At 3:26:28 PM on Monday, June 24, 2013,
elliot.holland@... wrote:

> I'll go ahead and post my Eyrbyggja saga. I didn't make it
> as far as I wanted to, but I'll give the first 5 lines, so
> that I can start working on Laxdaela Saga 69 part 1.

> •Eftir það tók Björn vopn sín og gekk í brott og ætlar
> heim.

> --After that(?) took (taka-take: 3 per. sing. past) Björn
> weapon (vápn: n. acc.) his/for himself (refl. gen.) and
> went (ganga-go: 3 per. sing. past) at away and intended
> (gram. ?) home (adv. like german heim)

> --After that, Björn took his weapon and went away and
> meaning to go home

<Ætlar> is 3rd sing. pres. indic., 'intends'. There is an
understood <fara> or <ganga> in the last clause: <og ætlar
heim ganga> 'and intends to go home'. This is a fairly
common kind of omission; it’s briefly discussed in §3.9.5.3
of Barnes.

> •En er hann kom upp um Digramúla hljópu upp fyrir honum
> fimm menn.

> --And when he came (koma-come: 3 per. sing. past) up
> around Digramúla (place name) jumped (hlaupa-jump: 2 per.
> pl. past) before him (dat.) five (gr. ?) men.

> --And when he came up around Digramúla, 5 men jumped in
> front of him.

The basic sense of <en> is adversative, 'but', though in
connected prose it’s often just a signal of narrative
continuation and in those cases is usually best translated
'and'. Here either alternative is defensible; I chose
'but'. Prepositions are frequently a pain, and <um> is no
exception. The likeliest meanings in this kind of context
are 'around', 'along', and 'over'; a <múli> is a projecting
‘nose’ of mountain, so any of these could make sense, but in
view of <upp> I went with 'over'.

> •Þar var Þóroddur, húskarlar hans tveir og synir Þóris
> viðleggs.

> --There was (vera-be: 3 per. sing. past) Þóroddur
> (person), farmhands (húskarl. mas. nom. pl.) his (gen.)
> two and sons ??.

> --There was Thóroddur, his two farmhands, and his sons,
> Thóris vidhleggs.

<Þóris viðleggs> is a genitive, so it cannot be in
apposition to the nominative <synir>, and in any case it’s a
single name, not the name of several sons. In fact it
modifies <synir>: 'and Þórir viðlegg’s sons'. The byname
<viðleggr> (nom.), or in modern spelling <viðleggur>, is
'wood(en)-leg'; we’d already met Þórir at this point.

> •Þeir veittu Birni atgöngu en hann varðist vel og
> drengilega.

> --they (masc. nom) gave (veita-give: 3 per. pl. past.)
> Birni (person? dat.) attack (atganga: f. acc?) and he
> defended (verja-defend gr?) well and bravely. (are adverbs
> declined?)

<Birni> is the dative of the man’s name <Björn>. Adverbs
have comparative and superlative forms but are not
inflected. <Varðist> is 3rd sing. past of what Barnes calls
the sk-form of the verb, otherwise known as the reflexive,
reciprocal, or middle form. Zoëga calls it the reflexive
(refl.) and has (5) <verjast> 'to defend oneself'.

> •Gengu þeir fastast að Þórissynir.

> --went (ganga: pres. 3 pers. pl.) they (mas. nom.) firmly
> (?) to Thorissynir (place name)

> --They men went adv? to Thorissynir.

The word order of this sentence is confusing. <Þórissynir>
is nominative; it simply expands on and clarifies <þeir>.
The subject, then, is <þeir Þórissynir> 'they, [the] sons of
Þórir'. The verb is best thought of as a separated
compound, <ganga að> 'to attack'; you’ll find that Old Norse
has quite a few of these verbs. They don’t behave quite
like German separable verbs, but I think that you’ll find
that a helpful way to think about them. Zoëga and CV both
classify them as verb + preposition, but sometimes that
'preposition' has no object and behaves like an adverb or
even simply modifies the basic meaning of the verb.

Note that <ganga at e-m> 'to attack someone (dat.)' does
appear in Zoëga’s entry for <ganga>, in section (15).

> hljaupa-jump (hubschen cognate?)

That should be <hlaupa>. No, it’s a cognate of English
<leap> (from Old English <hlēapan>) and German <laufen>.

Brian