--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "Patricia"
<originalpatricia@...> wrote:

> Sael, llama_nom
> obviously I'm not so well advanced in my studies, of this

fascinating subject, I missed this, but thankfully you have pointed
it out, and I guess that it is perhaps the humour of the writer,
making us to smile, the sagas were after all in many cases meant to
be stories for entertainment, like the poems and the singing

> Patricia -
> thank you

Sæl Patricia,

I've got plenty of advancing still to do myself! Maybe I'm up to
the Luke-Skywalker-in-Empire-Strikes-Back stage in my Jedi training
of Norse? I'll think I'm doing alright, then along comes another
Darth Vader of grammatical nastiness...

Anyway, I just noticed that kings like plural pronouns because there
are a lot of kings in the sagas. Something else weird: I don't know
if this is a general rule, but in Helga þáttr Þórissonar, a demonic
messenger even uses a plural noun when addressing King Óláfr
Tryggvason, _vinir_ literally "friends", instead of "friend"! (In
their translation Pálsson & Edwards just say "friend".)

Yes, I think you're right about the entertainment. Even when they
have a serious subject or a religious message to get across, there's
often funny stuff along the way to get our attention, like Loki
turning into a fly to steal Freyja's necklace. I regularly find
myself with a smirk on my face when reading Old Norse. It's a very
dry and deadpan humour mostly. Sometimes there are unintended
laughs due to the different culture, and the fact that we know more
about some scientific things (There's a good bit at the end of
Yngvars saga where the author says that he's rejected certain
annecdotes as unreliable, such as floating for a month down an
underground river--which strikes us as odd given that much of the
story he's just told is taken up with giants, cyclopses, dragons, a
mountain of gold, etc.) But more often than not I think the saga
writers slyly pretend to be more naive than they really are, which
makes it even funnier because then the humour seems to spill out
accidentally. It's all part of their technique of keeping their own
personality in the background and pretending that the story is
telling itself.

Some of the nicest stories I think are the ones where the humour and
sadness collide, and you end up in a Strange Saga Mood. Very often
the same theme could go either way: there's lots of stories about
someone being stubborn, just like Auðun, or ridiculously confinent
in themselves, and sometimes the outcome is gently amusing, and
sometimes it's the biggest tragedies of them all (Njáls saga has
examples of both).

Llama Nom

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: llama_nom
> To: norse_course@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2004 8:33 PM
> Subject: [norse_course] engu játum vér öðru en þessu er vér

höfum áðr ætlat

>
>
>
>
> Hello all,
>
> I wonder if anyone can tell me why Auðun "goes plural" here?

In Old

> Norse, as in English, I think it's normal for a king to talk

of

> himself as "we", and Auðun very wisely addresses Harald with
> respectful 2nd person plural pronouns (yðru, þér), but is it

unusual

> for someone non-royal to call themselves "we" in front of a

king?

>
> I was just wondering if this was intended to add to the humour

of an

> already quite fun scene, that poor little Auðun very

respectfully

> and innocently talks back to the king, as if his own decisions

carry

> as much weight as whatever the great Harald might decide--and

the

> fact that the king good humouredly ignores the affront, or is

rather

> amused by it himself.
>
> Llama Nom
>
>
>
>
>
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