My guess would be that this comes from the East Anglian dialect.  Cognate with ON but not borrowed.  Think of all the East Anglian names beginning with sige-  like Sigeberht, etc.
 
Laurel
----- Original Message -----
From: Haukur Thorgeirsson
To: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 8:37 PM
Subject: Re: [norse_course] Re: SIGALDRY

Heill, Danr!


> Consulting my Old English Dictionary (or rather, the glossary in
> Mitchell and Robinson), I think the best interpretation is sige-gealdor,
> cognate with the ON sig-galdr "battle magic" that Haukur suggested.

I should note that I don't think the compound 'siggaldr' is actually
attested so we should mark it with an asterisk; *siggaldr. The closest
attested word seems to be 'sighljóð' meaning "battle sound".

I'm not fluent in Old English but it seems to me that in 'sige-gealdor'
neither of the g's is a plosive. I assume that when you read 'sigaldry'
you use a stop for the g. So my question is: Does it come from another
dialect? Does it come from Old Norse? Or is the modern word a "learned"
borrowing from the old language that doesn't show the historical phonetic
development?

And of course we could still be dealing with something different :)

Kveðja,
Haukr


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