ǪrvOdd Lv 9VIII (Ǫrv 41)/3 — Bjarma ‘the Permians’
Þú látt, Sigurðr, í sal meyja,
meðan við Bjarma börðumz tysvar.
Háðum hildi heldr snarliga,
en þú, seggr, í sal svaft und blæju.
Sigurðr, þú látt í sal meyja, meðan börðumz tysvar við Bjarma. Háðum hildi heldr snarliga, en þú, seggr, svaft í sal und blæju.
Sigurðr, you lay in the girls’ room, while we fought twice against the Permians. We conducted the battle rather keenly, but you, fellow, were sleeping in a hall under a bed-cover.
notes
[3] við Bjarma ‘against the Permians’: The Bjarmar (OE Beormas) ‘Permians’ were the inhabitants of Bjarmaland, Permia, or in modern terminology the Kola Peninsula, a region in the vicinity of the White Sea. Glúmr Gráf 5/3I mentions the bjarmskar kindir ‘the Permian people’ as living on the shores of the river Vína (probably the Dvina), but the most extensive early reference to the Permians comes from the Old English account of the Norwegian trader Ohthere (ON Óttarr), given to King Alfred the Great and inserted into the Old English translation of Orosius’ Historiae adversum Paganos (Bately 1980, 14, 186-7; Lund 1984, 19). The Old Norse name Bjarmar is derived from the Finnish permi, a term referring to a travelling merchant from Outer Karelia (Lund 1984, 64; Ross 1981, 29-83). One of Ǫrvar-Oddr’s first and most spectacular adventures after he left home was to travel to Bjarmaland ‘Permia’ with his foster-brother Ásmundr, where they had a number of encounters with hostile Saami and Permians (Ǫrv 1888, 25-37). Their exploits there became so famous that, whenever Oddr met new people on his travels, he was always asked whether he was the Oddr who went to Permia. Cf. ǪrvOdd Ævdr 8 (Ǫrv 78).