thrall (n)
thrall (n) [thrôl]
1. (a) One who is held in bondage; a slave or serf; (b) one who is intellectually or morally enslaved by some power, influence, etc.
2. Servitude; slavery; bondage; thralldom.
(vt) Archaic
To put or hold in thralldom; to enslave.
(adj) Archaic
Subjected to bondage; enslaved.
From Middle English < Old English thræl < Old Norse thræll
In Norse mythology, Thrall was the son of Rig and Edda, and the husband of Esne. Thrall’s and Esne’s descendants became the peasants and laborers of the world. The story of Thrall is told in the Song of Rig (“Rigsthula”) section of the Poetic Edda. From the translation by Olive Bray:
“Thrall and Bond-maid …
Joyous lived they and reared their children.
Thus they called them: Brawler, Cowherd,
Boor and Horsefly, Lewd and Lustful,
Stout and Stumpy, Sluggard, Swarthy,
Lout and Leggy. They fashioned fences,
they dunged the meadows, swine they herded,
goats they tended and turf they dug.
Daughters were there, — Loggy and Cloggy,
Lumpy-leggy, and Eagle-nose,
Whiner, Bondwoman, Oaken-peggy,
Tatter-coat and the Crane-shanked maid.
Thence are come the generations of thralls.”
“For Schopenhauer, the Will is an aimless desire to perpetuate itself, the mainspring of life. Desire engendered by the Will is the source of all the sorrow in the world; each satisfied desire leaves us either with boredom, or with some new desire to take its place. For Schopenhauer, a world in thrall to Will must necessarily be a world of suffering. The mind can only create the world of representation, opposed to the Will; but since the Will is the source of life, and our very bodies are stamped with its image and designed to serve its purpose, the human intellect is, in Schopenhauer’s simile, like a lame man who can see, but who rides on the shoulders of a blind giant. …
Schopenhauer believed that while all people were in thrall to the Will, the quality and intensity of their subjection differed. The aesthetic experience temporarily emancipates the subject from the Will’s domination and raises them to a level of pure perception. The personality of the artist was also supposed to be less subject to Will than most: such a person was a Schopenhauerian genius, a person whose exceptional predominance of intellect over Will made them relatively aloof from earthly cares and concerns. The poet living in a garret, the absent-minded professor, Vincent van Gogh in the madhouse, are all (at least in the popular mind) examples of Schopenhauer’s geniuses: so fixed on their art that they neglect the ‘business of life’ that in Schopenhauer’s mind meant only the domination of the evil Will.”
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