From: llama_nom
Message: 10774
Date: 2009-12-09
>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 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.
> The <rifr> 'warp-beam' is the beam from which the warpFor <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.
> 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.
> The second <fyrir> also seems to me to be 'because of': theRandvér 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.
> 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.
> <Er upp kominn> is a bit of aOr could it be literal: the grey web of men (the cloth) has come up, i.e. been raised (on the loom)?
> 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.
> <Harðkléaðr> is a variant form of <harðkljáðr>, the pastThere are some notes on the loom terminology in this poem here:
> 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.
> The only real problem here was <hjálmgagarr>. TheThere 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.
> 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>.)