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Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

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Note to Anon Stríðk 1III

[8] stríðkera ‘a grief-prick [WIDOW]’: The meaning of this hap. leg. cpd and the way in which it can mean ‘widow’, as Magnús Ólafsson indicated it must in his prose commentary to Stríðk (LaufE 1979, 375), has been a source of puzzlement to some eds. Magnús understood the word keri as like hæll ‘heel’ in Egill Lv 48/5-6V (Eg 132), in that each had a double sense and that sense included the meaning ‘widow’ in each case. That is clearly why he followed the citation of Egill’s lines with Stríðk. He seems to have construed kera with jarðar ‘of the earth’ (l. 5), however, which cannot be correct, as LP (1860): stríðkeri points out. LP: stríðkeri confirms the sense of stríðkeri as parallel to hæll (‘heel’ and ‘widow whose husband has been slain’), but Finnur Jónsson admits he does not understand how this can be. Other compounds with ‑keri (cf. AEW: keri 2, 3) as second element indicate that this word, whose basic sense seems to be ‘pointed instrument, beam, probe’, comes to refer to a man or male creature; cf. gjaldkeri ‘steward’, sælkeri ‘wealthy man’, rjúpkeri ‘cock ptarmigan’ (Kock NN §2196B anm. comes to the same conclusion). The same must apply to stríðkeri, even though the cpd refers to a woman not a man. AEW: hæll 3 suggests that hæll got its poetic meaning ‘widow’ from skaldic word-play on homonyms (see Þul Kvenna I l/7 Note), but an alternative explanation that may help one to understand how stríðkeri can also mean ‘widow’ may be that when the noun hæll refers to a widow in poetry, it arguably depends on the prose sense ‘pole, pillar’, which this word has independently of the sense ‘heel’ (though ‘heel’ meaning the projecting hinder part of the foot also refers to a protruding part of the body). The two (or three) words are thus homonyms, whether or not they derive from the same or different roots, upon which opinion is divided (AEW: hæll 1, 2 and 3). Keri also has a base meaning of ‘pole, stick, pointed instrument’, just as hæll does. It also seems likely that keri has the extended sense of ‘male sexual organ, prick’ in all the Old Norse compounds in which it appears (as Fritzner: keri suggests; so also Kock NN §2196B anm. who makes the phallic connection even more obvious by proposing that stríð- is an error for stirð- ‘stiff, hard’). It could plausibly be argued that hæll ‘pole, pillar’ also had a phallic sense that was employed in the extension of the word’s meaning to ‘widow’. In the case of the cpd stríðkeri the first element, stríð ‘grief, sorrow’, makes the connection with the mourning process. It may seem perverse to refer to a woman who has lost her man as a ‘grief-prick’, but it is possible that, both in this case and in the ofljóst use of hæll, the reference to a woman in terms of masculine imagery may be a way of expressing that woman’s relative freedom from the constraints of the marriage relationship, which is in fact the very point of Anon Stríðk. The speaker of the stanza hopes that the woman he desires is a widow, because then he may have a better chance of entering into a relationship with her (cf. Grg Ib, 29-30; Dennis et al. 1980-2000, II, 29, 403).

References

  1. Bibliography
  2. NN = Kock, Ernst Albin. 1923-44. Notationes Norrœnæ: Anteckningar till Edda och skaldediktning. Lunds Universitets årsskrift new ser. 1. 28 vols. Lund: Gleerup.
  3. LaufE 1979 = Faulkes, Anthony, ed. 1979. Edda Magnúsar Ólafssonar (Laufás Edda). RSÁM 13. Vol. I of Two Versions of Snorra Edda from the 17th Century. Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1977-9.
  4. AEW = Vries, Jan de. 1962. Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. 2nd rev. edn. Rpt. 1977. Leiden: Brill.
  5. LP = Finnur Jónsson, ed. 1931. Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis: Ordbog over det norsk-islandske skjaldesprog oprindelig forfattet af Sveinbjörn Egilsson. 2nd edn. Copenhagen: Møller.
  6. LP (1860) = Sveinbjörn Egilsson, ed. 1860. Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis. Copenhagen: Societas Regia antiquariorum septentrionalium.
  7. Fritzner = Fritzner, Johan. 1883-96. Ordbog over det gamle norske sprog. 3 vols. Kristiania (Oslo): Den norske forlagsforening. 4th edn. Rpt. 1973. Oslo etc.: Universitetsforlaget.
  8. Grg = Grágás.
  9. Internal references
  10. Margaret Clunies Ross 2017, ‘ Anonymous, Stríðkeravísur’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 628. <https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=text&i=1042> (accessed 28 March 2024)
  11. Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2022, ‘Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar 132 (Egill Skallagrímsson, Lausavísur 48)’ in Margaret Clunies Ross, Kari Ellen Gade and Tarrin Wills (eds), Poetry in Sagas of Icelanders. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 5. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 389.

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