Heill Llama!

> This Gutnish grouping of three lines has some similarity with

ljóðaháttr, except that there are three beats in each line instead
of 2:2:3 + 2:2:3. It also has some similarities with the Old
English hypermetrical lines. These are attested as early as c. 700
in the quote from the Dream of the Rood on the Ruthwell Cross
inscription. They expand the normal pairs of 2-beat halflines to 3-
beat pairs with double alliteration on the first two beats of the
first halfline, but the headstave is the *middle* beat of the second
halfline:

> ...swætan on þa swiðran healfe.
> Eall ic wæs mid sorgum gedrefed,
> forht ic wæs for þære fægran gesyhðe.
> Geseah ic þæt fuse beacen
> wendan wædum ond bleom;
> hwilum hit wæs mid wætan bestemed,
> beswyled mid swates gange,
> hwilum mid since gegyrwed.
>
> ...to bleed on its right side.
> I was utterly afflicted with sorrows,
> I was afraid of that fair sight.
> I saw that eager beacon
> change clothes and colours:
> sometimes it was wet with moisture,
> drenched with a flow of blood,
> sometimes adorned with jewels.

Yes, these are similar, indeed. One thing it tells me is that the
older tradition, while having the likes of fornyrðislag as a kind of
center, was richer in variation that many might suspect.

> These hypermetrical lines come in small groups like this embedded

in poems which otherwise follow the more usual pattern of 2:2 with
the headstave on the first beat of the second halfline. So the
hypermetrical are a special effect, like going into slow motion.
The lines are usually expanded by adding an extra foot, often / x
(healfe), but also sometimes x / (ond bleom), or they can be like D
lines with an extra dip between the first two lifts (a to ðam
ælmihtigan). Optionally, the first and third beats of the second
halfline can alliterate with each other (oferdrencte his duguðe
ealle, . swylce hie wæron deaðe geslegene), but as far as I
know the third beat of the first line must have a different initial
sound to all the other beats.

And there we get something like the rule.

> > > ON meters like ljóðaháttr and fornyrðislag were inherited from

Proto-Germanic.

> As far as I'm aware, the former doesn't have an Old English

equivalent. The closest to it is Wulf and Eadwæcer [
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/rawl/wulf/ ], a powerful and
mysterious poem which is also unusual in having a refrain. I've seen
it described as ljóðaháttr, but it's not really clear whether the
standalone halflines with only line-internal alliteration are to be
recited with three beats, or two, since each of them could be read as
perfectly regular lines according the the normal rules of OE verse:

>
> ungelic(e) is us - E
>
> bireþ wulf to wuda - B
>
> uncer giedd geador - C

Hmmm. ljóðaháttr (háttr <*hahtuz, Go.*hahtus) literally means 'in
the fashion/manner of songs', literally implying that that it was
sung. This fits in well with Óðinn as the master-singer. It is,
therefore, not surprising that this meter in particular should be so
closely associated with this god in ON tradition. Virtually all of
the orginal ON pieces surviing in this meter are somehow connected
to this god. In fact, one could think of it as his special meter, or
the meter of the tradition about him. Ljóðaháttr died a quick death
after the conversion, after a couple of culturally failed attempts
to employ it as a meter for Christian visionary and wisdom works,
respectively. Its revival happened during the Romantic movement,
when Jónas Hallgrímsson used it to great effect, seeing it (quite
correctly) as one of the most central and powerful meters in the
language. I suspect that we might see more of it in OE had the book
that king Ælfred supposedly made, containing old heathen religious
and heroic material, survived. But history was cruel here, if the
tradition is true, perhaps denying us access to an OE redaction of
the wisdom/teachings of Woden, which would no doubt have been seen
today a the headjewel of OE literature. No doubt, it would have the
power, even today, to radically impact the English language and all
tradition relating to it. One imagines, furthermore, that it would
give the modern Anglician church serious difficulties in its claim
to be the sovereign tradition-barer of the Anglican (English) folk.
The antiquity of the ljóðaháttr tradition, and the kind of material
found it, speaks strongly for its position in Proto-Norse as one of
the most typical meters, at least for traditional material of the
Odinic type, if not wider. We may also have lost some ON inherited
meters, due to the faulty and incomplete preservation of the older
tradition. For example, Snorri quotes 2 lines from a poem called
Heimdallargaldr (níu emk moeðra mögr : níu emk systra sonr), which
meter I cannot identify. Perhaps Snorri could not, either. Consider
how old this material was in his time, and how distant it must have
seemed to him. He can name his poets from Bragi, who was definitely
born before 800, but about pieces like Grímnismál, Vafþrúðnismál,
Völuspá, etc. his terms include forn vísindi (old science/knowing),
orð siálfra ásanna (the words of the gods themselves), the words of
the völva (words of the seeress), etc.. Clearly, this material was
really distant for him, as reflected in his terminology about it,
which I think is rooted in actual tradition - that is, Snorri just
used terms and words for it actually passed on to him from the hoary
days of yore. I suspect that other meters did occur in the tradition
of yore, but that they did not survive, or only barely so (like the
one example of Galdralag quote by Snorri - his own), or the proverb
meter Málaháttr, which is essentially only reconstructable from the
scattered proverbs in it, the old inherited group having originally,
no doubt, formed a section of Hávamál. Perhaps the verse from the
lost Heimdallargaldr represents another lost meter. I think what the
attested corpus is telling us is that fornyrðislag and ljóðaháttr
were only the most common inherited meters, the latter suffering a
worse fate after the conversion, probably because of the kind of use
it had of yore. Because fornyrðislag was used for stories much more
than ljóðaháttr, its survival was assured, even if traditional songs
were given a new, Christian gloss (Beowulf, etc.).

