1. wends
a horde of savage Slavs who, about the 6th century, invaded and took possession of vacant lands on the southern shores of the Baltic, and extended their inroads as far as Hamburg and the ocean, south also far over the Elbe in some quarters, and were a source of great trouble to the Germans in Henry the Fowler's time, and after; they burst in upon Brandenburg once, in "never-imagined fury," and stamped out, as they thought, the Christian religion there by wholesale butchery of its priests, setting up for worship their own god "Triglaph, ugliest and stupidest of all false gods," described as "something like three whales' cubs combined by boiling, or a triple porpoise dead-drunk." They were at length "fairly beaten to powder" by Albert the Bear, "and either swept away or else damped down into Christianity and keeping of the peace," though remnants of them, with their language and customs, exist in Lusatia to this day.
|
Definitions of wends
