Hi Andy,
Brodeur's translation:
Loath were the hills to me, | I was not long in them,
Nights only nine;
To me the wailing of | wolves seemed ill,
After the song of swans.
http://www.tarotbyvolmarr.com/asatru/proseedda/index.shtml
...or more idiomatically "only nine nights". Yes, there's lots of
weird grammatical stuff in poetry that doesn't crop up in ordinary
prose, making it especially hard to unravel. E.g. vas = var. In
poetry the pronoun ek "I" is often tagged onto the end of the verb:
vask "I was" (instead of the normal: ek var). And instead of saying
eigi "not", poets might add the negative suffix -a or -at. So vas-k-
a "I was not".
The -mk ending is the first person middle voice (reflexive, etc.).
þóttumk = mér þótti "it seemed to me, I thought".
Good luck with Nouns!
Llama Nom
--- In
norse_course@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Higgins
<asthiggins@...> wrote:
> To Norse Group
>
> Yeah! I got the Three volume Barnes Old Norse
> Grammar, Readers and Gloss. Really excellent - I am
> starting from square one and working through (then I
> can go back to the Gordon reader - trying to figure
> out what
>
> Leith erumk fjoll, vaska lengi a
> naetr einar niu;
> ulfa thytr, thottumk illr vesa
> hja songvi svana.
>
> from Skathis's marriage - is not easy!
>
> I'm on nouns!
>
> Best, Andy
>
>
>
>
>
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