Anon (FoGT) 18^III

Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.) 2017, ‘Anonymous Lausavísur, Stanzas from the Fourth Grammatical Treatise 18’ in Kari Ellen Gade and Edith Marold (eds), Poetry from Treatises on Poetics. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages 3. Turnhout: Brepols, p. 593.

Interactive view: tap on words in the text for notes and glosses

See Introduction to sts 18-20. After the author of FoGT has introduced the figure of euphonia, he refers to what Óláfr [Þórðarson] has said on the subject in TGT (TGT 1884, 49-50; Wills 2001, 88-91 and 182-3), though his words are not exactly the same as the relevant part of the TGT text, which is only in W: Olaafr seger ok: evphonia verðr þar sem [vfagrer] limingar stafer erv skipter i þáá stafí, sem fegra hlioða, sem i þersvm nofnvm: lækr ok  ægr, þviat æ þikker hvarvitna lyta maal, nema þar sem skynsemí mꜳ̋ fyrer giallda, at þav orð, sem þat stendr í, dreifaz af þeim orðvm sem ꜳ̋ stendr í, sem her seger ‘Óláfr also says: Euphonia occurs wherever [unpleasing] ligatures are changed into those letters that sound more beautiful, as in these nouns: lækr and ægr, because [æ:] is everywhere thought to blemish speech, except where reason may explain that those words in which that [ligature] is found, are derived from those words containing [a:], as it says here’.

Stanza 18, which is arranged as four discrete, somewhat aphoristic couplets, very artfully provides several examples of words containing the ligature [æ:] and corresponding cognates with stem vowel [a:]. These are all found in the uneven ll. 1, 3, 5 and 7. In l. 1 we have ár ‘year’s abundance’ and ærir, 3rd pers. sg. pres. tense used impersonally, from æra ‘give a good crop’; in l. 3 æra ‘row with oars’ matches árum ‘with oars’, while in l. 5 ræða ‘on heat’ yields to ráða (from ráði ‘hog, boar’), both phonetically and in terms of sense. In l. 7 órar ‘fits of madness’ balances ærum (from ærr, earlier œrr ‘mad, crazy’ adj.). In the last case the correspondence is between [o:] and original [ø:]; cf. AEW: órar 1 and œrr.