sacked πο ́ λz μερο ́ πων qνθρ.πων (Il. 9. 328, 18. 342), we should under-
stand the word as referring to fortified places.
It has cognates in Vedic púr-‘rampart, wall, palisade’ and Lithuanian
pilìs (Latvian pils), ‘fort, castle’. An Illyrian form appears in the place-name
Polai or Pola.^19 The Indic word is incorporated in the compounds pu ̄rbhíd-,
puram
̇
dará-, ‘breacher/burster of ramparts’, applied mostly to Indra, the
war-god who as leader of the Aryan invaders destroyed the strongholds of the
native Da ̄sas.^20 The As ́vins are said to have assisted the hero Trasadasyu in his
pu ̄rbhídyam, his rampart-breaching (RV 1. 112. 14).
The other word, π3ργο‘fortification, city wall, tower’, is an early loan-
word in Greek from an unidentified, presumably Balkan source. Its closest
cognates are in Germanic: Gothic baurgs‘castle, town’, Old High German
burg‘fortress’, Old English burh, Old Norse borg. A Mitannian form perhaps
underlies Urartian burgana‘palace, fortress’, continued as Armenian burgn.
The lexeme is related to a widely attested Indo-European word for ‘high’.^21
The Germanic word is used in the Hildebrandslied (52) of the scene of
battles, and in the Edda likewise. In the world’sfirst war, that between the
Æsir and the Vanir, ‘Odin hurled (his spear) and shot it over the host...
breached was the encircling wall of the Æsir’sborg’ (Vo ̨luspá 24). In another
poem Sigurd destroys Brynhild’sborg (Oddrúnargrátr 18. 3–4).
Both in the Rigveda and in early Celtic poetry we find the motif of the
‘hundred strongholds’ as a marker of warfare on a grand scale. The Rishi
Gr
̇
tsamada celebrates Indra, yáh
̇s ́atám
̇S ́ámbarasya púro bibhéda ás ́maneva
pu ̄rvı ̄ ́h
̇
, ‘who broke S ́ambara’s hundred ancient fortresses as with a stone’
(RV 2. 14. 6). The Arthurian hero Uther Pendragon is made to say in his
death-song
It is I who broke a hundred fortified towns;
it is I who killed a hundred mayors of strongholds.Cadwallon’s campaign beyond Chester is summed up as ‘a hundred war-
bands and a hundred bold soldiers, a hundred battles which conquered a
hundred strongholds’. The Irish catalogue poem Núadu Necht records that
‘Foglas was violent, who equipped a hundred forts’ (fuirec cét cathrach).^22
(^19) Call. fr. 11. 6, Lyc. 1022, Strab. 5. 1. 9, al.; Mayer (1957–9), ii. 93.
(^20) Oldenberg (1917), 153; Hillebrandt (1927–9), ii. 153–69; G. Costa, SSL 27 (1987), 157–65.
(^21) Cf. Mayer (1957–9), ii. 31; Alfred Heubeck, Praegraeca (Erlangen 1961), 63–5; Chantraine
(1968–80), 958; EIEC 210, 269.
(^22) Marwnat Uthyr Pen 14, trs. J. T. Koch in Koch–Carey (2000), 300; Marwnad Cadwallon 10
(Rowland (1990), 447), trs. Koch–Carey, 359; K. Meyer (1913), 40/43 v. 12, trs. J. Carey in
Koch–Carey, 55. For reduction of forts in Irish narrative cf. the poem on the Destruction of
Dind Ríg (Campanile (1988), 26 no. 2), and the Táin bó Flidais (summarized in Thurneysen
(1921), 319).
- Arms and the Man 453