Okay then, leaving aside a Nor... nor... construction for a moment, there's another usage that it's possible Xoic (with reference to the motto) and I (without) might have confused. Nor can be used without neither in the sense of 'and not', linking back to the preceding clause. E.g. In John Hoole's verse translation of Orlando Furioso (1807). Urg'd by the well-known spur, the fiery steed Bore all before him that oppos'd his speed: Nor trench, nor steepy mound, nor thorny shade, Nor crossing flood, Bayardo's passage stay'd. Having dispensed with that usage, 'nor' can also link back to a no rather than a neither:- No wailing there, nor wretchedness is heard (Edmund Spenser, the Faery Queene) And given its flexibility as to what it links back to, I'd be surprised if it can't work standalone too. But for a Nor... nor... construction of the specific sort in question, I think these two might fit the bill:- What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. (Shakespeare - Romeo & Juliet) ==== Yet man's first sons, as o'er the fields they trod Rear'd from the hardy earth, were hardier far ; Strong built, with ampler bones, with muscles nerv'd Broad and substantial ; to the power of heat, Of cold, of varying viands, and disease, Each hour superior, the wild lives of beasts Leading, while many a lustre over them roll'd. Nor crooked ploughshare knew they, nor to drive Deep through the soil, the rich returning spade ; Nor how the tender seedling to replant ; Nor from the fruit tree prune the wither'd branch. What showers bestow'd, what earth spontaneous bore, And suns matur'd, their craving breasts appeas'd. (John Mason Good's translation of Lucretius - 1805) The difference between this last one and the one from Orlando Furioso is that the Nor... introduces a new idea rather than being an 'and not'. I don't know the poem but this looks like a description of the first 'Golden' generation of humans. It starts off with a list of what they could do - and then turns from this to a contrasting list of what they didn't have to do. And the 'Nor' is sufficient to introduce this - it's doing the job of a 'neither'. At least, I don't think it's an 'and not' - I suppose it might be a 'but not'
My speculation was only that if the original used a construct equivalent in its repetition to οὐδέ... οὐδέ... or ni...ni... (but it doesn't -- I've since consulted it), then a translator might in some instance have mirrored the repetition, and someone later corrected or hypercorrected it with Neither. I much appreciate your subsequent citations. My natural inclination has been that at least in highly elevated style, all that is really needed as the foundation for nor...nor...nor is some variety of negation in a sentence recent enough to provide some measure of connection to it, that no specific word is required. Your examples appear to support that, and further to show that if we go back far enough, not even the prior negative element is required.
https://books.google.com/ngrams NGRAMs can be drilled through to find what texts the search engine used to make them I used a case-sensitive search for Nor so that fewer of the results were nors that had been introduced by a neither It:- - only covers books since 1800 and on Google Books (.: public domain, .: skewed to pre-1950) - often includes foreign-language books e.g. earlier I was trying to find out if the phrase à gogo existed in English prior to 1957 and it returned it - but the results were all in guides to French grammar - includes aberrant usages the editors missed - mishandles dialect (simple division of English into British or American) - doesn't actually parse the text and can only search simple strings of up to (iirc) 5 words - and for strings of 2+ words it sometimes includes results from books where the OCR has ignored the columns - .: appears more scientific than it is in terms of statistical frequency
I've finally delved into the usage of wildcard, part-of-speech specification, and sentence position in NGRAMS, so that drilling down becomes useful in searches like nor * nor. Without that, I didn't understand how you could devise searches that were both broad enough and restrictive enough to zero in on citations like the ones you found without exceptional effort or encyclopedic memory. The fact that the construct is so unusual is what leads easily to results in such elevated style.
