Anon Stríðk 1III/8 — stríð ‘a grief’
Þess sitk, þægra hnossa
Þrúðr, ávalt, in prúða,
hverjum leik á hráka
hnugginn Gleipnis tuggu,
at urðhœings jarðar
ýtendr fyr mér nýtir
greipar svells ins gjalla
Gefn stríðkera nefni.
In prúða Þrúðr þægra hnossa, sitk ávalt, hnugginn hverjum leik, á hráka Gleipnis tuggu þess, at nýtir ýtendr jarðar urðhœings nefni Gefn ins gjalla svells greipar stríðkera fyr mér.
Beautiful Þrúðr <goddess> of delightful ornaments [WOMAN], I live always, deprived of every pleasure, in the spittle of Gleipnir’s <magic fetter’s> mouthful [= Fenrir > = Ván
readings
[8] stríðkera: ‘[…]’ 758ˣ
notes
[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).
kennings
- stríðkera — a grief-prick [WIDOW]