til bana - L N that's an odd
coincidence, I'm sure I've seen an expression - Mallory's Morte D'Arthur it is
"to his bane" the meaning is clear in context that his bane was his death, it
seems (ahem -it me seemeth)
there are very many more links between Old Norse
and Old or even Modern English, just waiting to be discovered (by our group of
course)
Kveðja
Patricia
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 11:29
PM
Subject: [norse_course] verða +
pp.
In a sentence like
ok varð gengit lengra
en hann ætlaði
"and he went further than he intended"
(Yngvars saga
víðförla)
does the combination ´verða' + pp. mean exactly the same as
a simple
indicative? This is how Pálsson and Edwards translate it
in Vikings
in Russia. In English to say "he HAPPENED to go further
than he
intended" would add a sense that it was pure chance and not
intended
by anyone or caused by anything in particular: it didn´t
necessarily
*have* to happen that way, it just did. Does `verða'
ever convey a
similar sense, or is the auxilliary verb completely
superfluous to
the meaning in such cases.
The nearest I can find
in Zoega´s entry for VERÐA is:
þeim varð litit til hafs
"they
happened to look seaward"
(Other examples of 'verða' + pp. are
passive, or have meanings
like "to become", or with dative "to befall
someone".)
And how about phrases like: hann lét verða farit "he
went"; hann lét
hana verða tekna "he seized her". Zoega in these
examples just uses
the English indicative, and there doesn´t seem to be
any suggestion
of chance involved.
Here's another idiom where
`verða' doesn't seem to add any extra
meaning: Henni varð þat fyrir at
hún bítr einn þeirra til bana
(Völsunga saga), at least not in Byock's
translation: "She bit one
of the brothers to death". The old
Magnússon and Morris translation
has: "and the first thing she did was
to bite one of those brethren
till he died." Surely no
accident. On that sombre note...
Llama
Nom
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