> My guess is that they would all be treated as ordinary halflines.

They all have two alliterating staves. The last two have a similar
rhythm if not exactly the same, adding to the sense that this might
have been sung. The overall effect is to interupt the flow,
fragmented and inconclusive, the opposite of the grand rolling
passages of the hypermetrical verse, but perfectly in keeping with
the subject. Curiously, there are other halflines that have less
than the usual number of unstressed syllables -- Wulf min Wulf --
more like the reduced lines that appear sometimes in ON
fornyrðislag. Old English verse is more tolerant of unstressed
syllables generally that Old Norse, partly because of changes that
happened between Proto-Norse and Old Norse which led to a reduction
of unstressed syllables, but maybe also a stylistic tendency.

This syllable loss creates some exceptional effects in the surviving
ON material originating from PN times, such as the verse I quoted in
my last post. Its strange to think that so much of the specifically
ON and charming character of extremely short lines is really just a
result of syllable loss in traditional material, causing speakers to
re-analyze/re-interprete an old meter like ljóðaháttr along new, and
Germanically speaking, radical lines. It works in ON, but its story
must have been a long, slow trip through the jungle ;)

> But then continental Germanic alliterative verse is much looser

still in this regard.

Yes. The dróttkvætt tradition shows what the thrust of thinking and
trend was during the Viking Age: folk good enough in ON to be poets,
and even professionally, were focused on more or less exact syllable
counts, internal assonance (in addition to alliteration), increased
used of kenningar/heiti/etc. and _longer lines_ - all of this moves
away, stylistically, from the style of the ON poets' own inherited,
traditional material, something which is partly explained by the ON
changes in place from PN. It was a natural development, strange as
it might seem in the wider, Germanic context.

> Now just a few thoughts abojut your Gothic version of the verse

from Hávamál / Hó,vamó,l.

;) the fun part

> > juggs was ik faúrþis
>
> This raises an interesting question of where to put the pronoun if

the verb is in "second position" after some non-subject
constituent. Old English tends to place the pronoun before the
verb, 'geong ic wæs','forht ic wæs', except in questions, negatives
and with þá "then" and þonne "then", (but if the subject was a noun,
then that noun tends to follow the verb), whereas Norse and the
continental Germanic languages tend to treat nouns and pronouns
alike when the verb is in second position, even in their earliest
attested forms, and be a bit stricter about the second position of
the verb than Old English (in those types of clause that demand it),
at least in prose. But I guess there's more freedom in poetry, and
this is only a tendancy in OE. The other order is found too
e.g. 'Seccan sohte ic ond Beccan'.

I suspect, but can of course not show, that Go. was very close to ON
in this respect, especially as relates to poetry. ungr vas ek forþum
is somewhat more poetic than ek vas ungr forþum, but still far from
being unnatural. One can say it that way, but it rings differently.

> I've read some theoretical arguments from Þórhallur Eyþórsson in

favour of Gothic being like Old English on this score, but I've also
noticed one example where the pronoun seems to follow a verb in 2nd
position: þanuh biþê ût usiddjêdun eis (translating a Greek absolute:
AUTWN DE EXERCOMENWN). So you could be right about the word order
here.

