Nīþ

In historical Germanic society, nīþ (Old Norse: níð; Old English: nīþ, nīð; Old Dutch: nīth); was a term for a social stigma implying the loss of honour and the status of a villain. A person affected with the stigma is a nīðing (Old Norse: níðingr, Old English: nīðing, nīðgæst, or Old High German: nidding), one lower (cf. modern English beneath, modern Dutch beneed/beneden, modern German nieder and modern Danish nedre) than those around him. Middle English retained a cognate nithe, meaning "envy" (cf. modern Dutch nijd and modern German neid/neidvoll), "hate", or "malice."

A related term is ergi, carrying the connotation of "unmanliness".

Níð, argr, ragr and ergi

Ergi and argr or ragr can be regarded as specifying swearwords. Ergi, argr and ragr were the severe insults made by calling someone a coward, and due to its severity old Scandinavian laws demanded retribution for this accusation if it had turned out unjustified. The Icelandic Gray Goose Laws referred to three words that were regarded as equal to argr by themselves. Those were ragr, strodinn, and sordinn, all three meaning the passive role of a man included in same-sex activities among males. Another semantic belonging to argr, ragr and ergi was, from the Gray Goose, "being a sorcerer's friend."

Aeneid

The Aeneid (/ᵻˈniːɪd/; Latin: Aenēis [ae̯ˈneːɪs]) is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It comprises 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas's wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem's second half tells of the Trojans' ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.

The hero Aeneas was already known to Greco-Roman legend and myth, having been a character in the Iliad, composed in the 8th century BC. Virgil took the disconnected tales of Aeneas's wanderings, his vague association with the foundation of Rome and a personage of no fixed characteristics other than a scrupulous pietas, and fashioned this into a compelling founding myth or national epic that at once tied Rome to the legends of Troy, explained the Punic wars, glorified traditional Roman virtues, and legitimized the Julio-Claudian dynasty as descendants of the founders, heroes, and gods of Rome and Troy.