Page "Cherusci" Paragraph 2

The etymological origin of the name Cherusci is not known with certainty.

According to the dominant opinion in scholarship, the name may derive from the ancient Germanic word * herut ( Modern English hart, i. e. ' deer ').

The tribe may have been named after the deer because it had a totemistic significance in Germanic symbolism.

A different hypothesis, proposed in the 19th century by Jacob Grimm and others, derives the name from * heru -, a word for ' sword ' ( cf.

Gothic hairus, Old English heoru ) Hans Kuhn has argued that the derivational suffix-sk -, involved in both explanations, is otherwise not common in Germanic.

He suggested that the name may therefore be a compound of ultimately non-Germanic origin, connected to the hypothesized nordwestblock.