I think so. Hávamál is natural in speech, not overly poetic, using
things like word-order to great effect. While not overly poetic, and
nowhere showy, its still poetic in a classical, conservative sense.
There no better use of ON anywhere, nor will there ever be, so its
not a criticism when I say that its not overly poetic. Perhaps what
I mean is that part of it's total mastery lies in under-statement,
use of plain language, simple imagry, etc.. There are exactly the
kinds of things that I imagine might have characterized Go. poetry.

> But as ever, it would be nice to have more (reliably independent)

examples. Another example that might be relevant: iba þank þû
faírháitáis "you do not offer thanks, do you...?" (Gk. MH ECEI
CARIN)--but since the rest of the clause matches the Greek word
order, it's not clear how the whole thing would look in natural
Gothic. So maybe either would be possible: 'juggs was ik faúrþis'
and 'juggs ik was faúrþis'.

Yes. When moving a verse into Go., I will go as strait as possible,
trusting the inherited tradition of language-use and examining the
consequences only afterwards. If there is ore than one Go. option,
the one matching the ON source will always be chosen. I imagine that
the Gothic speaker rendering the PN verse in Gothic would do just
the same, following the idiom usless grammar forbade it, or a total
collapse in meaning occured, etc. Fortunately, most of this material
just slides right into Go. - the nightmare is in the details ;)

> > fôr ik áins samana
>
> I don't think the ON idiom 'einn saman' "alone" is attested in

Gothic. If you wanted to avoid it for that reason, there are a few
other verbs of travelling that could fill the gap, e.g. áins
hvarboda; áins wratoda.

*einn vrataþa (ek) could occur in ON, and hverfa can mean have some
meaning (in eddic verse, etc.) as in Go., but the fór alliterates
here with forþum, and fôr occurs in Go., meaning the same thing - so
the issue is áins samana, or how to say 'alone/all alone' in Go. and
in this context. They would have understood áins samana, and it may
have occured in the langauge (or just in the poetic tradition?), but
on the other hand it may not have been natural. I just don't know.
Perhaps they used it every day. Right or wrong, the basicness of the
phrase áins samana suggests to me that it could be used, though, and
what then in poetry? My gut feeling is that my imaginary translator
would just renders PN ainaz samanô in Go. as áins samana, whether he
thought it natural in Go. or just idiomatic to PN and strange. Hmmm

> > áudags þûhta mis (+ik/ik wisan)
>
> I think Gothic may have expressed this as simply 'áudags þûhta

ik', or 'áudags ik þûhta', either with 'wisan' (Gal 2:6, Gal 6:3, Sk
4:7), or without (2Cor 13:7).

Another eery similarity is the +/-wisan/wesan - essentially, you can
jsut add it whenever you want to, or if the meter works better with
it. But about -dative mis: hmmmm... Go. has another similarity when
it comes to verbs and the cases they steer - I've never hit the wall
on this issue, as there is hardly a wall to hit. Without any doubt,
verbal case-governance, and the survival of reflexives in -sk, is
one of the most conservative features of ON, which goes amazingly
far when trying to translate to Go. - but again, the devil is in the
details. Here the detail is is Go. can omit the dative, passive
subject with þûhta or not. About the +/-ik/ek and wisan/vesa: these
are implied in the ON, and þóttumsk is somewhat ambiguous here, as
it was early levelled into the first person in ON.

> I'm fairly sure the dative pronoun would be left out even though

that's potentially ambiguous with the meaning "to
seem".

I think so, as to whom is it seeming?

> Compare: 'jabai hvas anþar þugkeiþ trauan in leika, ik mais'

"if any other man thinks that he (himself is able to) trust in the
body, I (do) more." And: 'sahvazuh izei usqimiþ izwis, þuggkeiþ
hunsla saljan guda' "whoever kills you will think that he is offering
a sacrifice to God."

Hmmm. There is an ON usage 'hann þykkir/þat þykkir', but tends to
meaning 'he/it is considered (by others). I'd cut the dative mis in
the Go. if no examples of it can be found or the lack of it seems
idiomatic to Go., in which case +ik wisan in full. Do we have any
examples of full mis/þis/etc. þûhta? On the other hand, do we have
examples to the contrary where dative, passive subject is clearly
implied? ON also has some implication habits: es ek annan fann
(where the relative particle es implies elliptical þá - in fact, one
could just as well say 'þás ek annan fann' - but Go. is too old for
this kind of playing around with the particle, which is still 'î/ei
in Go. and is he, where ON shows hann, replacing PN ez, which just
becomes the relative). One side note for langauge-history interested
is that at least one other case of *ez survived in ON - in fact, its
still lurking in Modern Icelandic even: þareð (eð < et, the neuter
of the obsolete *ez 'he' ;) Go. þarei. I think this one very odd and
unusual, as 'þar es' is typical in ON, but *þar et, lurking in the
spoken language somewhere looks to have made a comeback after es >
er rendered the awkward **þarer....

