(Thinks: Am I the only person in
Miðgarðr not to have read a single Harry Potter book?  There, I've admitted it
 
No LN - bless - here's another one
Patricia
----- Original Message -----
From: llama_nom
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 1:40 AM
Subject: [norse_course] Re: Gunnarsslagr - Gunnar's Melody

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, Haukur Þorgeirsson
<haukurth@......> wrote:


> Well, Atli sure is cooler than Lord Voldemort ;)


Have to take your word on that.  (Thinks: Am I the only person in
Miðgarðr not to have read a single Harry Potter book?  There, I've
admitted it.  Thinks 2: Maybe when everyone else goes off them, I´ll
give it a go...)



> You're right, these should all be œ's.


How about `hlær mik'?  Would this not mean "mocks me", "laughs at
me"?  I'd have expected `hlœgir mik' "makes me laugh", "makes me
glad".  That seems to be the standard defiant sting-in-the tail
thing to say to someone who thinks they´ve beaten you, e.g. Fáfnir
to Sigurðr, or Útsteinn in Hálfs saga, foreseeing vengeance on the
apparently victorious Ásmundr.



> > "margt er þar úrelt" -– it was the use of the French word `reins'
> > for kidneys that surprised me.  Even the Oxford English
Dictionary
> > doesn't have that, as far as I can see.
>
> Yeah, I had to look that one up. It was in Webster's. Usually
Thorpe isn't
> that difficult :)



There's some fun words in Smith-Dampier's 1912 translation of The
Waking of Angantyr [ http://www.northvegr.org/lore/kings/001.php ],
like "lowe" (from ON logi) for `eldr'.  And "Men called me mortal,
till thus I YODE / to seek thee out in thine abode.  Yes, it doth
rhyme!  But, come to think of it, maybe this is better than the Old
Norse Online suggestion "man...enough" for `maðr...menskr'.  Isn't
MENSKR more like "human" (i.e. mortal as opposed to supernatural or
monstrous), rather than "manly"?

Maðr þóttumk menskr til þessa
My guess: "I thought that I was a human person till now", "I've
considered myself human thus far".

I seemed man enough til the point... (Krause & Slocum)
A mortal maid to men I seemed (Auden & Taylor)
A mortal maiden is she who comes (Kershaw)
I took thee for a brave man (Percy, 1763)

Don't have Terry to hand, but if I remember rightly she had "mortal"
somewhere in there.  Seems like Smith-Dampier, like Auden & Taylor,
treats `maðr þóttumk menskr' as if it was maybe `mönnum þótta ek
mensk' -- but it's sometimes hard to know what are "creative"
divergences for the sake of the metre.  Nora Kershaw's is another
rhyming version, less extremely archaic language, but lots more
liberties to fit it into six-line stanzas rhyming AABCCB.  But still
some nice language.

Actually, for all the jolly rhyming and Smith-Dampier's self-
deprecating preface, I'm going to secretly admit to quite liking
this too.  Apart from "the grisly fiends of hell" I don't think it
departs all that far in sense from the original.  Isn't S-
D's "Hiding it avails thee not" better for `dugira þér at leyna'
than the Old Norse Online suggestion: "It is not fitting for you to
hide it"?

Also `lowe' and `yode' are genuine English words, albeit obsolete
and obscure, rather than William Morris style archaic-sounding
neologisms, or Hollander's trick of just inserting Norse words raw
into the English, with footnotes.  That's just cheating, surely? 
Still, Hollander and Morris can both sound great aloud, I reckon.

Speaking of poets referring to themselves in the plural, there´s a
useful note tucked away on p. 294 of Gordon´s Introduction to Old
Norse about something that looks like a plural, but isn´t, namely
the dative 1st. sg. pronoun 'mér', suffixed to the verb as -m (from
*-mR).  The example it gives is 'biðjum' "I ask for myself", from
line 7 of the 2nd strophe of Egill's Höfuðlausn.  I wonder if this
sort of thing came to be interpreted as plural by later poets
themselves, causing them to use plural pronouns to match.

Llama Nom