Anon 732b 2III/7 — maks ‘of grease’
Pater ert og princeps feiti;
percussor ert svartra pússa;
rex heitir þú lifra ljóssa;
látprúðr ert þú domnus húða.
Praeses ert og lofðungr lýsis;
leðrs kalla þig Caesarem allir;
magister ert maks og leista;
margsvinnr ert þú dux fyr skinnum.
Ert pater og princeps feiti; ert percussor svartra pússa; þú heitir rex ljóssa lifra; þú ert látprúðr domnus húða. Ert praeses og lofðungr lýsis; allir kalla þig Caesarem leðrs; ert magister maks og leista; þú ert margsvinnr dux fyr skinnum.
You are a pater (‘father’) and princeps (‘prince’) of fat; you are a percussor (‘smiter’) of black [skin] pouches; you are called rex (‘king’) of shining livers; you are a courteous domnus (‘lord’) of hides. You are a praeses (‘protector’) and ruler of oil; all men call you Caesar (‘emperor’) of leather; you are a magister (‘master’) of grease and [leather] footwear; you are a very wise dux (‘duke’) of skins.
notes
[7] maks og leista ‘of grease and [leather] footwear’: Mak is not otherwise recorded in Old Norse. It is not listed as a headword in LP, but the whole phrase magister maks ok leista is quoted under leistr ‘foot of a stocking, sock, shoe’, where it is identified as an ironisk betegnelse for en graver (?) ‘an ironic term for a tanner (?)’, but left untranslated. Elsewhere, Finnur Jónsson (1886a, 194) interprets maks as gen. sg. of n. mak ‘ointment, fat’, which is known in Modern Icelandic and may derive from Old Norse (cf. ÍO: 3 maka ‘smear’). Tallow-based grease can be used to curry tanned leather and render finished leather goods supple or make them waterproof. The noun leistr ‘foot; foot of a stocking, sock, shoe’, might refer here to some sort of leather footwear, the end-product of the labour to which the stanza refers: either stockings such as the socked leggings of waterproofed leather worn by Icelandic seamen, or else leather shoes, boots or galoshes (cf. Ulset 1975, 131). An alternative would be to treat ms. ‘maks’ as máks, gen. sg. of mák(u)r ‘fore-paw, hand’, which is only unambiguously attested in post-Reformation Icelandic; in this case leistr might be read in its older sense ‘foot’. The phrase ‘master (magister) of front- and hind-feet’ would invoke once again the business of skinning, during which the feet of the animal were cut off; but it would disrupt any sequential progression of terms in the stanza. Leistr is seldom used in skaldic poetry, yet it also appears in the only other material in the skaldic corpus referring to a leatherworker, in one of two lausavísur attributed to Þjóðólfr Arnórsson that were composed in mockery of an enraged tanner (Sneglu-Halla þáttr ch. 3, ÍF 9, 267-9; ÞjóðA Lv 5-6II). Employing leistr in the sense ‘foot’, Þjóðólfr depicts the tanner crawling like the dragon Fáfnir across the heiði leista ‘heath of feet [FLOOR]’ during his fight with a blacksmith (ÞjóðA Lv 6/4II). The use of the same rare term in the only surviving skaldic compositions mentioning leatherworkers suggests that the choice of the word in the C14th macaronic could have been influenced by familiarity with the earlier satire.