Re: Aw heck: "hekk á"

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "A. L. E. McK." <runadis@...>
wrote:

> What if it's the air the tower is 'hanging on' as well as 'in'? It

seems plausible to me, the writer over-repeats himself, 'hekk á turn
í loptinu', the cofusion might be due to a superfluos preposition?
Does this proposition crash with any rules? Both of them takes
akkusative in a temporal 'role' (I have to get my gramatic english
in place... Meanwhile, I hope I'm understood), -as I think is the
case of 'loptinu'. Or am I asssuming to much, are there rules or
anything elsewhich speaks against?


Hi Runadis,

Thanks for drawing my attention to the cases. I wasn´t really
thinking about this, but 'turn' is masculine, so if something was
hanging from / on the tower, we might expect 'hekk á turni(num)'
(cf. í loptinu = dative; á stólpum = dative).

hekk á krossi(num) "hung from the cross"
hekk á gálganum "hung on the gallows"

Zoega has two types of exception for 'á', where acc. is used for
stationary objects. B(2) "acc. ...with verbs denoting to see, to
hear" + "phrases denoting to be placed, seated, to sit". Either of
which could possibly be relevant here. But if 'á' isn't a mistake,
it seems more natural to consider it as adverbial, like:

þar hekk á sverð "there was a sword hanging from it"
er ketillinn hekk á "which the pot hung from"

http://www.lexis.hi.is/corpus/leit.pl
(also see Google, for modern examples)

> Does this preposition clash with any rules? Both of them takes

accusative in a temporal 'role' (I have to get my grammatic english

Temporal means "to do with time". I think accusative and dative
each have both temporal and spacial uses with these prepositions.
But there are a lot of subtleties I'm still learning. 'í' as far as
I can see seems to be the conventional preposition for things
suapended "in" the air, but maybe you're right if the writer was
thinking of an unusual idea, such as that the tower is resting "on"
a cushion of air. *Hekk turn á [loptinu] ok í loptinu? I don't
know. Just taking the word order as it is, the adverbial use seems
more familiar to me anyway, from a purely grammatical point of view,
but semantically puzzling.

Llama Nom

>
> Annika
>
> llama_nom <600cell@...> wrote:
>
>
> I'm puzzling over this description of a wondrous tower in Eireks
> saga víðförla:
>
> Sá þeir þá því líkast sem stöpull væri ok hengi í loptinu ok engir
> stólpar undir. Þeir nálgast þangat. Þar sá þeir, at hekk á turn í
> loptinu á engum stólpum. Sunnan við turninn stóð stigi.
>
> They saw then what looked (for all the world) like a pillar /
> steeple / tower. And it seemed to be suspended in the air with
> nothing holding it up. They approach it. Then they saw that A
> TOWER WAS HANGING (?ON [IT]) in the air with nothing to support

it.

> A ladder stood propped against the south side of the tower.
>
> stöpull, m. (1) steeple, tower; (2) pillar = stólpi
> stólpi, m. post, pillar, column
>
>
> I'm just trying to visualise this miraculous set-up. I'm assuming
> that in this case 'stöpull' isn't synonymous with 'stólpi', since
> we're explicitly told that there aren't any of those. But is
> the 'stöpull' likely to be the same as the 'turn' (perhaps just

less

> specific when seen from a distance), in which case can 'hekk á' be
> used in an absolute sense, simply "was hanging [up there]"? Or
> does 'hekk á' imply that the 'turn' is dangling down from a

steeple,

> or that it's just hanging suspended in the air perhaps balenced on
> top of a pillar that doesn't reach all the way to the ground?
>
> Somehow I don't think archeology can help us here, so it comes

down

> to the grammar. All suggestions (sketches?!) welcome,
>
> Llama Nom
>
>
>
>
>
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