such a relationship with a female jötunn existed, then "it has left no other trace in the extant mythology. Rudolf Simek states that in two skaldic kennings "Máni is apparently a gigantic being in a myth of which we otherwise know nothing". John Lindow theorizes on Máni's fate at Ragnarök in that "as part of the creation of the æsir, that is, the cosmos, Máni must be destroyed at Ragnarök, but this is not explicitly stated, except perhaps by Snorri, who tells about Mánagarm, who will swallow a heavenly body that may be the moon". Rudolf Simek connects the account of Máni, and Hjúki and Bil (featuring, as Simek states, "a man with a pole and a woman with a bushel") found in chapter 11 of Gylfaginning with modern accounts of the Man in the Moon found in modern folklore in Scandinavia, England, and North Germany. Simek additionally points out that a stanza appearing early in the poem Völuspá states that the Æsir had set up the Moon "in order to be able to reckon the year", which Simek connects with Germanic computation of time having been directed towards the Moon rather than the Sun, and that shorter amounts of time were given in nights rather than days.