Note to Eil Þdr 19III
[8] bígyrðil ‘of the girdle’: The second element of this cpd is gyrðill m. ‘girdle, belt’, but the first element is obscure. Some scholars explain the cpd as an old formation with the adv. bí ‘at’, which is improbable because that adv. belongs to a set of prefixes that were lost in the North Germanic languages during the period of syncope. Although words with this prefix do appear in dictionaries, such compounds are usually late and show influence from German, which is not likely to have obtained in Eilífr’s time. Most likely, bígyrðill goes back to a cpd whose first element we do not recognise.