Peace Unwoven: Transgressive Women in Old Icelandic Heroic and Mythological Literature, and in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum

<p>The aim of this thesis is to present a survey of the types of women that transgress in Old Icelandic mythological and heroic texts, their reasons for doing so, and the ways in which they do it. As I believe that this has not been looked at before, I hope this research will be of use to further study of the role of women in the fornaldarsogur.</p>

Peace Unwoven: Transgressive Women in Old Icelandic Heroic and Mythological Literature, and in Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum

<p>The aim of this thesis is to present a survey of the types of women that transgress in Old Icelandic mythological and heroic texts, their reasons for doing so, and the ways in which they do it. As I believe that this has not been looked at before, I hope this research will be of use to further study of the role of women in the fornaldarsogur.</p>

Revisiting the configurationality issue in Old Icelandic

The status of Old Icelandic with respect to (argument) configurationality was subject to debate in the early 1990s (e.g. Faarlund 1990; Rögnvaldsson 1995) and remains unresolved. Since this work, further research on a wide range of languages has enhanced our understanding of configurationality, in particular within Lexical Functional Grammar (e.g. Austin & Bresnan 1996; Nordlinger 1998) and syntactically annotated Old Icelandic data are now available (Wallenberg et al. 2011). It is thus fitting to revisit the matter. In this paper, I show that allowing for argument configurationality as a gradient property, and also taking into account discourse configurationality (Kiss 1995) as a further gradient property, can neatly account for word order patterns in this early stage of Icelandic. Specifically, I show that corpus data supports part of the original claim in Faarlund (1990), that Old Icelandic lacks a VP-constituent, thus being somewhat less argument-configurational than the modern language. Furthermore, the observed word order patterns indicate a designated topic position in the postfinite domain, thus reflecting some degree of discourse configurationality at this early stage of the language.

MODELLING OF THE FRAGMENT OF THE SEMANTIC FIELD, REPRESENTED BY ABSTRACT NOUNS IN OLD ICELANDIC

Введение. Изучение семантики словообразовательных формантов сосредоточено главным образом на материалах современных языков. Эмпирический материал охватывает лексические единицы одного из древних германских языков – древнеисландского, а именно существительные мужского рода, образованные с помощью словообразовательного суффикса -skapr-. Цель – моделирование участка семантического пространства, вербализованного в древнеисландском языке посредством производных лексических единиц с абстрактной семантикой, маркированных словообразовательным суффиксом -skapr-. Материал и методы. Материалом для исследования послужили этимологические и толковые словари древнеисландского языка. Корпус эмпирического материала составил 86 единиц, выделенных с помощью приема сплошной выборки. Исследование языкового материала осуществлялось с применением методов сравнения, компонентного и словообразовательного анализа, приемов этимологического анализа, интерпретации. Результаты и обсуждение. Корпус лексических единиц мужского рода склонения на -а, образованных от именных основ при помощи суффикса -skapr-, включает 86 единиц. Понятийные области, вербализованные производными с рассматриваемым суффиксом, включают обозначения личностных качеств человека, характера или способа действий и их результатов, обозначение конкретных объектов, товаров в собирательном значении, типов взаимоотношений, обозначения понятий, относящихся к религии, язычеству или колдовству. Наиболее многочисленная группа обозначений охватывает названия черт характера или поведения человека, как поощряемых, так и порицаемых обществом. При этом зафиксировано наличие синонимичных рядов производных с суффиксом -skapr-, номинирующих одно и то же качество характера человека, а также синкретичность семантики некоторых производных с указанным суффиксом, включающей как абстрактные, так и конкретные значения. Наличествующий в морфологической структуре анализируемых производных суффикс -skapr- этимологически связан с самостоятельным словом skap «вид, состояние», которое восходит к праиндоевропейскому корню *(s)keH. Развернутый ряд производных, построенных по одному и тому же словообразовательному типу, позволяет рассматривать данный тип как отдельный формат представления знаний, некий мыслительный конструкт, объективированный суффиксом. Суффикс в такой аналитической конструкции функционирует в качестве маркера формата. В случае с анализируемым суффиксом данный формат может быть определен как абстрактная сущность, названная основой, мыслимая как самостоятельный объект в абсолютизированном виде, т. е. в отрыве от действительного обладателя этой характеристики. Заключение. Производные с словообразовательным суффиксом -skapr- репрезентируют целый спектр понятий, связанных с характеристиками человека и его деятельности. Словообразовательный суффикс функционирует как маркер семантического инварианта в семантической структуре производных, который может позиционироваться как профиль словообразовательного типа. Семантическое пространство, форматируемое суффиксом, имеет композиционную природу, обусловленную семантикой компонентов самого суффикса. Introduction. Over the last decade’s studies on semantics of derivational morphemes have primarily dealt with contemporary language data. The article focuses on a group of Old Icelandic masculine nouns that are formed by means of the derivational suffix -skapr-. The aim is to model a fragment of the semantic field that is represented by the Old Icelandic derivatives with an abstract semantics and marked by the suffix -skapr- . Materials and methods. The source of material for the study is etymological dictionaries of the Old Icelandic language. The corpus of empirical material includes 86 lexical units. The study of the linguistic material draws on the methods of comparison, component and word-formation analysis, methods of etymological analysis, interpretation. Results. The corpus of masculine nouns belonging to the masculine a-declension, derived from nominal stems with the help of the suffix -skapr-, includes 86 units. The conceptual areas, verbalized by derivatives with the suffix under consideration, include designations of personal qualities of a person, character or method of action and its results, designation of specific objects, goods in a collective sense, types of relationships, designation of concepts related to religion, paganism or witchcraft. The most numerous group of designations covers the names of traits or behavior of a person, both encouraged and condemned by the members of society. It has been revealed that the same quality of a person’s character can be verbalized by a series of synonymous derivatives with the suffix -skapr-. Besides, a number of derivatives with the suffix display their syncretic semantics, involving both abstract and concrete meanings. The suffix -skapr- present in the morphological structure of the analyzed derivatives is etymologically related to the independent word skap “species, state”, which goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)keH. A series of derivatives, built according to the same word-formation type, allows us to consider this type as a separate format for representing knowledge, a kind of mental construct objectified by the suffix. The suffix in this analytic construct functions as a format marker. It is argued that the suffix under analysis marks the format that can be defined as “an abstract entity called by the base, conceived as an independent object in an absolutized form, i.e. in isolation from the real owner of this characteristics”. Conclusion. Derivatives with the word-formation suffix -skapr- represent a whole range of concepts related to the characteristics of a person and his activities. The word-formation suffix functions as a marker of the semantic invariant in the semantic structure of derivatives, which can be viewed as a profile of this word-formation type. The semantic filed indicated by the suffix is of a compositional nature due to the semantics of the components of the suffix itself.

