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skaldic

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages

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Anon (FoGT) 19III/5 — Heitir ‘is named’

Æli telz, það er ólu
ósnotran mann gotnar;
ælir vatn, þar er álar
allstrangir fram hallaz.
Heitir †lær† á †læru†,
læringar kienningar;
kallaz mærr á Mæri,
mæring, ef gjöf tæriz.

Telz æli, það er gotnar ólu ósnotran mann; ælir vatn, þar er allstrangir álar hallaz fram. †Lær† heitir á †læru†, kienningar læringar; kallaz mærr á Mæri, mæring, ef gjöf tæriz.

He is considered a wretch, whom men brought up as an unwise man; water causes dredging, where very strong channels incline forwards. … is named from … , lessons [are called] instructions; [land] is called mærr in Møre, a prestation if a gift is given.

notes

[5] lær heitir á læru ‘… is named from …’: No fully convincing explanation of these two nouns has been proposed. Finnur Jónsson (Skj B) was unable to come up with anything, while Kock (Skald and NN §1445) and FoGT 2004 adopt lær in the sense ‘thigh, upper leg’. Lær must be sg., as the verb heitir is sg., which rules out Sveinbjörn Egilsson’s suggestion (SnE 1848-87, II, 216-17 nn. 9 and 10) that lær stands for lœr, pl. of ‘golden plover’. He further proposed that læru could be a variant of léru = leiru ‘mudflat, muddy shore’, but this is highly improbable both phonologically and ecologically (cf. FoGT 1884, 266-8 n. 4). Another hypothesis is that the form læru or lœru may be dat. sg. of a noun that occurs in SnE in a list of pejorative terms for men, viz. leyra (SnE 1998, I, 106, 224-5, II, 345: leyra or løra or løri; cf. AEW: løra and discussion), which appears in various spellings in the mss and seems to mean ‘degenerate person’ or ‘coward’. The sense of l. 5 might then be ‘a thigh is so-called on a degenerate man’ (i.e. just as it is on other men), but this interpretation is really clutching at straws. Jón Helgason (1970, 213-14) postulated a *lór ‘sluggishness, inactivity’ as the basis for the mutated noun lœra, later læra ‘degenerate, good-for-nothing’, giving the sense ‘*lór (sluggishness) is named from/derives from læra (a degenerate, good-for-nothing)’.

grammar

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