> For the sake of the metre, maybe either: 'áudags ik þûhta' or

change it to a B line with the pronoun and finite verb unstressed at
the beginning: 'ik þûhta áudags wisan'?

I want the idioms as close as possible, and do not want to change
the position of áudags, as it hurts the poetry, I think. I'll take
the consequences after áudags, if need be: *þûhta mis/ik þûhta/þûhta
ik/ik wisan - whatever is good and natural Go.

> > manna ist mans gaman
>
> A bit of a pun here: a Gothic word 'gaman' (= ga + man, neuter)

does occur, but with the meaning "partner" or "comrade"
http://www.wulfila.be/lib/streitberg/1910/HTML/B046.html ]. If you
wanted to stick to attested words, you could maybe have 'fahêþs' or
'hlasei' here.

I examined gaman, discovering that OHG OS OE all agree with ON here,
essentially, which lead me to: 1)the Go. meaning 'joy' is unattested
or 2)the ON meaning 'comrade' is unattested, or was lost during the
transaition PN>ON in favour of just 'joy' or 3)the Gothic meaning
developed from an older meaning attested in the other languages, if
the orignal one ever were lost. I elected to solve the problem by
allowing by imaginary translator to stay idiomatic, as usual - in
the worst case scenario, gaman can only mean 'comrade' in Go., in
which case the line makes just as much sense anyway, and it still
carries the same meaning, I think. I think the reader will agree.

Now, where Go. may, or may not, have one attested word, ON normally
has several, often with more possible meanings/shades of meaning
than in attested Go. I think this tells us something about limits in
the Go. attestation more than anything else. Thus, in rendering the
verse ON e,lds es þörf : þeims inn es kominn PN ailidas ist þarbu,
for instance, I won't render it with Go. fôn simply because it is
the only attested fire-word in Go. ON doen't show funi here, and one
reason is that it wreaks the alliteration þörf-þeim; instead, I go
to the etymologies and reconstuct Go. *áiliþs based on the other
languages, a word which really must have existed. I think that Go.
would have functioned much like any other Germanic language when it
comes to synonyms and their use in poetry. On another idiomatic
note, I'd render gumi guma and maþr manna, so why dot eldr *áiliþs?
In my theoretical translator-scenario, the worst thing that could
happen (counter to Germanic, though) would be that my Goth failed to
understand PN ailidaz, either because 1)it didn't exist in Gothic
(which would be very surprising) or 2)it had moved out of the masc.
a-stem category (highly unlkely) or 3)it had aquired a different,
but likely related, meaning, and he deemed it unatural in Gothic as
a word for 'fire' - as an idiomatic translator of PN, he would then
have to add a foot-note explaining to his fellow Goths that the
words is 1)idiomatic to PN and means 'fôn,etc.'(no problem) 2)he had
chosen to decline the word according to a 'wrong' declension because
that's what his PN source did (a big problem for me, as I want only
correct Go. forms, not bogus declensions, even where the shades of
meaning differ, as that can be explained as idiomatic - and that
would explain his footnote if 3) ;)

> Anyway, thanks for you detailed response to my questions.

I hope you like this one ;)

> I hope I haven't wandered too far off topic with this post, but I

think it's interesting to compare the different Germanic traditions,
and might offer insights about the origins of the various different
metres that are attested in Old Norse which were developed from the
inherited fornyrðislag style.

Indeed. By the way, I very much appreciate your criticism of the Go.
text, as it gets into the nasty details that must be addressed for a
seamless rendering, and that's one thing I'm a perfectionist about -
I'll always change my text to make it better, and I'm always willing
to examine and re-examine details. In fact, while I essentially have
all the Hávamál parts in CR rendered in Gothic, and have had bits
and pieces laying around for a while now, I'm still very bashful on
any verse that contains a more questionable word or line. I realize
that for it to be make even better, it would need to be dissected,
and independently translated in whole or part, by another party, and
then systematic comparision made, evidence sorted, and then a single
text along agreed lines, etc.. Fortunately, I'm not shy about the
parts I know are solid, and not too much so where there is only one
minor issue or so. Probably the best thing I have going for me here
is a consistent vision about a direct, idiomtic translation within
the confines of correct grammar - just letting the grammar be king
and obeying his dictates whenever he raises his voice ;)

-K

> Llama Nom
>