New prepositions in the house

In the literature on semantic and categorial change French chez and Mainland Scandinavian hos are often cited together as parallel examples of locative prepositions deriving from nouns referring to the concept ‘house’. In this paper we compare in detail the philological records and the more recent development of the two items as well as that of the cognate Insular Scandinavian hjá. We show that while there are similarities in the development of Latin CASA / French chez and hos, as frequently suggested in the literature, there are also significant divergences. We argue in favour of a reevaluation of the origin of hos aligning it with hjá rather than casa as suggested in Noreen (1892), and show that if so revised, the differences can be shown to arise from the different meanings of the source terms: Latin casa ‘hut, house’ and later ‘place’ as opposed to Old Swedish hos and Old Icelandic hjá ‘group of people, company’. We then go on to explore the consequences of these different diachronic trajectories for our general understanding of the connected semantic and syntactic developments and the time course of categorial change.

The Manifestations of Fate in Medieval Germanic Poetry and Lithuanian Folk Songs

Reflections of mythical worldview are embedded in traditional oral poetry, viz. Old Icelandic collection of poems Poetic Edda, Old English poem Beowulf, and Lithuanian folk songs. Archaic motifs and archetypal imagery are conveyed by means of poetic grammar (alliteration, kennings, epithets, etc.). Through interpretation, the hidden (symbolic) meaning of the poetic grammar is unveiled, and the connection between the two worlds, the sacred (the divine) and the profane (the human) (Eliade 1959), is exposed. To advance the analysis of poetic narrative, the methodology employed in the paper combines comparative Indo-European poetics (Watkins 1995) and oral-formulaic theory (Kiparsky 1976; Foley 1996). The paper focuses on the poetic narrative’s motifs that encode the archetypal image of the goddess(es) of fate in the Germanic and Baltic traditions. Selected passages from Old Icelandic, Old English, and Lithuanian poetic texts reveal the motif of fate in the following contexts: the establishment of the laws governing human life, the courtship and wedding narrative, the inescapable decrees of misery and death, the warrior’s fame and fate, and the connection between the goddess of fate and the cuckoo bird (in the Lithuanian tradition). The poetic grammar and poetic formulas, in particular, reveal the prototypical characteristics of the supernatural beings who rule fate – Norns, Wyrd, and Laima – and present them as an integral part of the Indo-European mythological system.

The Saga of Icelandic

This paper seeks to answer the question whether the great wealth of Icelandic literature in the sagas and the Eddas of the 12th – 13th c. is accessible to modern Icelanders without special linguistic training and hence whether it is possible for a language to remain almost intact and impervious to changes for more than 7 centuries. The paper provides an ad hoc contrastive analysis of the main nominal and verbal grammatical categories in Modern Icelandic and Old Icelandic, while focusing on their morphological properties, and describes and discusses the similarities and differences ensuing from the analysis.

Unearthing St. Edmund: A source for Edmund's martyrdom in Íslendingabók

In Ari fróði Þorgilsson’s Íslendingabók, the settlement of Iceland is said to have first begun from Norway in 870, the year that “Ívarr, son of Ragnarr loðbrók, had St Edmund, king of the English, killed.” He attributes his knowledge of the date of this martyrdom to a mysterious “saga” of St Edmund, the identity of which has long been debated. This note considers the various alternatives put forth by previous researchers and concludes that the most likely candidate for this saga is in fact a composite of two texts, Abbo of Fleury’s Passio Sancti Eadmundi and Hermannus the Archdeacon’s De miraculis Sancti Eadmundi. These texts are known to have been bound together in at least one manuscript from the early twelfth century. It is argued that a similar manuscript may have circulated in Iceland and was used to inform several other Old Icelandic texts composed over the following two centuries.