--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:

>
> The first problem is the preposition <fyrir>. After much
> thought I decided to take it as 'because of' in a causal
> sense: it's the fall of the slain that has set up the loom.

I wonder if it could be Zoega's 9th sense for <fyrir> + dat., "(9) denoting disadvantige, harm, suffering; þú lætr Egil vefja öll mál f. þér, thou lettest E. thwart all thy affairs; tók at eyðast f. herm lausa-fé, her money began to fail;" In which case, perhaps it could be translated simply 'for'. Since the valkyries actions take place on Good Friday morning, and since they traditionally choose the slain, I was thinking of the causality the other way around: the loom determining the battle.

> The <rifr> 'warp-beam' is the beam from which the warp
> threads hang, and its <reiðiský> 'rigging-cloud' is
> presumably either what hangs from it or by metonymy the loom
> as a whole. (I take the first half of the compound to be
> <reiði> 'tackle, rigging'.) <Rigna> 'to rain' takes the
> substance rained in the dative, so <rignir blóði> is simply
> '(it) rains blood'. <Vítt> is either an adverb or an
> adjective modifying <reiðiský>, but the sense is about the
> same either way.

For <reiðiský>, Lex. poet. 'ophængt sky'. If the first element of the compound is derived directly from the verb <reiða> 'carry, shake, swing, raise, etc.', maybe 'raised, hanging' or 'shaking' cloud? But a rigging metaphor would be appropriate to threads.

> The second <fyrir> also seems to me to be 'because of': the
> spears have created the dead bodies that (as we are about to
> see) form the warp and loom weights. <Vinur> is the plural
> of <vina> 'female friend', and <vinur Randvés bana> 'female
> friends of Randvér's bane [i.e., slayer]' is a discontinuous
> kenning for the valkyries.

Randvér the son of Jörmunrekkr was hanged, making me wonder if his killer could be a name for the thread itself, but 'friends of' seems more likely to be a person than an inanimate object, and the usual interpretation seems to be that they're the female friends of Odin, i.e. valkyries.

> <Er upp kominn> is a bit of a
> problem; I used 'has come up', but I have in mind a sense
> along the lines of 'turned out, turned up', of which there
> are examples in CV.

Or could it be literal: the grey web of men (the cloth) has come up, i.e. been raised (on the loom)?

"The loom is broadly dressed for the fallen/slain with the shaking/hanging/rigging cloud of the warp beam (=the threads on the loom). It's raining blood. Now there's raised, (?)due to / (?)before spears, the grey web of menfolk which the female friends of Randver's killer (=Odin's valkyries) fill with red weft."

> <Harðkléaðr> is a variant form of <harðkljáðr>, the past
> participle of <harðkljá>; Zoëga doesn't have <harðkljá>, but
> he does have the basic verb, <kljá>. CV has <yllir> as 'the
> name of a beam in the upright loom', but it seems to me that
> the beams are already accounted for; the shed rod seems a
> much better bet, and on digging around on-line I found that
> this is a fairly widespread interpretation. The diagram at
> <http://housebarra.com/EP/ep02/20wwl.html> is quite helpful,
> by the way, and
> <http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/image/mywwloom.jpg> is a
> picture of a modern reproduction based on extant medieval
> loom parts from Greenland and Iceland; it's set up for
> four-shed twill, according to its owner. (I know her
> slightly; she's a serious re-enactor whose scholarship I
> trust wholeheartedly.) I think that Grace's photos make a
> good case that the battle's swords are being identified with
> the weavers' shuttles.

There are some notes on the loom terminology in this poem here:

http://www.archive.org/details/anglosaxonnorsep00chadrich
Anglo-Saxon and Norse poems (1922), 191-195.

On <yllir>, Lex. poet. just says 'a tool pertaining to the loom' (also a type of tree). In particular, not that Kershaw offers a different interpretation of <hrælaðr> to CV (p. 193). She explains <hræll> as a "pointed instrument of bone or hard wood used to carry the weft into its proper place", rather than the sley. Another definition I found online: "teinn (rúmlega 20 cm langur) úr hvalbeini (eða tré), oftast oddmyndaður til beggja enda, notaður til að til að færa ívafið og jafna" (a stick, 20 cm or longer, made of whalebone or wood, often pointed at both ends, used to move the weft and make [it] even)." According to Kershaw, 'reed' is "nearer the mark" (than sley) but "involves a chronological difficulty".

Could <hræll> be translated 'shuttle'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_weighted_loom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_%28weaving%29

Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson: "And arrows are the shuttles."

> The only real problem here was <hjálmgagarr>. The
> individual parts give 'helm-dog' easily enough, but it's
> clearly a kenning, and not an obvious one (at least to me).
> I finally turned to the Lexicon Poeticum at
> <http://www.septentrionalia.org/lex/index2.php?book=e&page=-15&ext=png>,
> specifically p. 255, where <hjalmgagarr> is glossed
> '"hjælm-hund", sværd'. (<Hjalm-> is an earlier form of
> <hjálm->; the vowel was later lengthened before <l>.)

There a lot of kennings of this type recorded where a sword is likened to a fierce animal, perhaps imagined as attacking a piece of protective equiptment such as a helmet, shield or armour.

http://www3.hi.is/~eybjorn/ugm/kennings/animal.html

It's similar to how axes are likened to mosters or troll-women of shields, etc. I guess they're all part of the general category of kennings where the attacking weapon is described as some kind of harm to the defensive weapon.

http://www3.hi.is/~eybjorn/ugm/kennings/monster.html

Given <vargr unda> 'wolf of wounds' here, it maybe isn't always possible to know whether a particular instance of such weapon-as-animal kennings refers to a sword or an axe.