> Well, Atli sure is cooler than Lord Voldemort
;)
Have to take your word on that. (Thinks: Am I the only
person in Miðgarðr not to have read a single Harry Potter book?
There, I've admitted it. Thinks 2: Maybe when everyone else goes
off them, I´ll give it a go...)
> You're right, these
should all be 's.
How about `hlær mik'? Would this not
mean "mocks me", "laughs at me"? I'd have expected `hlgir mik'
"makes me laugh", "makes me glad". That seems to be the standard
defiant sting-in-the tail thing to say to someone who thinks they´ve
beaten you, e.g. Fáfnir to Sigurðr, or Útsteinn in Hálfs saga,
foreseeing vengeance on the apparently victorious
Ásmundr.
> > "margt er þar úrelt" - it was the use of
the French word `reins' > > for kidneys that surprised me.
Even the Oxford English Dictionary > > doesn't have that, as
far as I can see. > > Yeah, I had to look that one up. It was
in Webster's. Usually Thorpe isn't > that difficult
:)
There's some fun words in Smith-Dampier's 1912 translation
of The Waking of Angantyr [ http://www.northvegr.org/lore/kings/001.php
], like "lowe" (from ON logi) for `eldr'. And "Men called me
mortal, till thus I YODE / to seek thee out in thine abode. Yes,
it doth rhyme! But, come to think of it, maybe this is better than
the Old Norse Online suggestion "man...enough" for
`maðr...menskr'. Isn't MENSKR more like "human" (i.e. mortal as
opposed to supernatural or monstrous), rather than "manly"?
Maðr
þóttumk menskr til þessa My guess: "I thought that I was a human person
till now", "I've considered myself human thus far".
I seemed man
enough til the point... (Krause & Slocum) A mortal maid to men I
seemed (Auden & Taylor) A mortal maiden is she who comes
(Kershaw) I took thee for a brave man (Percy, 1763)
Don't have
Terry to hand, but if I remember rightly she had "mortal" somewhere in
there. Seems like Smith-Dampier, like Auden & Taylor, treats
`maðr þóttumk menskr' as if it was maybe `mönnum þótta ek mensk' -- but
it's sometimes hard to know what are "creative" divergences for the sake
of the metre. Nora Kershaw's is another rhyming version, less
extremely archaic language, but lots more liberties to fit it into
six-line stanzas rhyming AABCCB. But still some nice
language.
Actually, for all the jolly rhyming and Smith-Dampier's
self- deprecating preface, I'm going to secretly admit to quite liking
this too. Apart from "the grisly fiends of hell" I don't think it
departs all that far in sense from the original. Isn't S- D's
"Hiding it avails thee not" better for `dugira þér at leyna' than the
Old Norse Online suggestion: "It is not fitting for you to hide
it"?
Also `lowe' and `yode' are genuine English words, albeit
obsolete and obscure, rather than William Morris style archaic-sounding
neologisms, or Hollander's trick of just inserting Norse words raw
into the English, with footnotes. That's just cheating,
surely? Still, Hollander and Morris can both sound great aloud, I
reckon.
Speaking of poets referring to themselves in the plural,
there´s a useful note tucked away on p. 294 of Gordon´s Introduction to
Old Norse about something that looks like a plural, but isn´t, namely
the dative 1st. sg. pronoun 'mér', suffixed to the verb as -m (from
*-mR). The example it gives is 'biðjum' "I ask for myself", from
line 7 of the 2nd strophe of Egill's Höfuðlausn. I wonder if this
sort of thing came to be interpreted as plural by later poets
themselves, causing them to use plural pronouns to match.