Excuse me, if I had not had a warning (most timely) of the fiendish double kenning I would have thought unwisely and with confusion that the hapless serpent was a "Bloody Sacrifice" and meant to be there to remind anyone else who saw it of the bravery of the Earl who had tied said snake in knots, but, knowing somewhere that the snakes sorrow was cold, and therefore winter, this makes better sense now
Kveðja
Patricia
and the blood that fell upon the field was after all the blood of the serpent, they were not there to fight - were they - ?? they were "Tourists "  No?
----- Original Message -----
From: llama_nom
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2005 7:51 PM
Subject: [norse_course] Re: Miscellanea Section L Subsection (iii)/Translation

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "AThompson" <athompso@......>
wrote:


> You say, "would seem to be parenthetical" - that seems to me to be
> somewhat inconclusive - whether or not you agree with my reading,
is my
> reading actually gramatically and syntactically defensible?

> .....is connecting sút with leiðar þvengs incontrovertable? Whether
> or not you agree with my reading, is it actually gramatically and
> syntactically defensible? ie Why can´t the sorrow be the wise
woman´s?


Sæll Alan,

I lack the wisdom (yet!) to say that anything is impossible when it
comes to skaldic verse :)  I haven't seen many manuscripts, but I
gather that the punctuation and line divisions in poetry are
generally supplied by editors, so whether it's "parenthetical"
depends on the sense, rather than actual parentheses in the text. 
Maybe there are other ways of looking at it.  In fact as well as
yours I can imagine several other grammatically possible versions,
depending on how we distribute the genitives, for example.

That said, Gordon's version makes sense, in terms of the prose
explanation, and seems to me perfectly in keeping with skaldic
conventions.  'minnisk' takes a genitive direct object (þess), so I
assume 'sút' isn´t what the lady remembers.  The reflexive 'minnisk'
makes me think it isn't an instrumental dative with the
sense: "she's reminded of that by sorrow/sickness".  Could it in
theory be "the wise lady remembers that WITH sorrow"?  But, if 'sút'
wasn't connected with 'leiðar þvengs' then this leaves us with the
problem of what he's doing tying knots in snakes, and the problem of
explaining how the sorrow or sickness is related to the lady, and
why.  I think it's the snakes that clinch it.  But I haven't read
the rest of the story either, so that's why I'm keeping all my
opinions safely subjunctive.



> I don't think any of the snake kennings you cite or the double
kennings
> bizarre – in fact they're rather cute! And I have no problem with
the
> concept of double kennings per se but, to my mind, the `splicing'
of sút
> in line 4 with `leiðar þvengs' in line 2 reeks more of scholarly
> ingenuity and "cleverness" in their quest for double kennings than
a
> genuine intention on behalf of the poet/author.



Some of these poets were scholars though, and ingenious and clever. 
Anthony Faulks: "It seems that this complexity was one of the most
highly valued aspects of skaldic art.  ...the picture this gives of
the Viking is of a really rather intellectual type, far from the
wild inspired figure evoked by Carlyle (in his work 'On
Heroes')  ...actually I think that the Viking was really rather an
intellectual chap" (A Faulkes: Poetical Inspiration in Old Norse and
Old English Poetry, Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture, 1997--published
by the Viking Society for Northern Research).  Here's one of his
examples, from Halldórr skvaldri´s Útfarardrápa.  The three nested
statements are nested ABCBA:

Ér knáttuð þar þeira
You were able there their

--þú vart aldrigi (skjaldar
--you were never (shield´s

leygr þaut of sjöt) sigri
fire thundered through homes) victory

sviptr--gørsimum skipta.
bereft--treasure to divide.

A: "You were able to divide their treasure there."
B: "You were never bereft of victory."
C: "the shield's fire [sword] thundered through homes."



Here's one from Bersi Skáldtorfuson, preserved in Heimskringla.  One
complex kenning (hríðboða elds hests hranna "storm-herald of fire of
horse of waves" = storm-herald of fire of ship [shield] = warrior)
is spiced into the main sentence (mun ek eigi síðan at hverjum kosti
fylgja út dýrra manni "I will never again, under no circumstance,
follow out a greater leader [than this]"):

ELDS, mun ek eigi fylgja
út, HRÍÐBOÐA, síðan,
HESTS, at hverjum kosti,
HRANNA, dýrra manni.

http://www.hi.is/~eybjorn/ugm/kennings/4kennt.html



 
And for a particularly striking bit of word-order shenanigans, see
Þórsdrápa, st. 6, 1-4.

http://www.hi.is/~eybjorn/ugm/thorsd00.html

The words 'háfmörk' and gen. 'háfmarkar' "fishing-net forest
[river/sea]" are not only split up, but the first element 'háf-' is
tucked away in line 4, while '-mörk' and '-markar' are up in line
1!  So, all in all, our displaced 'sút' (if such it be) is a
relatively mild example of skaldic antics.





> I always translate these constructions this way to demonstrate the
> grammar, eg mér þykkir = [literally] (it) seems to me = I think



Ha, I was just sitting staring at the screen and wondering what 'eg'
was doing here--till I realised it was just "for example",
not 'ég', 'ek'!

Llama Nom




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