Excuse me, if I had not had a warning (most timely) of the
fiendish double kenning I would have thought unwisely and with confusion that
the hapless serpent was a "Bloody Sacrifice" and meant to be there to remind
anyone else who saw it of the bravery of the Earl who had tied said snake in
knots, but, knowing somewhere that the snakes sorrow was cold, and therefore
winter, this makes better sense now
Kveðja
Patricia
and the blood that fell upon the field was after all the
blood of the serpent, they were not there to fight - were they - ?? they were
"Tourists " No?
> You say, "would seem to be parenthetical" - that
seems to me to be > somewhat inconclusive - whether or not you agree
with my reading, is my > reading actually gramatically and
syntactically defensible?
> .....is connecting sút with leiðar
þvengs incontrovertable? Whether > or not you agree with my reading,
is it actually gramatically and > syntactically defensible? ie Why
can´t the sorrow be the wise woman´s?
Sæll Alan,
I
lack the wisdom (yet!) to say that anything is impossible when it comes
to skaldic verse :) I haven't seen many manuscripts, but I gather
that the punctuation and line divisions in poetry are generally supplied
by editors, so whether it's "parenthetical" depends on the sense, rather
than actual parentheses in the text. Maybe there are other ways of
looking at it. In fact as well as yours I can imagine several
other grammatically possible versions, depending on how we distribute
the genitives, for example.
That said, Gordon's version makes sense,
in terms of the prose explanation, and seems to me perfectly in keeping
with skaldic conventions. 'minnisk' takes a genitive direct object
(þess), so I assume 'sút' isn´t what the lady remembers. The
reflexive 'minnisk' makes me think it isn't an instrumental dative with
the sense: "she's reminded of that by sorrow/sickness". Could it
in theory be "the wise lady remembers that WITH sorrow"? But, if
'sút' wasn't connected with 'leiðar þvengs' then this leaves us with the
problem of what he's doing tying knots in snakes, and the problem of
explaining how the sorrow or sickness is related to the lady, and
why. I think it's the snakes that clinch it. But I haven't
read the rest of the story either, so that's why I'm keeping all my
opinions safely subjunctive.
> I don't think any of
the snake kennings you cite or the double kennings > bizarre in
fact they're rather cute! And I have no problem with the > concept
of double kennings per se but, to my mind, the `splicing' of sút >
in line 4 with `leiðar þvengs' in line 2 reeks more of scholarly >
ingenuity and "cleverness" in their quest for double kennings than
a > genuine intention on behalf of the
poet/author.
Some of these poets were scholars though, and
ingenious and clever. Anthony Faulks: "It seems that this
complexity was one of the most highly valued aspects of skaldic
art. ...the picture this gives of the Viking is of a really rather
intellectual type, far from the wild inspired figure evoked by Carlyle
(in his work 'On Heroes') ...actually I think that the Viking was
really rather an intellectual chap" (A Faulkes: Poetical Inspiration in
Old Norse and Old English Poetry, Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture,
1997--published by the Viking Society for Northern Research).
Here's one of his examples, from Halldórr skvaldri´s Útfarardrápa.
The three nested statements are nested ABCBA:
Ér knáttuð þar
þeira You were able there their
--þú vart aldrigi
(skjaldar --you were never (shield´s
leygr þaut of sjöt)
sigri fire thundered through homes) victory
sviptr--gørsimum
skipta. bereft--treasure to divide.
A: "You were able to divide
their treasure there." B: "You were never bereft of victory." C: "the
shield's fire [sword] thundered through homes."
Here's one
from Bersi Skáldtorfuson, preserved in Heimskringla. One complex
kenning (hríðboða elds hests hranna "storm-herald of fire of horse of
waves" = storm-herald of fire of ship [shield] = warrior) is spiced into
the main sentence (mun ek eigi síðan at hverjum kosti fylgja út dýrra
manni "I will never again, under no circumstance, follow out a greater
leader [than this]"):
ELDS, mun ek eigi fylgja út, HRÍÐBOÐA,
síðan, HESTS, at hverjum kosti, HRANNA, dýrra manni.
The
words 'háfmörk' and gen. 'háfmarkar' "fishing-net forest [river/sea]"
are not only split up, but the first element 'háf-' is tucked away in
line 4, while '-mörk' and '-markar' are up in line 1! So, all in
all, our displaced 'sút' (if such it be) is a relatively mild example of
skaldic antics.
> I always translate these
constructions this way to demonstrate the > grammar, eg mér þykkir =
[literally] (it) seems to me = I think
Ha, I was just sitting
staring at the screen and wondering what 'eg' was doing here--till I
realised it was just "for example", not 'ég', 'ek'!